The following most likely doesn't answer all areas that you want but when I was trying to look up stuff on faith I found what I pasted below and thought you'd like to read it.
There was a tightrope walker, who did incredible aerial feats of daring. All over Paris, he would do his tightrope act at terrifying heights. As his finale he would walk across a tightrope, blindfolded, while pushing a wheelbarrow. An American promoter read about this in the papers and wrote a letter to the tightrope walker, saying, "I don't believe you can do it, but I'm willing to make you an offer. For a very substantial sum of money, besides all of your transportation costs, I would like to challenge you to do your act over Niagara Falls." The tightrope walker wrote back, "Sir, although I've never been to America nor seen these Falls, I'd love to perform in your country." Well, after a lot of promotion and setting the whole thing up, many people came to see the event. The tightrope walker was to start on the Canadian side and cross over to the American side. There was a dramatic drum roll, as the tightrope walker walked across the rope suspended over the most treacherous part of the falls -- blindfolded!! He made it across easily, pushing his wheelbarrow in front of him. The crowds went wild. He then comes up to the promoter and says, "Well, Mr. Promoter, now do you believe I can do it?" "Well of course I do. I mean, I just saw you do it." "No," said the tightrope walker, "Do you really believe I can do it?" "Well of course I do, you just did it." "No, no, no," said the tightrope walker, "Do you believe I can do it?" "Yes," said the promoter, "I believe you can do it." "Good," said the tightrope walker, "then get in the wheel barrow." "What" said the promoter? "You heard me. If you really believe I can do it, get in the wheel barrow and I'll do it for you again!!"
This story reminds us that anyone can say they believe. Yet faith is more than simply saying, "I believe". Faith is proven genuine only when it is tested. We will know if faith is real by its courage and conviction up against situations that conflict and contradict what we are being asked to believe. Faith is tested when we are asked to trust in the promises of the Bible instead of listening to our own subjective feelings or to what our human reason views as objective fact. For God often calls his people to believe the unbelievable! Faith challenges us to defy our feelings, our fears, and sometimes even the facts -- choosing instead to believe the promises of the Gospel that God has made to us in Scripture.
Why do we refer to Abraham as the father of all believers? Because Abraham is the archetypal believer who first modeled for us how to live by faith in the face of doubt. God persuaded Abraham to believe that God could and would perform the feats he had promised. St. Paul records that Abraham believed God's promise that he would become the father of many nations even though his body "was as good as dead". At close to one hundred years of age, an unable to father a child throughout his long marriage to Sarah --now in her nineties -- this couple's probability of producing an heir was statistically impossible. Abraham and Sarah's greatest longing was to have a child, but Sarah was barren. No wonder Sarah laughed out loud when the Lord told Abraham that his wife would conceive and have a son. What God had promised this elderly couple went against all reproductive odds.
Yet in Abraham's acceptance of God's promise we are given the very definition of what it means to believe, or to have faith. For faith is "being fully persuaded" that God can and will do whatever it is that he has promised to do for us -- no matter how unlikely or unreasonable! At the same time, how absurd it must've sounded to a man almost a hundred years old -- and who had never been able to have children in the past -- to hear God promise him that he would become the father not only of one child, but of many nations? Since God's promise to Abraham and Sarah seemed to go completely against all biological reality, Sarah attempted in her own way to help God's promise along by finding a surrogate mother to bear her a child. Hagar was selected and Abraham at last was able to father a son through this concubine. But this son, Ishmael, represented Sarah's own human attempt to fulfill the promise, and not God's. Sarah's very human solution lacked faith. Sarah did not take God at his Word and so she tried to come up with her own plan to make things happen. Sarah found another way to have a child because she did not really believe God's promise. Even though Sarah is extolled later in the Bible for her faith, here we are reminded in her of how we often try to solve our problems on our own without God's help.
A man approached a little league baseball game one afternoon. He asked a boy in the dugout what the score was. The boy responded, "Eighteen to nothing -- we're behind." "Boy" said the spectator, "I'll bet you're discouraged?" "Why should I be discouraged?" replied the little boy. "We haven't even gotten up to bat yet!" This story illustrates that there are no hopeless situations. There are only people who have grown hopeless about them. Romans chapter four says, "Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed." Faith in Christ beckons us all to become optimists. For our lingering unbelief looks at situations as they are, but faith looks at them as they can be with God's help. Faith believes in what God has promised over anything we may experience in life. Life experiences have a way of making people doubting and cynical about situations, about people, about the future, and about God. But faith calls us to look at life not as we have experienced it, but as God has promised it! If we added up everything that has happened in our lives, there might be times when we came to the conclusion that God has not worked everything together for good in our lives. Yet this is God's promise to the Christian -- that he is working all things together for good in our lives. And so we believe it even when we can't find any empirical evidence for it, because God has promised our lives and our future a gracious outcome!
What God was asking Abraham to believe went against Abraham's personal experience, his common sense, and his reproductive history. And yet we are told that Abraham "did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God". Abraham believed that whatever God promised he also had the power to perform! My guess based on what we know of Abraham is that Abraham did at times waver in his degree of certainty about God's promises, but in God's ledger, as a believer it was never counted against him. As God does for us, through eyes of grace God saw only the faith, and not the residual unbelief in Abraham. This is what it means when it says that Abraham's faith "was credited to him as righteousness". For the sake of our faith in Christ, God does not count or credit our remaining sins and unbelief against us. We may feel guilty at times, too guilty to possibly be forgiven, and yet faith believes the promise of God's grace -- that our guilt has been forgiven and forgotten by Jesus' death on the cross. Are we to believe our feelings of guilt, more than the promise of forgiveness? Faith believes God's promise that God has forgiven our sin and guilt for Jesus' sake. Faith therefore defies feelings of guilt and the fear of death and whatever else contradicts the gracious promises that God has called us to believe.
This leads us to the whole question of why God credits faith as righteousness? The Holy Spirit's comments in this text concerning Abraham might lead us to assume that Abraham was saved by virtue of his faith. But faith is not a human virtue. Faith is not a good work. We are not saved based upon our ability to believe in God or to trust in him. Abraham is not being praised in this text for believing per se, but for believing that God is gracious and would faithfully do what he had promised. These may sound like the same thing, yet they are two entirely different ways of looking at faith. One way is to look upon faith as a good work. But the right way to look at faith is as the receiving means by which the heart takes hold of God's promises of grace in Christ. To put it simply, Abraham did not have faith in his own powers to believe and in his own ability to trust God. That would have been to have had faith in himself and not God. On the contrary, Abraham had faith in the promises of God's grace. For you see, it's not faith in itself that saves us, but it is faith that believes that being justified or acquitted by his blood, we have peace with God through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
As we define faith we must understand that there are great misunderstandings about faith, even among some Christian churches. It might be helpful to point out that there are two kinds of faith or trust: First Commandment faith and Gospel generated faith. The First Commandment commands that we trust in God completely and in no one or in nothing else. The Law of God therefore demands faith from us. But we already know that we cannot fulfill the Law or meet its demands. The Law shows that we do not trust God enough or have the kind of faith in God that we should according to this commandment. Whenever we consider faith according to the First Commandment, we will fail to have enough faith and will end up focused only upon our own unbelief. It's not until our faith attaches itself to the promise of grace that all of this changes. For Gospel created faith trusts God by believing that Christ has forgiven our sins and has fulfilled the Law's requirements for us. Our faith in the Gospel forgives all of our transgressions including our unbelief -- our failure to have faith -- which is a sin against the First Commandment.
First commandment faith as we consider faith under the Law concentrates on the strength of our faith. Unlike it, saving faith attaches itself to the strength of the Lord found in the promise of his grace. The Holy Spirit creates saving faith in those who hear the Gospel's promises. Gospel faith is not interested in measuring the quantity or the quality of our faith. Gospel faith is focused away from itself and fixated entirely upon the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ is the object and his cross the obsession of saving faith. Faith generated by the good news of the Gospel looks outside itself and focuses on all of God's promises made to us in Christ. And so the very faith that the First Commandment demands from us, the Gospel gives to us as the Holy Spirit causes us to claim and to cling to the Gospel's promises by faith!
Faith does not bring its own righteousness to the bargaining table with God. Faith brings the righteousness of Christ as our only claim of righteousness before God. This is what Romans means when it says that "It was credited to him" as righteousness. God did not make a conditional promise to Abraham based upon Abraham's own ability to father a child. God did not say, "You will become the father of many nations, if you are able to produce a son." But God promised Abraham a son, and despite all of the reasons not to, Abraham believed the promise God made to him! For one of Abraham's future descendants would be Jesus, and through that son God would declare Abraham righteous. God would see Abraham's life through the righteousness life and innocent death of that son. Notice that Romans four says that these promises were not written for Abraham alone, but also for us! If you read the Bible as mere history you might say that this was only promised to Abraham. But faith will extrapolate further and say that the promise is for us and for all who believe as well! The things that happened to the Old Testament patriarchs such as Abraham didn't happen just for their sake, but also for our sakes. God used Abraham to teach us the true nature of faith. We believe in the same God, the same grace, and the same Messianic promises concerning Christ that Abraham believed in! Abraham was looking forward to Christ's day and we look back on it; but the nature of faith hasn't changed in all of the intervening time between father Abraham and now. Abraham hoped in the future promise of Christ while we have faith in the fulfilled promise of Christ. Hope is just faith from a different angle in time. Faith looks back upon the events of the cross, while hope looks forward to the fulfillment of God's promises based on that same faith.
Years ago researchers performed an experiment to see the effect that hope has on those undergoing hardship. Two sets of laboratory rats were placed in separate tanks of water. The researches left one set of rats in the water and found that within an hour they had all drown. The other rats were periodically lifted out of the water and then returned to the tank. When this happened, the second set of rats kept swimming for over 24 hours. Why? Not because they were given a rest, but because they suddenly had hope. Remarkably, those animals somehow had hope that if they could stay afloat just a little longer, someone would reach down and rescue them. If hope holds such power for unthinking rodents, how much greater its effect on our lives? Based upon our faith in Christ God has given us a certain hope in the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the dead, and in the life of the world to come. Hope is not wishful thinking in this context. It is that certainty of God's grace and goodness toward us in Christ that keeps us afloat. We live by faith as people of hope, knowing that God has and will continue to reach down and rescue us in Christ. Amen
Pastor Mark Elliott
St. John Lutheran Church
Champaign, Illinois