House Church Talk - People of Faith

[jim sutton]

Are Christian Believers the People of Faith?

Everyone has faith. That has never been the issue.  Anyone who believes 
anything at all has exercised faith.  

Even atheists fully expect the sun to come up tomorrow, and they believe that 
taxes are likely to increase.  Agnostics also believe that if they keep shying 
away from making decisions, the issues will go away and leave them alone.

Everyone has faith.

Unbelievers have almost always outnumbered believers in this world.  True 
Christian believers are a very small minority.  That's why the Bible often 
contrasts the truth and life of God with the ideas and ways of ?the world.? 
 With Christian believers it is very often "you and me against the world."

Faith itself is not what makes us different as Christian believers.  We are 
different because we trust in God and in His Son Jesus Christ.  

Unbelievers also exercise faith.  They believe in a universe that ?somehow? 
caused itself to exist from nothing.  Or they believe in a universe that is 
made up of things that have always been there -- forever and ever and ever. 
 And they also believe that with enough time, things that came from nowhere 
will take on new forms and develop into complex things.  Even develop into 
living things and into even conscious beings.

Everyone has faith, alright.

We each one must decide at times in our lives what we will believe.  We must 
choose who we will believe.  We must decide what we will trust in, who we will 
trust.  Unbelievers often believe that human reasoning is a good path to all 
truth.  And that might almost work except that human reasoning requires 
sufficient data, and there is (relatively speaking) very little data that can 
be gathered by the human senses.  The rest must be hypothesized.

So we all act on faith.

Christians believe that God has spoken and revealed Himself.  We also believe 
He has revealed to us certain truths about the universe, about human nature 
and about eternity.  We believe that Jesus Christ is the living God who came 
down to walk among us, to die for us and to rise again in order to seal our 
redemption, our salvation. We believe in the God that Jesus reveals to us.

Unbelievers reject God and opt for a more implausible scenario.  They believe 
that the universe exists in a vacuum, without design or creator, without 
meaning or purpose.  And then they commit suicide when they can no longer 
stand to live in a world or participate in a universe that is wholly without 
meaning or purpose.  Who can blame them?

God speaks.  Anyone at all can choose to listen.  Anyone can pay attention to 
the evidences.  Yes, it still requires faith, even when you hear and believe 
God.  But it takes a faith more reasonable than the faith of unbelievers who 
choose to do their own thing (which is simply to think and do what all the 
other unbelievers are thinking and doing) and hope that all will make more 
sense in the morning.

Everyone has faith.  But not everyone makes good use of what they have.

Jim