How Can Losing Your Faith Be a Good Thing? (reflecting on an article)

I occasionally browse for interesting articles and a phrase from a particular one grabbed my attention and I had to read the rest of it:

A faith that leaves us unprepared for suffering is a false faith that deserves to be lost.

The title of this article was also an attention-grabber: Losing Your Faith May Be God’s Gift To You.

Wait, what?

How could this possibly be a good thing or even be considered a “gift” from God?

The author of this article didn’t hold back —

I have sympathy for people who lose their faith, but any faith lost in suffering wasn’t a faith worth keeping. (Genuine faith will be tested; false faith will be lost.)

So, is he saying that anyone who’s lost their faith in God never had it to begin with?

Believing God exists is not the same as trusting the God who exists. A nominal Christian often discovers in suffering that his faith has been in his church, denomination, or family tradition, but not Christ. As he faces evil and suffering, he may lose his faith.

Losing your faith may be God’s gift to you. Only when you jettison ungrounded and untrue faith can you replace it with valid faith in the true God — faith that can pass, and even find strength in, the most formidable of life’s tests.

• To read the rest of the article click here.

If I were to summarize what I got from reading this article into one sentence it would be this:

The object of your faith will determine the strength of your faith.

In other words, faith doesn’t save you — only Jesus can.

Faith isn’t a feeling though as humans, we rely too much on how much feeling of “faith” we put in others, on how much we “know” about God and the Bible, but when disaster strikes (or someone tears down your belief system), that “faith” is shaken. It’s then when we realize that everything we thought we knew falls apart and we begin to question everything.

In the end, many choose to walk away from God because He had let them down; because He wasn’t what or who they thought.

Faith isn’t about feelings or knowledge. It’s about trust. It’s about the strength of our relationship with Jesus Christ.

Knowledge will only go so far. People we care about could betray or hurt us. If knowledge and people have been the object of our faith rather than Jesus, it will challenge how we view God because we base this view upon how we’re treated by others. If people let us down, if people can tear down our belief system, how can we trust Him not to as well?

So, why is losing our faith a good thing?

It means we have misplaced our faith. It means that our faith was never truly in Him.

This crisis of faith causes us to reexamine everything which then leads us to a crossroads where we must make a decision — what or who should be the true object of our faith?

The author concludes the article with the following:

There are probably many people who need to lose their faith — because their faith is in the wrong thing. I believe God can use this crisis to topple our idols, including but not limited to the idols of health and wealth, and clear the way for us to embrace genuine trust in Christ.

So let’s fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Let’s make Him the object of our faith. He will support us and sustain us and be there for us in a way that no other object of faith can.

Make Jesus the object of your faith — and you’ll be able to endure the trials of life.

1 Peter 1:9

For you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.