The Bible Study Podcast, episode 287. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues a study of faith.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. An odd thing happening

me when I started to prepare for this particular episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. An odd thing happening to me when I started

to prepare for this particular episode of the podcast. I knew I wanted to do faith, but I don't have

a rough outline yet for this particular study. I'm still learning as I go. And so I went to my

Bible gateway.com, which is sort of my online concordance, and I looked up faith. And the odd thing is

that most of the references I found weren't the word faith, but the word faithful and the word

faithfully. And they corresponded to many of the people that we think of in the Bible as being

full of faith. And so, for instance, the calling of Noah,

we get, this is the account of Noah and his family. Noel was a righteous man,

blameless among the people of his time, and he walked faithfully with God. That's from Genesis

6.9. And the calling of Abraham is when Abraham was 99 years old, the Lord

appeared to him and said, I am God Almighty, walk before me faithfully and be blameless. And that's from

Genesis 17, verse 1. And it's interesting because when I looked up the word faithful in the dictionary, I was told that the number one definition was full of faith, but that was an obsolete definition.

And I'm going to try and make it a little less obsolete in this particular episode.

But also, as we think about it, the term faithful, as we use it more normally, is steadfast and affection or allegiance

loyal. And the synonyms what we get are things like constant and dedicated and devoted. And the

antonyms are words like disloyal and faithless and fickle. And I think that there is

consistency in some ways between my understanding of faith and those

words. So I want to look a little bit at what it means to be faithful. When we talk about faith,

we tend to, I think, misleadingly think of faith as belief. And we'll look

later on at the verses in James, where James says, for instance, you believe that Christ is Lord.

...