The Reason For God by Timothy Keller

I've been reading an excellent book - The Reason For God by Timothy Keller. Today I came across a couple of paragraphs illustrating "faith" that I would like to share with you.

The faith that changes the life and connects to God is best conveyed by the word TRUST. Imagine you are on a high cliff and you lose your footing and begin to fall. Just beside you, as you fall, is a branch sticking out of the very edge of the cliff. It is your only hope and is more than strong enough to support your weight. How can it save you? If your mind is filled with intellectual certainty that the branch can support you but you don't actually reach out and grab it - you are lost. If your mind is instead filled with doubts and uncertainty that the branch can hold you, but you reach out and grab it anyway you will be saved. Why? It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.

This means you don't have to wait for all the doubts and fears to go away to take hold of Christ. Faith, then, begins as you recognize and reject your alternative trusts and gods and turn instead to the Father, asking for a relationship to Him on the basis of what Jesus has done - not on the basis of your moral effort or achievements.

You can make your move to faith this way....

Father, I've always believed in you and Jesus Christ, but my heart's most fundamental trust was elsewhere - in my own competence and decency. This has gotten in into trouble. As far as I know my own heart - today I give it to you. I transfer my trust to you and ask that you would receive and accept me not for anything I have done but because of everything Christ has done for me.