Faith is like believing a chair will hold you without breaking and dumping you on the floor. You can’t prove you really have faith until you walk over and sit in the chair.

Let’s relate this back to Christianity, and the idea of faith. There are three general views of faith in the Christian community.

The first is I cannot have faith without God intervening through Grace because I am totally depraved; that I cannot even desire to trust God, so I won’t trust God. This view, examined in the light of what faith really means, doesn’t make any sense. I have faith all the time; I trust people (my wife, my doctor), institutions (my church, my car insurance company), and things (my car, the chair I’m sitting in), all the time. Even those who are not Christians can clearly have faith in people, institutions, and things, or they wouldn’t be able to actually live their lives. So the question becomes: why should I be able to have faith in other things—and not God—in my ‘natural state?’

There are two answers to this question:

1. You can have faith in God, but not saving faith. That is, God must regenerate you before your faith becomes saving faith. The problem is there’s only one word for faith throughout the entire Scriptures, and there’s no contextual argument to be made for two types of faith. Faith is faith, nothing more, and nothing less.
2. You can have faith in God, but you won’t ever desire to have faith unless you are regenerated first. This is an attempt to go behind faith, and state that you can desire all sorts of things, but you can never desire salvation. This is proven false on at least two fronts. The first is the many times in the Scriptures when men are given a choice to believe or not. Why would God use the language of choice, if there were no choice? The second is empirical evidence from the world; if man has no desire for salvation, then why does he invent so many religions? If men don’t desire salvation, or God, then why do they struggle so hard with philosophy? Of course, if we take this path, we also run smack into the logical contradiction between total depravity and the perseverance of the saints.

So both answers fail. Whether by an underlying grace from God, or an underlying grace that prevented humans from total corruption of their wills, men still have the ability to place faith in people, institutions, and things. Since God is a Person, humans have the ability to place faith in God. If I must be regenerated in order to have faith, then salvation is not by grace alone through faith alone, but rather by grace alone; faith has nothing to do with it.

The second view is that I can have faith, but I must prove my faith by showing fruit. In other words, I must sit in the chair to prove I really believe in the chair. But the Bible, everywhere, says I must have faith to be saved, not that I must produce works to be saved (the Epistle of James included). If I must produce fruit to be saved, then salvation is not by grace alone through faith alone.

The third view is that I can have faith, but even though I have faith, I can’t act on that faith (whether you want to argue that all men are given enough grace to be able to have faith, or you want to argue that God, through grace, left men free will through the fall is immaterial). That I can believe in the chair, but I can’t sit in it, because my will won’t allow me to. In this view, when I have faith, God provides me the means to sit in the chair. At the same time, the only path I have to grow is to actually go and sit in the chair, to trust God and His promises in my life on a daily basis. It’s this spiritual maturity that shows my faith is real (although I don’t need to prove it to anyone).

The third view is the only one that makes sense, given the actual definition of the word faith, and the actual teachings of the Scriptures.

Faith is like believing a chair will hold you without breaking and dumping you on the floor. You can’t prove you really have faith until you walk over and sit in the chair.

How many times have I heard this when someone is explaining faith in God through my life? But is is true? This is the all too crucial question we miss when examining these sorts of “just so” stories.

The best place to start when considering any idea like this is: what do the words mean? If I grab my handy dandy dictionary, I find the following definitions:

confidence or trust in a person or thing

belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion

belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.

Christian Theology. the trust in God and in His promises as made through Christ and the Scriptures by which humans are justified or saved.

I would say that a good rough and ready definition is you can believe something in two ways: you can believe that, and you can believe in. For instance, you can believe that the chair exists, and you can believe in the chair. If you believe that, it’s impersonal, or objectified belief. The chair could hold someone, but that has no application to me, personally. If you believe in, it’s personal, or direct, belief. That chair could hold me if I sat in it. The second sort of believing, belief in, is what I call “faith.” Now you’ll notice what is missing from all of these definitions of faith: action. I can believe that a chair will hold me without actually sitting in the chair. I can believe in a chair without sitting in it. It’s useful to take a less “neutral” example to see this more clearly.

I can say, for instance, that I believe in my doctor. In other words, I believe in his ability to help me if I were to contract a major disease, or if I were to get into an accident and wind up with a broken arm. This is analogous to the chair; I believe in the chair. Sitting in the chair would be analogous to intentionally contracting a disease to prove my faith in my doctor. In other words, when used in the context of something other than a chair, the argument that I must act in order to prove my faith falls apart.