Average time per day for this plan: 7 Minutes
You are working on lesson 2.
Lesson
01
That Settles It For Me
Lesson
02
Just Have Faith
Lesson
03
Humble Ourselves and Pray
Lesson
04
It's Just Me and Jesus
Lesson
05
Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin
Lesson
06
Christianity Is a Relationship, Not a Religion
Lesson
07
Jesus Was a Social Justice Warrior
Lesson
08
It's Not My Place to Judge
Lesson
09
This World Has Nothing For Me
Lesson
10
God is Good All The Time, All The Time God is Good
Just Have Faith

Mark Twain sarcastically defined faith as ‘believing what you know ain’t so.” Harvard professor Steven Pinker described faith as “believing something without good reason to do so.” And the famous atheist Richard Dawkins said, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is a belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”

If their criticisms were aimed at the Bible, I can understand a little of where they’re coming from. The Bible is full of accounts that defy natural explanation. The parting of the Red Sea. The feeding of five thousand people with only five loaves and two fish. The Bible follows a deeper logic that makes little sense to people who believe that only the natural world exists.

When faith is under attack, lots of people default to talking about faith only as the strength of our belief. People say “Just have faith” as a way to say, “Be strong. Hang in there.”

When I think about faith’s critics and those who treat it in a shallow way, two things come to mind:

First, we ALL place faith in something. Biblically, faith does not mean believing things that don’t match up to reality. It means admitting that God is the greatest reality in the universe, who solves the mysteries of knowledge and existence while bringing healing and purpose to our lives.

Second, faith in God isn’t something we simply have; it’s something we live. The Bible doesn’t tell us to have faith; it tells us to live faithfully. The righteous LIVE by faith, the Bible says.

This doesn’t mean we don’t have doubts. Doubt can even be healthy as long as we put it in its proper place. We have to doubt our doubts as much as we doubt what we are putting our faith in.

The goal isn’t to prove everything we believe 100%. It’s to form beliefs that are true, and that we are justified in holding. The question about faith isn’t whether we can work up strong feelings about it; it’s whether the object of our faith is worthy.

It’s important to look at the stories of people who lived faithfully. Amazing people who invented scientific methods, created the ideas of charity and human rights, abolished slavery, developed world-changing technologies, brought billions out of poverty, and established the modern idea of education.

We think of these people as heroes. They believed by faith, cultivated knowledge through faith, and acted as if their faith were true. The world could not help but be changed as a result.

But they didn’t do anything we can’t do. We have a big decision to make: Will we let ourselves be forced into thinking of faith as a private, unfounded belief, or will we step up and live beyond ourselves in a way that changes the world.

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