Faith

Faith

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” 
                                                                                                                             Hebrews 11:1
“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.”
                                                                                                          Hebrews 11:6.
Having faith in God is perhaps the hardest thing anyone can do.
While the Psalmist writes,
“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” 
                                                                                                                                    Psalm 19:1
It is easy for people to dismiss the mathematical perfection of the universe to the big bang and not see God.
Those who would dismiss God as not being there can’t conceive that He could have created the big bang to usher the universe into existence.
C.S. Lewis an Oxford scholar studied the life of Jesus and the Bible at the time he studied it he was not a believer as such but he was looking for truth. He came to the conclusion,
“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.” 
                                                                             C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain 
With regards to Jesus he wrote,
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” 
                                                                                                        C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.
As a Christian I believe there is a God and that Jesus is his one and only Son. That Jesus is indeed God incarnate.
As a Christian I see it as my duty before God to present Jesus to anyone who will listen to me.
I cannot impose my beliefs on anyone. I can only present them. What I believe is summed up by the Apostle Paul when he was speaking to the Philosophers in Athens.
The book of acts records,
“So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.  
A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.  
Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?  
You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.”  
(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) 
Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.  
For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you. 
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands.  
And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else.  
From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.  
God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.  
‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ 
“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill.  
In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.  
For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.” 
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.”  
At that, Paul left the Council.  
A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.
                                                                             Acts 17:17-34
I leave the above for you the reader to believe it nor not.
Please think about it.