How to Live Your Faith

Living out our faith is something that we all strive to do. Part of our faith is living it out so we can go and make disciples. We want people to look at our lives and think “what’s different about them?’’ Right, isn’t that what we all strive for? 

Living our faith in our everyday life is actually a huge part of most sermons, and for good reason. It’s too easy to forget to do. The thing is though, sometimes those sermons miss a few points. It can be super easy to get people motivated during a sermon and make them really feel good about doing better…. 

But, it often leaves around Sunday afternoon. Don’t let that make you feel bad, I’m just as bad about it, it’s hard. Life is so busy and we all have so much going on. Oftentimes when churches talk about living out faith they can make it look like a perfect picture, but that’s so not true. As I’m sure you all know. 

I do think that it’s important to remember that we need to work together and normalize what it actually means to live out your faith. 

That’s why I’ve decided to write this article because I want to touch on: 

What it means living your faith in a day to day way

We will fail sometimes

To have grace with yourself

It goes more than just at church

I think these things are super important because we should be able to have a realistic view of what this should look like. 

What It Means Living Your Faith In A Day To Day Way

This is simple, as you know, to live your life in a Christ-like way. That means to love each other, show grace, understanding, to rely on him, to express our faith and bring the Good News to other people. 

How can you see yourself doing that? Is it going out of your way to show more kindness? Think about how you’ve been living your life lately, do you see those things there? 

This isn’t about putting on a show of somesort, but rather just embracing our faith and really really letting it into our hearts and leading us in our days. 

Maybe at work this is showing grace to a particularly difficult person. Or perhaps it’s going out of your way to help someone that you usually don’t have time for. Making time for people is another great way to live your faith. People are amazing and should be valued. 

Living our faith in a day to day way really just means always keeping your faith in the front of our minds and interactions. Don’t be fooled though, that’s a lot harder than it seems. 

We Will Fail Sometimes

This one can be a hard one to swallow, but the truth hurts sometimes. We will fail. We will not live out our faith perfectly and do everything right. How do I know that? Because we are human and the bible even tells us that we won’t be able to live perfectly, I mean we live in a sinful world and we aren’t Jesus, so we just can’t make all the right decisions. 

We can do our best, which I’m sure we all do. But we will fail. It’s okay to fail. We can learn from our mistakes and do better. That’s the best part of failing. 

When we fail, it’s important to look at what happened, why it happened, and how we can do better. It’s the best way to move forward. 

We Have To Have Grace With Ourselves 

This comes after the failure, the grace. When we fail we have to have grace with ourselves. If we aren’t able to do that then we can’t learn, we can’t move forward and do better. 

And we get that grace. If Jesus is able to give us grace when we definitely don’t deserve it then we can give ourselves grace. Grace is one of our fundamental values of our faith and by trying to live out our faith in our everyday life and if we are to extend grace to everyone else then why not ourselves? 

It’s hard to extend grace to ourselves, it’s hard to feel worthy of it, but with some practice we can manage to do it. 

And that’s so important when we fail in living our faith. We will. We make mistakes, say something that we shouldn’t, react in some way we shouldn’t, do something we shouldn’t. You know what I mean. 

I can think of more than a few things that I’ve done in my past that make me feel shame, that I know deep down I shouldn’t have responded that way, but I did. I can’t take it back, I can’t do anything other than learn and have grace with myself. 

That’s the goal here. Now moving forward, I can take what I learned and react better. Remember my faith and be better. 

So that’s what you should strive to do too. We need to learn to have grace with ourselves.

It Goes Farther Than Just Sunday

This one is a big one! It’s one of the reasons that many people find Christians to be hypocrites… 

And honestly can any of us blame them? 

How many times have you heard that waitstaff at restaurants hate the after church crowd because they are the rudest and tip the worst… 

That is mind boggling to me. We are called to be kind, that people aren’t below us and yet we sometimes treat people that way. Why? 

Perhaps it’s because of the society we live in now. Things aren’t always great and we make mistakes, but we have to remember that just because we leave the main auditorium at church doesn’t mean we should stop trying. 

People pay more attention to us when we aren’t in church than when we are in church. Think about that for a second. I know many people that treat church as a stage. Of course we want to look good and one way people do that is to show how strong their faith is. I know that’s wrong and we all want to automatically say “not me!”. But the truth is, we’ve all probably done that. I know I have… I’m not proud of it, but I’m not perfect and like I’ve said earlier, we learn from our mistakes. 

So let us remember that our faith and how we live it out is not confined to the church, a day, or a group of people. It should live in our hearts and show in every aspect of our character. That is what we should strive for. 

Have grace, learn, and love.