The Easiness of Faith

I’ve never thought of faith as easy. My path to it was rather torturous; lots of boulders blocked the way. It stretched for seven years, from high school to my senior year in college. And then it became a rather more focused and purposeful activity, as I learned what it meant to “grow in faith.”

“Grow in faith” is a rather interesting phrase. We usually mean that it is our faith that’s growing. But it could also mean that it is in faith that we grow spiritually.

But is faith easy?

In The Pursuit of God, A.W. Tozer says yes.

“Now if faith is the gaze of the heart at God,” he writes, “and if this gaze is but the raising of the inward eyes to meet the all-seeing eyes of God, then it follows that it is one of the easiest things possible to do. It would be like God to make the most vital thing easy and place it within the range of possibility by the weakest and poorest of us.”

He cites three reasons why he believes faith is easy.

First, faith is simple. It’s the utter simplicity of turning our gaze from ourselves to God.

Second, it can be done at any time. Faith is not bounded by the hour of the day, time of the year, or period of a person’s life.

Third, faith can be done anywhere. It’s not limited by place. You don’t have to be in a church, or a stadium filled for a revival meeting, or in the mountains or some other physically breathtaking beauty. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Corrie ten-Boom found faith in the most of awful of circumstances, places where abandoning hope was the rational thing to do—Stalin’s labor camps and Hitler’s concentration camps.

Faith is simple. You don’t have to be a theologian or an expert. You simply have to “gaze upon a saving God.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been discussing Tozer’s The Pursuit of God. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Gaze of the Soul,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact. Next week, we’ll be discussing chapter 8, “Restoring the Creator-Creature Relation.”