In his book Calling and Character, William Willimon makes this observation.

The Acts of the Apostle’s is, by my reckoning, a great early Christian treatise on Christian ministry, but Acts hardly ever turns away from its drama to give ethical admonition. Rather, all ethics is by implication, through imaginative, dynamic analogy, by creative inference from the models for ministry of people like Paul, Barnabas, Peter and Tabitha. As Stanley Hauerwas has said, “The lives of the saints are the hermeneutical key to scripture.”

If this is the case, is it reasonable to assume that we learn more from watching the people in scripture wrestle with what it means to be faithful then from any list of faithful activities? To be honest I like this idea. If faith is something living and on going I tend to think faith will look different in different people.

I realize there are moral fundamentals and who we are cannot be separated from what we do. We live out what we believe for the most part but ethics and faith is not the same thing. If I want to see what faith looks like, shouldn’t I be looking at a life, instead of a doctrine? The thought also occurs that the life I should be looking at more then any other is the life of Christ. While the life of the struggeling saints provides a picture of holiness incomplete Jesus shows me what a truely human life looks like.