Faith, what is it?

First we need to understand what faith is, before we look at those in the great hall of faith. So what is faith, really? According to Hebrew 11:1, "...Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Let us look at that statement closer to better understand it. I wanted to really understand what each main word in this statement meant to make sure I understood what it meant to those who was reading it in the original language. So, I looked them up in the Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible.
This is what I found out.

 Faith means to have a conviction of religious truth or to have a strong assurance, belief , confidence, or trust in something. Substance means to have an abstract assurance or concrete essence of something to stand on. And Evidence means proof or conviction. So with that in mind, I would say that faith is to have a strong belief in things that we can not see with our physical eyes, yet have a strong conviction of the proof seen with our spiritual eyes.

Then Paul goes on to give an example of that in Hebrews 11:3, "Through faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." In other words, when God spoke and made the worlds, he took something from the spiritual world & made our physical worlds.

You see, we often have things backwards in our lives. We often let our minds tell our bodies & then souls what to do, or we let our physical bodies' feelings tell our mind & soul  how to act. Instead, we should have our souls dictate to our minds how things should be, and then our bodies will follow. When we do this, we will be walking in faith.