Empowered Faith

“Faith does not eliminate questions, it just knows where to take them!”

Faith. This one single word holds more power and premise in people's lives than any other word. When it comes to love, faith is something that is a part of it. Someone speaks about hope, and there is faith. Commitment, trust, belief, and so and so one. Faith is always right there among all these vast other words. Why does such a word hold so much power over us?

In our last teaching on faith we barely scratched the service of it. We asked, "What is faith?" Truth be told, it is a very deep and empowering word. Perhaps an easier way to look at it is to say what it is not. For starters, as we said in our last episode, Faith is not simply belief. If faith is nothing more than one's belief than anyone can tell me how to live by faith, judge me as to whether or not I am living a life of faith, and can also tell me if my faith is right or wrong. Why? Because it's what they believe.

Faith is so much more than belief. And what I wish to do is look even deeper into what faith may be. To begin, let's start at the beginning. Everything in our lives has a Starting-Point, including faith. Now, I said faith isn't simply about one's belief. However, that does not mean that someone's personal belief doesn't have an affect as to the starting-point of their faith.

Secondly, faith is not simply one's religion or religious beliefs. Religion, as it is defined, is a particular system of faith and worship. The key word there is system.

Religion is a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, world-views, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It seems as though religion has become more about man-made systems or organizations. Meaning that it can be whatever someones says it is. Just like belief.

Faith isn't a system, nor is it just an organization. It's also more than spiritual elements, prophecies, and written texts. Now as I said earlier, faith for you and I has a Starting-Point. This starting-point may have been with a priest, rabbi, pastor, or someone who represented a particular belief system. Perhaps faith began in a building of some sort like a Church, synagogue, or some other physical structure that represented that specific belief system. But for each of us, faith has a Starting-Point.

To start out, I want you to try something this week. Take some time and think about where this Starting-Point was for you. Was it when you were a child? Was it something passed down throughout your family history? Or was it something you turned to when you had hit rock bottom of your life. After doing this, I want you to then ask, was faith something I chose for myself or something that was chosen for me. My Starting-Point for my faith was something that was chosen for me.

You see my parents where already attending Church and chose to be Christians of a particular Religious Denomination. Now before going any further, my goal has never been nor will it ever be to judge unfairly or put down someone's personal beliefs. My goal is to help you become more mindful of who you are, why you perceive things the way you do, and to empower You!

So my parents where members of this particular religious denomination that I was essentially born in too. We had this set identity for ourselves and also these specific traditions that were outlined for us. We had to go to a physical location to quote worship God by singing specific types of songs in a certain way. We read texts from the Bible that I later found out was in fact interpreted and believed to mean something different by other religious denominations whose identity and traditions were very different from ours. Yet, I never once asked myself, "Why do I believe these interpretations and views of this system?"

It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I began to question things. For one thing, a lot of people who had an identity and traditions attached to this belief system seemed to only focus the fact that we were right and others where wrong. And not so much on what worked. They where very motivated to press on others what they believed, and yet not be happy when you disagreed with them, question those in authority, and they certainly did not like it when you questioned their faith.

I wondered, "What about those who have chosen to live their lives different from what we believed to be the quote, right way of living?" So here is my main point of this, take a moment and ask yourself, "Why have I chosen to believe what it is I believe?" Now I don't mean what your religious identity is, meaning what your denominational faith, traditions, or beliefs are based on some particular system. Why do YOU believe the way you do in certain things?

Why do you perceived things towards certain people or about certain things going on in our world today? The purpose for this question of Why is because belief is what creates the way we think. Beliefs create a cognitive lens through which we interpret the events of our world and this lens serves as a selective filter through which we sift the environment for evidence that matches up with what we believe to be true. Your beliefs influence your behavior. Your belief(s) shapes your reality.

One of the most basic ways that beliefs can shape reality is through their influence on behavior. For example, if you believe that you’re capable, competent, and deserving of your dream job, you’re probably more likely to notice and seek out opportunities that could help you get there. Beliefs about your basic character—who you are as a person on a fundamental level—can be especially powerful. While guilt (feeling that you did a bad thing) can motivate self-improvement, shame (feeling like you are a bad person), tends to create a self-fulfilling prophecy , reducing hope and undermining efforts to change.

By the same token, praising character as opposed to behavior is a more effective means of promoting positive behaviors. For example, children who were told that they were helpful people for doing something generous (donating something to those seen as poor) later engaged in more selfless behavior than did children whose behavior alone was praised or who did not receive praise. So our beliefs create our thoughts, those thoughts are what create how we feel about something or someone. From those feelings do we see certain behaviors come too light.

So let's say we know someone whose chosen to live their life differently from what we believe to be the right-way to live life. And let's say that the lifestyle of that person is opposite of or opposes that belief we hold true. What happens is an unfair judgement of that person, not because of their lifestyle, but because our thoughts influence our perception or reality on life. That is why I call it an unfair-judgement. We are not really judging their lifestyle, it is our belief(s) that are making that judgement of that person for us. So I again ask, Why do you believe the things you believe?

When you become Mindful of what it is you believe, you also become Mindful of your thoughts, of why you perceive things as you do. By becoming Mindful of those thoughts do you then become Mindful of your feelings and thus Mindful of your behaviors. When we understand the WHY behind our beliefs, we then begin to understand how to Empower ourselves.

Because, when your life is empowered you then begin to Empower the lives of others? This is the first step in having an Empowered Faith! I encourage you to take the time this week to become mindful of your faith...

Join our newest group entitled "Empowered" and take that next step!