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In this series, we’ve defined faith as “living out what you believe.” Our faith can (and should) grow, and that happens first through understanding, then conviction, then finally when we make a commitment and take a step of faith to live out what we believe to be true. We’ve been talking about the faith story of Abraham for the last couple of weeks, and this week we look at the most challenging episode in that story – where we’ll see how life’s toughest tests can grow our faith like nothing else can.

If you’re going to discover a ‘full life,’ you’re going to have to grow in your faith – because the full life that God meant for you to have is a life of faith. As we’ve defined it in this series, faith is simply “living out what you believe,” and that process of living out our faith includes taking “steps of faith” that indicate (and reinforce) our faith commitment – our decision to trust God. In an odd story from Genesis 18, we see that sometimes God waits for us to take that step before doing something “wonderful.”

In this series we’ve defined faith, generically, as “living out what I believe” – and, specifically, the Christian faith is “living out what I believe to be true about Jesus.” We’ve seen that our faith begins and grows in three stages: we grow in our understanding about what is true, then we develop a conviction about that truth, then finally we make a commitment to live out that conviction. This final step in the process is the key: our commitment is sealed (and our faith then grows) when we take a step of faith.