Faith.

‘The way of the heart’
In our Monday training, Josh took me and the others through chapter two of a book I cant quite remember the name of! The chapter was called ‘faith – the way of the heart.’
The chapter spoke about how faith in our generation has become a way of the head. Like we have a set of checkboxes that people have to tick before they are a ‘Christian’. And each church denomination has a different set of checkboxes.
An easy one for example would be that one church denomination would say that you have to believe in child baptism to be a ‘Christian’, whereas another would say that you must believe in adult baptism.
After talking on this, the author comes to the ‘Four meanings of faith’.
Faith as Assensus.
Faith as Fiducia.
Faith as Fidelitas.
Faith as Visio.

Assensus.
This part of faith is to believe that a claim or statement is true. This is what is most thought of when people today think about faith. It is ‘head matter’, not heart matter. To know something is true, or false. Though this in itself is not everything. You can believe all the right things, and yet still be in bondage of all the things that tie you up. You can believe all the right things, and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things, and still be relatively unchanged. So, however important Assensus is, it is not everything in itself, we need the other three meanings of faith.

Fiducia.
Fiducia is faith as trust. It does not mean trusting in the truth of a set of statements about God; it means trusting in God.
Faith as trust is like floating in an ocean. If you thrash about, you will sink, but if you relax, you float. Like peter when he walked on water, he was trusting in Jesus, so he was able to walk on the water. We need to be trusting in the buoyancy of God.

Fidelitas.
Faith is faithfulness. In any relationship, we need to be faithful. We are faithful, or not, to our spouses, and so we also need to be faithful to God. The opposite of this is being unfaithful to God, and to use a biblical metaphor, being unfaithful is adultery. But not within human sexual relationships, rather not following the laws of God. So faith as Fidelitas is to be faithful to all of God’s Laws.

Visio.
This is faith as seeing the ‘whole’. Faith as visio is seeing reality as gracious. The opposite would be to see reality as hostile, threatening, or as indifferent. Trust and visio go together. Trust in God and we see his plans, and the bigger picture of our lives.

Hebrews 11v1 in the NIV says:
‘Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.’

The message version says this:
‘The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It's our handle on what we can't see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.’

We do not just believe, we do not just trust, we are not just faithful and we do not just see the whole.
We have faith.