Faith or...

I found myself thinking the other day about faith. Most of what we know and think about faith comes from a passage in Hebrews:"Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see." (Hebrews 11:1, NLT)

Confidence. Assurance. Those are good things. Right? Raise your hand if you're "Sure"...remember that commercial? Always a good thing to be confident in one's deodorant (different blog post, but I digress)...

Yet my mind went to a different place: When is faith simply us wanting to slack off and not do the hard work that needs to be done?

"Oh, I'm leaving that up to God."

Really? What if leaving it up to God means God gives you the strength to deal with it yourself?

"My marriage is a mess. I'm turning it over to God." What if God wants you to ask your spouse what's wrong and actually entertain the fact that you may be the source of the problem?

Can faith, the belief and trust in God, become a cop-out we use to stay away from obedience?

Do we sometimes believe that in leaving it up to God and trusting Him that He'll let everyone else know where they need to change to make our life easier?

How do we walk the fine line between trusting God and trusting God enough to walk the path He lays out for us?

I think, and not to start a theological argument (though I love them) that this is where James' line that "faith without works is dead" comes into play. It's not about salvation. It's not about doing good things to get to heaven, etc.

It's about the fact that if we really trust God, true faith, means knowing that trusting God with the issue may lead to Him trusting us with the solution.

What do you think?