Faith is an Action

Genesis 12, Proverbs 7, Matthew 4

I am pleased today to share words from Jeffrey Fletcher, a pastor, chaplain, husband, father and regular writer for SeekGrowLove and Church of God publications. We mourn the death of Pastor Jeff, we look forward to celebrating with him at the resurrection, and we are thankful that his Godly words of wisdom and his example of faith live on for us today. The following is part of an article titled True Abrahamic Faith which was published in the July-Sept 2025 edition of The Restitution Herald (Vol 114 No 3).

If we say we have the faith of Abraham, shouldn’t we understand what that really means? The fact of the matter is … when we study the life of Abraham, we find very little spoken about what he actually believed in a structured, systematic way. Abraham left behind no creed or statement of belief about God. So to understand what faith meant to Abraham, we have to look at what he did by way of response to God. 

First, we see in Genesis 12 that Abraham took his wife, his nephew, and his servants, left Haran, and went down to the land of Canaan, where he pitched his tent and built an altar to the LORD who had appeared to him. From this, we discover three things about the faith of Abraham: 

1. He had a personal relationship with God – Abraham believed that God was a personal God. 

Abraham was not an atheist, who doesn’t believe in God. 

He wasn’t an agnostic, who won’t say one way or another if there’s a God. 

He wasn’t a deist, who believes that God is a kind of higher power who simply wound up the universe at the beginning and then pretty much left us on our own to do as we please. 

He wasn’t an animist, who believes that an immaterial force called nature — Mother nature, Gaia, etc. — inhabits the universe and occupies all living things (had he believed that, he never would have killed an animal and offered up a sacrifice at the altar). If you want to know more about animism, just watch the Disney film Pocahontas, which reflects a prevalent 90s animistic belief that things like trees have spirits. 

He was not a pantheist, who believes in and worships all gods. This popular belief holds that all religious truth is equally valid. All gods are equally valid and can justly be worshipped – whether they be called Buddha, Lord Krishna, or YHWH. 

Abraham believed in God and God alone as the true God. Not a higher power, which is a kind of politically correct term for God among many 12-step groups. Yes, God is a higher power, but He is more than pure power, energy, or even impersonal spirit. God is a personal being with whom we can enter into a real, personal relationship. 

We know these things about Abraham not because of what he said to others about God, but because of the way he responded to God. 

2. He made worship a priority – notice that wherever Abraham settled, he built an altar. He came to Shechem; he built an altar to worship God. He went to Bethel; he built an altar to worship God. Later, he moved to Hebron; again he built an altar to God. Everywhere he settled, he built an altar to God. Worship was a priority to him. And remember too – this was not because of some religious law or empty ritual Abraham was following. The laws of Moses, which prescribed the type and frequency of offerings to God, were not given until over 400 years after the time of Abraham. Abraham selected animals from his flocks as a way of recognizing that everything he had was from God and really belonged to God. Abraham was willing to offer up his best as an act of worship to God. 

This priority of worship was demonstrated when Abraham, after being victorious in battle against the confederacy of kings from Sodom and Gomorrah, as an act of worship, brought to Melchizedek, a priest of God, a tenth of the spoils of war. The very first tithe in the Bible does not come as a result of an ecclesiastical law, but as an offering of worship and display of faith on the part of Abraham. Abrahamic faith makes worship a priority and demonstrates it through sacrificial giving and tithing. 

3. He believed God – he packed up his tents and moved based on a promise that God had given him. He believed God and demonstrated that belief by his actions. Had Abraham stayed in Haran, would he have had true faith? What if he had said to everyone in Haran, “Listen, I believe in God, I believe God keeps His promises, I believe that God will give me the land of Canaan and make a great nation out of me” and then never packed up his tents, never loaded up his camels and donkeys, never tightened his sandals, never pulled out his walking stick and never journeyed south to Canaan? Would that have been true faith? 

You see, so much of what passes for “faith” these days isn’t really faith at all. Part of the problem is that faith in the English language is a noun. 

A noun is a person, place, or thing, whereas a verb is an action. English is one of the only languages that has the word “faith” as a noun. In other languages, it is a verb. Why is that significant? Because Abrahamic Faith is a verb. Abrahamic Faith requires action. There’s no room for couch potatoes in Abrahamic Faith. Abrahamic Faith is not a spectator sport. 

One of the problems with American religion today is illustrated by the weekly football game, where we have 22 exhausted men who desperately need some rest being observed by thousands of spectators sitting around eating junk food and drinking beer, who desperately need some exercise. 

Abraham set down his beer, put down the remote control, packed up his stuff, and began a journey that would last for the rest of his life. He didn’t know how many stops, how many detours, how many frustrations, how many dis-appointments, how many battles, how much pain there would be on the journey. But then again, none of us on this journey of faith knows what we will encounter along the way. We travel out on faith, trusting that the God who has called us to the promised land will never abandon us on that journey, and that the land that awaits us is truly a good land. 

The complete article can be found here, starting on page 7. THE RESTITUTION HERALD is owned and published by the Church of God General Conference, a nonprofit Christian corporation located at 2020 Avalon Parkway, Suite 400,
McDonough, GA 30253, which is also the site of Atlanta Bible College.

Reflection Questions:

1. What is involved in having a personal relationship with God? How is that the same or different from what you have seen in religion today? Do you have a personal relationship with God? It is healthy to continually look for ways to improve relationships. How can you improve your relationship with God?
2. How do you worship? How might God want to see you worship, in addition to what you typically do now? What happens when we don’t make worship a priority? Would God say that you make worship a priority?
3. Do you generally think of faith as a noun or a verb? Who have you seen live out their faith? What have done or currently do to demonstrate your faith? What might God be asking you to do next?

Prayer

Dear Heavenly Father, we praise you because you are a real, personal God who desires a relationship with your creation. We thank you for the examples of faithful fathers, for the men and women recorded in your Word, as well as the ones who have lived since then, who though not perfect, go beyond talking about faith to demonstrate a living, breathing, moving, active faith in you. Help me to have a faith that gets me off the couch and even beyond my comfort zone. Show me, Father, how you want me to live out my faith next. May my worship of you be pleasing to you and a priority in my life. I pray these things in Your Son’s name. Amen.