“I do not have faith; I just
don’t ‘believe’.”
Wrong, everyone has faith. Everyone
expresses faith. We cannot live life without faith. Let me go ahead and
demonstrate the necessity of faith.
It’s like the nurse who has just
finished her shift, and as she walks to the train station, she notices ahead a
bunch of construction workers working on the path. It looks like she will not
get past. Both to the right and left seem impassable. She continues walking,
thinking, “They will make a way for me; I will be okay.” She keeps walking. And the workers do make
way. But she couldn’t predict how until she approached close. She had to get
close to see and that took faith.
Because we all meet uncertainty in
life, and because we can’t escape such ambiguity, we are all required to have
or show faith—even the so-called atheist.
The Commonality of Faith
We can know that faith is a
commonality because life requires us to show faith; if we are to venture
forward and be anything like happy, we will have difficulties to contend with,
and faith is our only way through.
The necessity for faith, an
opportunity for everyone, despite religious or spiritual allegiance, meets with
the presence of the struggling life we can all identify with.
Even for the millionaire, the
business owner who is their own boss, the elite sportsperson, and the rockstar,
life is nothing like all beer and skittles.
Every single person alive, in
living well, must express faith.
It merely helps if we have a construct for our faith, in order that we believe in things that give us
the appropriate level of hope—a hope based in truth (that’s not based in denial
of truth, or lies). It’s a very practical thing this construct for faith, for
no human being can thrive at life without hope. Hope is a necessity for living successfully.
Choosing Faith Can Only Be an Advantage
Because we have to live according
to faith if we wish to succeed, we might as well choose a faith that will serve
us as much as we serve it. Indeed, the Christian faith serves us much more than we could ever serve
it.
When we consider that the
Christian faith is borne upon the perfection of God’s love—a no-lose situation
for believers—we find, suddenly, there is a faith construct that just improves our lives.
There would be no mature
Christians, dead or alive, who would attempt to convince people against the Gospel.
They were won to it and they died won to it.
***
Life requires us to have faith,
because it is such an uncertain existence.
Faith is for everyone, because
everyone needs faith in order to survive and thrive in life. Because the
Christian faith centres on unparalleled gain, with God making all the
sacrifices, we have a construct for faith that not only works; it reaches into
our lives and saves us every day by the very measure of our applied faith.
***
Life insists we live by faith in
order to succeed. In living this faith that works—the only one—we choose Christ, knowing Christ has already chosen us.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.
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