I was caused to reflect yesterday on the seeming lack of humility in the certainty a person of faith has that their faith is true which additionally might mean that they have to believe that the faith of others is misguided.

On first inspection this seems to demand a lack of humility – a belief in the correctness of one’s beliefs.

Anyway, I didn’t feel to comfortable with this so I thought about it some more.

It occurred to me that perhaps knowing the truth can only happen when you give up your own beliefs and accept truth from outside of oneself. So to have any faith at all it has to come because:

• You recognised your foolishness and inability to work out what was truth
• You were supplied with faith from someone/something outside of yourself

So by definition to have faith is to admit your foolishness. It demands a loss of pride.

We are given faith, it comes from God. We believe in the truth that he gives us and we do not accept any credit for the receipt of that faith – which has only arrived in us with humility.

In my mind we often go too far in what we believe is our faith: We start labelling our opinions as faith and start believing in our own wise pronouncements on matters of belief. When we start noticing that we have a vested interest in our position with regard to matters of belief then perhaps we might notice that there is something wrong, that we have allowed pride in our own opinions and our own wisdom to work its way back in to our lives – pushing our real, God given, faith to the sidelines.