Not a Guest Blog: The Virtue of Faith

A Blog of Virtues…Faith.

Dear Readers,

      Good morning (or afternoon or evening or whenever you are reading this—I’m writing in the morning)!

       I hope you and your family and friends are doing well. I pray for each of you as well as the members of my local ACFW chapter—we just met and the needs are great and our God worthy of praise.

1 Corinthians 13:13 “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

My last blog post was about hope, and I sincerely needed that hope in my life—I’m still struggling but time with friends and colleagues has led me to put the hope in joyous moments and a good future firmly in place.

Now, I need to stay the course.

Faith can mean so many things. At its base, faith is believing God exists. God is the creator of the universe and of all things, great and small. The universe needs a creator because I cannot believe something came out of nothing and order from chaos.

Further, I believe this God chose to involve himself in His creation because—why wouldn’t he?

Why bother to create bluebirds and roses and humans if He wasn’t going to enjoy his creation? He counts the feathers of the birds needed for flight and calculated the size of DNA strands, so He undoubtedly goes to the trouble of getting to know us as individuals as well.

I believe that he not only knows us but loves us. Again, He created us and he put the capacity, no, the need for love in the very threads of our being so He understands love. If we can feel love, He who created us must also feel. And care.

Note that none of this (so far) is based on the bible. To me, all of the above is logical and just makes sense. Those trolls on the internet who mock our “Sky Daddy” as an illusion, in agreement with Freud and other philosophers, throughout human history, who reject God as wishful thinking—they’re making some pretty big assumptions to get to that rejection. And I am sorry for them—because a world without any purpose, any hands behind the machinery, is a very cold place indeed. It also takes some pretty strong wishful thinking—that there isn’t a God out there who values justice.

Faith in Jesus, on the other hand, is easy. There is so much historical evidence he existed—see The Case for Christ if you’d like to read about some. He lived.

Further, as C.S. Lewis argued, Jesus must have been the son of God. He said it. If someone says something, putting it out there even until the statement caused his own death, they must believe what they themselves are saying.

If we say something and it is true, then we are sane. If we say something and it’s not true, then we are a liar. But did Jesus give any other evidence of being a liar? No.

Or maybe he was insane? Did he give any other evidence of a loss of touch with reality? No.

Therefore, Christ said he was the son of God and he is.

Finally, once we’ve gotten to this point, we believe in God and Jesus—they existed. Then, we must therefore believe what they said.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” John 14:6

Dear Reader, I hope you have faith. Faith that God exists, that Jesus and the Holy Spirit exist, and that they all love you.

You are loved.

Amen.

PS. How is faith then a virtue? It's a gift from God, but we must hold on to that gift. Don't give it away, don't discard it, don't let it sit on a shelf unused and forgotten--cling, sister, cling to that faith!

Amen again.