Faith – is an amazingly large subject, and one which will mean something different depending upon who you ask. There are a lot of ways to understand this word, to apply this force, to appreciate this treasure.  What follows is an effort to distill what this most precious of gifts has meant to me, personally.  I hope that you will find it helpful in some way; I suspect that there is a little space in the human heart, the size and shape of which is exactly such that it can only be filled by this idea we speak of as "Faith" ....

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As a young adult, I had the extreme good fortune to stumble upon
a powerful little devotional written by Pamela Reeves titled "Faith is..."
Here are a few bits that I found helpful in seriously considering the gospel for the first time.

Faith is the conviction of realities I can not see or feel:

Not a leap in the dark nor a mystical experience nor an indefinable encounter...
But trust in One who has explained Himself in a Person, Christ,
and in an historical record – the Bible.

Faith is not some vague idea that God is somehow trustworthy, but an explicit confidence
in Him based on His proof of utter trustworthiness in dying for me.

Biblical faith counts on the fact that in the kingdom of God
everything is based on promise, not on feeling.

So faith is not about my believing hard enough, nor my emotional exhilaration or flatness,
but instead rests on what God guarantees in His Word.

Faith is trusting the Promiser to keep His promises.

In this line of thinking, I found a permission to experience faith as a rational solution to spiritual needs, rather than the emotional "experience" contrived in some kinds of church services.

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Trusting God to keep His promises... this simple idea permeates the Bible.  To believe God, or not.  Notice that I did not say "believe in" God, but to simply believe that what He says is true, as in not a lie.  The Bible is the story of people making this choice:  Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Pharaoh, David, the Prophets,Mary and Joseph, the Disciples, the Pharisees, those looking to Jesus for healing and truth and hope 2000 years ago, and today.  Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.

Abraham chose to simply take God at his word, as did most of the others above.  Will we?  Will I?  Will I trust God to keep the promises He makes in His Word?  This is the first question that faith must answer, the question that drives Scripture, both Old Testament and New Testament.  Will God keep His promises to love us, to take care of us, to bless us?

The second question that faith must answer is built upon the first, and is particular to the New Testament.  That is, of all God's promises to us, which is the most important one?  God's purpose in sending Jesus, His ministry, the Gospels, the Epistles, all point to one overarching promise:  that Jesus is the key, the way, the means, to life-with-God.  Life in another dimension.  Here, now, for real.

Do we want that?

I do!!!

How do I get that???

For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have Eternal life.

Now here is the interesting part... the Greek word translated "believe" (pisteuo) meant "to trust in, to rely upon, to entrust with."  To believe in Jesus is more than simple intellectual acknowledgement of Jesus as real -- Satan does that much!  Rather, it means to rely upon Jesus for our life-with-God.  To depend upon Jesus to make our life in this new dimension ("born again!") actually happen.

This is the meaning of Jesus' statement:
"I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me."

This means simply that there is no other way for us to access this dimension, life-with-God.  Our own efforts or goodness or morality or rule following or drive or intelligence -- these simply won't work, there is no other way.  Only by relying totally and exclusively on Jesus, the one who received God's stamp of approval (as in raised from the dead) when he gave himself for our ungodliness, our sin, our alienation from God.  In taking upon himself the death-debt for our not being able to stand in the presence of God's consuming perfection, Jesus became our key to life-with-God, no caveats or exceptions.

This is the choice faith makes:
desiring life-with-God and entrusting our very souls completely to Jesus to make it so.

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(Credit, and appreciation, for this last bit goes to David Brooks, whose recent essay on Faith helped me find the words for what I have so often felt these last years...)

Faith can be understood, experienced, lived as a movement of the heart towards God.

Faith is often understood as belief, something that one possesses. In this respect, our faith moves along a continuum between doubt and knowing. Similarly, faith can be further understood as something that one exercises. In this respect, our faith moves along a continuum between irrelevance and essential.

A reality that I have become increasingly aware of as I have grown older is that
faith can be lived as a longing for the divine – divine in the sense of goodness and light and love, the pure, the holy, the beautiful, the praiseworthy – qualities that we can sense but cannot quite grasp, much less own or live. In this respect, our faith moves along a continuum between apathy and desire.

Faith, then, encompasses belief, and application, and at its richest, a longing for a living communion with the One in whom we live and move and have our being.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,
the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world... C.S. Lewis

I’m grateful for the chance to choose a life that can be lived trusting in a good and loving God’s care, for a life in which it is indeed possible to live toward the divine, toward something worthy of seeking and serving.

This, for me, has been a life worth living.