LEAP OF FAITH

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) wrote, “Over and over in the Old Testament the explanation of events in human history is that humans may know that Jehovah is the living God. An act of faith in the biblical tradition is always undertaken in an environment of knowledge and is inseparable from it.

We can never understand the life of faith seen in scripture and in serious Christian living unless we drop the idea of faith as a “blind leap” and understand that faith is commitment to action, often beyond our natural abilities, based upon knowledge of God and God’s ways. The romantic talk of “leaping,” to which we in the Western world have become accustomed, actually amounts to “leaping” without faith—that is, with no genuine belief at all. And that is actually what people have in mind today when they speak of a “leap of faith.”

“And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.” Jesus