Costly Faith invites you to trust God with the life you are building
Who do you admire? Think about someone whose success, family life, career, character, or influence makes you think, “I would love to have something like that.” What you admire can reveal something about what you desire. The question that follows is important: how will you pursue that desire while keeping your relationship with God at the centre?
That question connects with Spiritual Pruning: How God Cultivates a Fruitful Life and Godly Wisdom Gives You Clarity for the Decisions That Matter. Both explore ways God shapes a fruitful life and gives clarity for decisions that carry real weight.
Costly Faith brings another dimension into that conversation. Faith affects the way you pursue success, handle ambition, make decisions, build relationships, and respond to what you cannot yet see. It asks you to examine the source of your confidence and the role your own ability plays in the life you are building.
The cost of faith is closely connected to trust. Trust requires surrender and obedience, along with a willingness to place your strength, expertise, and plans under God’s direction. The result described in this teaching is deeply relational: growing in friendship with God while living the abundant life Jesus calls you toward.
Questions About Costly Faith
What makes faith costly?
Costly Faith involves trust, submission, and obedience. It asks you to place your ability, expertise, strength, plans, and decisions under God’s direction while continuing to live responsibly and pursue what matters to you.
How does faith apply to everyday life?
Faith reaches into work, family, relationships, ambitions, decisions, and future plans. The teaching presents faith as a practical relationship with God that influences the visible areas of your life.
Why is relationship with God central to Costly Faith?
The teaching describes the relationship with God as the aim. Faith creates an ongoing dependence on Him, allowing your friendship with God to deepen as you trust Him with what you can see and what remains unseen.
What You Admire Reveals What You Desire
When you admire someone, you are often responding to something you value. Perhaps you see excellence in their career, a strong marriage, meaningful relationships with their children, financial success, or an achievement that represents years of effort. Whatever catches your attention can reveal an aspiration already present within you.
The teaching points to 2 Corinthians 10:12 as a warning about comparison. Paul addresses the tendency to measure ourselves against others. When another person’s success becomes the standard by which you evaluate your own life, you can lose sight of the particular life God is shaping in you.
You can admire excellence while remaining attentive to where God is leading you. Someone else’s success can awaken desire without becoming the measuring stick for your life.
The Trap of Grinding for What You Want
A clear ambition can create pressure to believe everything depends on you. The internal message becomes, “I can make this happen if I work hard enough.” Hours increase. Hustle becomes normal. Every problem becomes something you must solve through greater effort.
Hard work has value. The teaching explicitly acknowledges that God honours diligent work. The issue comes when your own strength becomes the foundation of your confidence and your relationship with God becomes disconnected from what you are building.
Personal effort can carry hidden costs. Work can consume attention that belongs to your marriage, children, health, relationships, or spiritual life. That tension can produce disillusionment.
Costly Faith brings faith into the equation. Responsibility, effort, excellence, and discipline remain part of your work while your life belongs in relationship with God.
Faith Brings God Into Every Area of Life
The teaching presents faith as essential to the abundant life Jesus promised. That reaches into ordinary areas of life: building a company, doing excellent work, being a husband or wife, raising children, and developing relationships.
Faith becomes practical in decisions, hopes, responsibilities, relationships, and the future you cannot fully see. Jesus is invited into every part of your life.
Hebrews 11:1 describes faith in terms of confidence concerning what is hoped for and assurance concerning what is unseen. The unseen matters because your present circumstances never contain the whole picture of what God may be doing. Faith allows you to trust God while continuing to act responsibly within what you can see and understand.
The teaching also describes faith as giving the unseen realm permission to influence the seen realm. In the speaker’s framework, God’s world influences the work, dreams, relationships, and decisions that make up your visible life. The emphasis remains relational.
Faith Is Trust Before Results
At the heart of Costly Faith is a simple idea: God wants a relationship. Results matter, while relationship with Him is the aim.
You can have goals, build a business, pursue excellence, strengthen your family, and hope for meaningful outcomes while keeping your relationship with God central. Faith becomes trust in God as you pursue those outcomes.
Trust means acknowledging that you cannot control every result. You can control your response, obedience, effort, and decisions. Faith asks you to trust God with what remains outside your control.
You may understand the facts surrounding a decision and still need to trust God with what you cannot see. Expertise and experience still need His direction.
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The Cost of Surrender
This is where the word costly becomes important. If faith involves trust, then faith also involves submission. You are placing yourself under the direction of someone you trust.
The teaching identifies a specific cost: laying down the claim that everything rests on “my ability, my expertise, my strength.” That can be difficult when competence and achievement have become significant parts of your identity. Surrender asks you to recognise your abilities as gifts and resources while giving God His rightful place.
The speaker describes God coming as who He is, with you submitting to Him. That submission can involve obedience when you sense His leading, even when obedience carries a personal cost.
Costly Faith reaches into the places where you feel most capable. Bring your competence into a relationship with God while your trust rests in Him.
Faith Deepens Friendship With God
The result described in the teaching begins with relationships. When you choose to incorporate faith into your life and trust God with your strength, your friendship with Him grows deeper.
God is part of the relationship through which you live, decide, work, love, and serve. Faith also remains a constant investment because life contains things you cannot fully see or control. Each situation can become an invitation to depend on God and deepen your friendship with Him.
The teaching presents an ongoing need for faith as part of life with God. Faith keeps your relationship active and dependent on Him.
Living Costly Faith in Daily Life
You can begin with the areas already in front of you. Consider your work, family, finances, ambitions, and the decisions you are currently carrying. Ask where you are relying entirely on your own ability. Ask where God is inviting you to trust Him.
Work diligently while praying for God’s direction. Pursue excellence while remembering that your identity does not rest entirely on achievement. Build meaningfully while leaving room for God to influence decisions you cannot predict.
Costly Faith becomes tangible when trust enters these ordinary spaces. Faith becomes integrated into how you think, decide, work, relate, and respond to uncertainty.
Costly Faith in Daily Life
| Area of Life | Faith in Practice |
| Work | Pursue excellence while trusting God with direction |
| Ambition | Hold meaningful goals within relationship with God |
| Decisions | Seek God’s direction where the outcome cannot be fully seen |
| Relationships | Invite faith into marriage, family, and everyday relationships |
| Ability | Use your skills while recognising God’s rightful place |
| Future | Trust God with what remains outside your control |
Conclusion
Costly Faith asks you to consider what happens when trust in God becomes part of your whole life. Your ambition can remain purposeful. Your work can remain diligent. Your abilities can remain valuable. Your relationship with God becomes the foundation from which you use them.
Faith is a constant investment because relationship with God is the aim. As you surrender your strength and trust Him with what you cannot see, you create room for deeper friendship with Him.
If you are trying to understand where you are, what God may be asking of you, or how to bring clarity to the decisions in front of you, a conversation can help you explore those questions.
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Bible References
- Hebrews 11:1 (KJV): “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
- 2 Corinthians 10:12 (KJV): “For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.”
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