Faith

What is faith? As per one of my favorite definitions (of which I cannot claim the credit of invention), "faith is believing the Word of God and acting on it, no matter how I feel, because God promises a good result." Faith in the Biblical sense is not, first of all, grounded in some intellectual adherence to a particular set of plausible but unproven assumptions. It is not reasoning and conniving and rationalizing my way to a solution which maximizes my profits and minimizes my losses. Faith is grounded in a person. It is taking God at His word, and accepting what He says as reliable and true, not because of my honest evaluation of the relevant lines of evidence, but because of who He is as a Person, and who He is as my Friend.
This is so hard for me. One of the greatest difficulties in my walk with Christ, I am coming to realize, is my inability (in my flesh) to turn my brain off. Now, please don't get me wrong. I'm by no means advocating some kind of quasi-evangelical anti-intellectual habits of slovenly thinking. I will stand by my conviction that worship is never complete if I have failed to love the Lord my God with every aspect of my being, including my mind. But we err in the opposing direction to suppose that we can anticipate the Lord's actions or intentions in a particular situation simply by virtue of our own mental acrobatics. We focus our energies on ascertaining some reason why what the Lord has laid on our hearts to accomplish is a plausible expectation.
In other words, although I am all for thinking critically about one's faith and exploring the regions which are dimly lit and fraught with inconsistency, when we attempt to understand why we find ourselves in a particular situation or why the Lord has commanded us to follow a certain course of action, we are in danger of wandering a little past our paygrade.
Although the Lord may bless us with wisdom to understand "the reason why" He asks us to do something, there is simply no promise in Scripture which guarantees this in every instance. It is when we sense the void of our own understanding that we must return on our knees to the throne of our Father, from whom and through whom and to whom are all things, both now and forever. And this is the essence of faith: not a conscious forfeiture of one's responsibility to address intellectual problems faced by ourselves or other believers, but a ready submission to the Person of Jesus Christ, who rightfully expects our unquestioning obedience to His instructions.
My instinct, when faced with a decision which requires faith, is to question whether I have truly heard the voice of the Lord. Was it merely an intuition? Was it my own habits of thought, or an internal voice which suggested this course of action? Or was it genuinely a prompting which originated with the Holy Spirit?
I won't pretend to have the answers to those questions, but one thing I do know, the more time I spend in a person's presence, the more I can begin to discern the motions in the spirit of that person. I begin to feel their heart beat, and to know the things for which they ache. Such is my relationship with Christ. Through time spent in His word, I can grow in my ability to know the voice of the Lord from the counterfeits. God grant us the wisdom to know His voice ever more clearly, and to follow it unquestioningly, knowing that He alone is truly sovereign and good, and will not lead us into harm. God grant us faith.