What is faith and why is it important to the personal relationship with Jesus? The definition provided us by the Holy Scriptures is found in the book of Hebrews, "Faith makes us sure of what we hope for and gives us proof of what we cannot see."(CEV, Hebrews 11:1) This definition tells us that faith gives us certainty about our hope and provides us with evidence of that which is invisible. Since Christianity is based on the worship of Jehovah, a Spirit that cannot be seen, and Jesus His son, a historical figure that we have never interacted with, our only proof of their existence is our faith. Our faith gives us the assurance that the invisible Jehovah is real and that the historical figure called Jesus is truly His son. It is because we cannot see God why we need to believe in God. To truly understand the importance of faith and to understand its definition we will take a look at the word hope, a word that we can all relate to.

In our natural existence we live by hope. We go to work each day being sure that we'll receive a paycheck at the end of the week or at the end of every two weeks. We dedicatedly wake up each morning, dress ourselves, and spend our own money for food, gas, bus fares, train fares, and all the other expenditures that go along with going out to work. We do this without question, believing in a paycheck that may or may not materialize. There are those of us who even borrow from others and guarantee them repayment on a certain future date based simply on our hope of getting paid. We embrace our hope of getting paid at a specific time not as an uncertainty but as a guaranteed certainty. But why are we certain? There truly is no guarantee that we'll be paid. Companies go bankrupt all the time and business fail all the time. Many people have made retirement plans, purchased luxury items, taken out mortgages, and made personal investments in corporations that have failed. What was thought was a sure thing turned out not to be. The recent case of corporate giant Enron's collapse and bankruptcy is enough to make this point. Though we approach things in our daily life as guarantees, we really have no reason to be so assured that they are. What we are doing in our daily lives is called living by hope; approaching the uncertain as though it was a certainty and approaching the invisible (the not yet received paycheck) as though it were already reality.

Faith allows us to accept a reality that we have no material evidence of, but nevertheless live with, as though the material reality was already present. This is why the Holy Scriptures say that faith makes us sure of our hope. In the example of the paycheck, we hoped for a paycheck but lived our lives as if we already had that paycheck. We made the paycheck real by our hope and it became real because of our hope. Faith does the same, it makes us certain of what we hope for and that certainty creates the material reality or evidence of what we hoped for. Let us look again at the definition of faith and make a few creative substitutions in the definition using our paycheck example.

Original Scriptural definition:

"Faith makes us sure of what we hope for and gives us proof of what we cannot see."(Hebrews 11:1)