The Merger: Intentional Faith

Self-help guides clutter our book stores, online carts, and social media feeds because we want to be better than most at whatever our hearts and heads enjoy. A key word in that world of self-help is intentional. You can search all day and find hundreds of websites, books, memes, and groups to help you live intentionally. Recently, a congregation in Louisville, Kentucky asked me to take that buzz word and apply it to faith. Here’s what I discovered.

Living intentionally means a person is focused, aware of their surroundings, and deliberate in response. It’s the opposite of living on auto-pilot (lacking any decisive desire) or cruise control (giving up some decision-making). While the list can be longer and packed full of more specific details, to live intentionally includes some order of the following:

Your life is decisive, not reactive. In the face of something less, it wants what is best. It does not settle.

Your life is sustainable, not momentary. Decisions aren’t made in the mold of improvisation. They are found in deliberate repetition.

Your life is oriented, not just active. You aren’t just occupied with something to do, you are focused on something particular. It has a goal in mind.

Your life requires a notable cost. It shouldn’t cost something, it should cost everything, because it is, by purpose, the life you most want to lead.

To that end, intentional faith is similar and there is a strong precedent in the OT and NT Scriptures of practiced intentional faith. From a few short examples, a picture is painted of faith lived out in the lives of these people “on purpose”. Like a skilled archer taking aim, these examples show us what it means to hit the target on purpose.

Of course, no one lived more intentionally than Jesus Himself. He “he set his face to go to Jerusalem” (see Luke 9:51) knowing exactly what awaited Him there. He was decisive and unflinching in a way none of us can fully repeat. But that’s precisely the point. He isn’t just our example, He’s our reason to live intentionally. We don’t have His foresight, and we were never meant to, but we can follow the ones whose stories are about to unfold in the examples ahead. With one faithful choice at a time, trusting the God who already sees the end, we can live with intentional faith just like them.

Your life is decisive, not reactive. In the face of something less, it wants what is best. It does not settle.

Joshua 24:15 may be the most intentional statement in all of the OT. In that moment, Joshua is smack dab in the middle of his farewell address to the children of Israel. He has led them for decades and throughout the conquest of Canaan. His leadership and life are both now coming to an end, but he has one last message for them. When he says, “choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord”, he makes it clear, intentional faith in the Lord despite other options is the only way for his household.

Notice the ownership of intention, “as for me and my house…” That is deliberate. Not reactionary. He owns the moment and plants a flag, because intentional faithfulness is not passive default, it’s decisive habit. This was not the first day and certainly not the last day that Joshua, in spite of idolatry all around him, chose to follow the Lord. His lasting message to modern readers is simply, keep choosing today, right now, in this very moment, to serve the Lord.

**Your life is sustainable, not momentary. Decisions aren’t made in a world of improvisation. They are found in deliberate repetition.**

Read through Daniel 6 and observe something sustainable. In that passage, Daniel was forbidden to pray to anyone other than the King of the Persians and Medes, a man named Darius, yet what does he do? As was his custom, he went home, opened the window, faced Jerusalem, and prayed. Then, because his life was deliberately repetitive, he paid a hefty price for his faithfulness (the lion’s den). Thankfully, the Lord is even more faithful to His intentional servants.

Please notice that he didn’t make a dramatic choice to rebel against the king’s wishes on impulse. He didn’t scream and shout, make a scene, or act out of desperation. He simply lived out the pattern of his chosen life. Long before the crisis that arose that day, his mind was at peace with who the Lord is and what that means everyday, not just some day. When the law was passed, like the day before, Daniel was going to pray facing Jerusalem, with his windows open, to the God who delivers His children from the mouth of a lion.

Your life is oriented, not just active. You aren’t just occupied with something to do, you are focused on something particular. It has a goal in mind.

In Second Timothy 4:7, the Apostle Paul says, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me…” Paul’s life had been chaotic, yet purposeful. Even in his previous Jewish life as a persecutor of the Christians in Judea, his goal was to serve God. His concerted effort to “finish” seems to have been the guide for his life. It’s also worth considering Philippians 1:21, “for me to live is Christ, to die is gain”.

There is no immediate gratification for Paul, there is intentional faith. He converts to the Lord, and he gets to work (see Acts 9). Many years later, with the end in mind, his goal is clearly stated. He had pointed his life in that direction with intention.

The Roman philosopher Lucius Seneca once said, “When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind”.¹ That simple truth is relevant to our faith. With a goal in mind to join God in paradise, live your life intentionally.

Your life requires a notable cost. It shouldn’t cost something, it should cost everything, because it is, by purpose, the life you most want to lead.

No cost seems higher in our society than forsaking our identity for another. In fact, in 2026, personal identity might be the most combative character trait in our society. Everyone wants to define their identity in isolation of others, unless everyone is like-minded and flexible in their beliefs. And it’s led to countless arguments and discussions that seem to continually get nowhere.

Christians should reject that self-identifying ideology and proudly state their identity is in Christ. Think about Galatians 2:20, which says, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”.

Ruth, the OT woman with a book that bears her name, may illustrate that cost of the sentiment better than any other Bible character. In Ruth 1:16-17, she forsook her Moabite identity to become a child of Israel and accompany her mother-in-law to the promised land. But, the promise was far from certain on that fateful day. There’s no reason to believe she saw any of the future promises God had in store for her. But she still said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”

When she identified with God’s people, she gave up all of her worldly markers of faith, family, and nation. She gave up all her Moabite-ness to become Ruth the Israelite. Eventually, that led her to Boaz, Obed, and her grandsons David (and therefore, by extension, Jesus).

It cost her something in this world to live intentionally, but what did it gain her in the world to come? Everything.

Conclusion

Remember where we started. If an intentional life is all of these things, then this must be true of an intentional faith:

It is decisive, not reactive. In the face of something less, it wants what is best. It does not settle.

It is sustainable, not momentary. It is found in deliberate repetition. Decisions aren’t made in the mold of improvisation. They are found in deliberate repetition.

It is oriented, not just active. You aren’t just occupied with something to do, you are focused on something particular. It has a goal in mind.

It requires a notable cost. It shouldn’t cost something, it should cost everything, because it is, by purpose, the faith you most want to have.

Joshua, Daniel, Paul, and Ruth didn’t stumble into faithfulness; they pointed their lives in a direction and paid whatever it cost to get there. The question isn’t whether your faith will cost you something — it’s whether you’ll lay down everything, the way Christ laid down everything for you, and call that surrender the most intentional choice you’ll ever make.

Notes and Further Reading

Lucius Seneca, The Complete Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter LXXI entitled “On the Supreme Good” ↩︎