This from John Piper, via Of First Importance:
Faith is looking away from ourselves to another. Faith is total dependence on another. When faith stands in front of a mirror, the mirror becomes a window with the glory of Christ on the other side. Faith looks to Christ and enjoys him as the sum and judge of all that is true and good and right and beautiful and valuable and satisfying.
Amen to that. That’s the reason we resist faith, just as it’s the reason we resist grace. The Reformed tradition emphasizes that salvation is by faith, not by works, and that even faith comes to us as God’s gift, not as the result of our own efforts; but there is one work, of a sort, that is required. The work of faith, if you want to call it that, is accepting our displacement from the center of our universe; it’s the willingness to look away from ourselves, not only to acknowledge our dependence but to acknowledge our insufficiency and our need to follow rather than to carve our own path, and to find our joy in another rather than in ourselves.