Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Deepen Your Understanding of What Faith Is by Considering What Faith is Not



Excerpt from What Faith is Not by Mitch Finley:

When we say that faith is not a security blanket, the metaphor of the security blanket is an image of a faith that you can turn to anytime for a feeling of well-being. All you need to do is grab your faith and pop a thumb in your mouth to make things right with the world. But if this is how you relate to your faith then your faith is bound to disappoint you. If, when life gets scary, you turn to your faith like Linus turns to his blanket, sooner or later you will discover that your faith will slip right through your fingers and be gone. Sooner or later life, like Snoopy, will snatch your security blanket faith away from you, and because it is a weak kind of faith it will be gone in the blink of an eye. Zip! Gone, just like Snoopy is gone with Linus' blanket. Of course, you may try to hang on to your security blanket faith, but if you do you can expect to find yourself airborne and going for a wild ride, and before long your security blanket faith will slip from your grasp and be gone, with you lying on the ground wondering what the heck happened there.
A security blanket faith is phony because it is a "faith" that depends upon a woefully inadequate image of God. It reduces God to the role of an emergency rescue technician. If my faith is a security blanket, that means that it is God's role to rescue me from bad times, suffering, grief, and the consequences of my own stupid mistakes and idiotic choices. It also means that never will my faith require me to take any risks or accept suffering for the sake of some greater good.

Order a copy of this book, or learn more about it...Here.