CHRISTIAN FAITH

Faith is believing beyond what we can see or feel. Rather, it is means to believe with the heart, our spirit, our inward man. Faith is much stronger than a fleeting emotion, which has no stability, but is enticed and motivated by the winds of change which blow constantly in divers directions, never seeming to get its feet on solid ground. 

 Indeed, the person who decides to live by the notion that, "If it feels right, it must be right" and "If it feels good, do it", can testify that a live influenced by every feeling which an individual experiences will be filled with much misery, regret and decay. 

Feelings are not always reliable. They are to be enjoyed, but not depended upon. Christianity is not based upon how we feel. It is stable and reliable. It is by faith. It is believing in God and what He says, beyond how things appear. 

This is actually the second of the six foundational teachings of Christianity. We must have faith toward God and we must develop faith in God. No intelligent person, who desires to know truth will deny that there is a God. Even creation itself reveals that God exists. 

The world is too well put together and the universe too magnificent and vast for any real thinking person to doubt that a Being of Enormous Power, Wisdom, Intelligence and Might created it. This Being is God. Some call Him the Higher Power. Indeed He is. He is the One Who made everything and therefore He is the One to Whom all will have to give account. The first of the Doctrines of the Christian Faith is Repentance from Dead Works. 

This means to turn around from sin and all religious works which cannot give a person right-standing with the Creator of the universe, a Righteous and Holy God. The next step is to have faith in God and in what He has done to bring us back to Himself. Did I say, "bring us back"? Indeed I did, for something happened which had separated us from our God. 

The story can be found in the first Book of the Bible, the Book of Genesis. Almighty God had created man in His image and after His likeness. Man was made for the purpose of fellowshipping with God. Man had right-standing with God. 

He was clean, innocent, and holy. God made man like Himself and for Himself. Man however decided to go against God, being tempted by an angel, a fallen angel who did not want to submit himself to the very One Who made him. We in Christianity call him the devil. 

He is wicked, evil and full of lies and deceptions. He tempted man and mankind succumbed to that tempter. When the first man, Adam, and his wife, listened to and obeyed God's enemy, the fallen angel, they fell from their right-standing with God. 

They were now sinners, meaning that they were in sin and incapable of helping themselves get out of it. This is what the phrase in the Bible, "dead in sin" means. (Ephesians 2:1-3) This sinful nature they passed down, through birth, to all of humanity. (Romans 5:12, The Bible). All of us came into this world with a nature of sin. It is said that man is inherently good. 

According to the teachings of the Bible, this is not so. Man is inherently evil, until he repents and turns to God in faith that what God has provided for man can set us free and bring us back into right-standing with Himself. God, in seeing man-kind's situation determined, because of His great love for us, to help us. We could not help ourselves. 

So God sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ to die for us and shed His blood to wash away our sinful nature, bringing us once again into right-standing with God as His very children. This is the real essence of faith toward God. We must believe that God sent His Son to die for our sins. We must believe that Jesus Christ paid the price for our sins and that God raised Him from the dead. 

We must believe that we can now come to God and be His children, obtaining a righteous position with Him once again, not on the basis of what we have done, but rather on the basis of what He has done for us in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And we must receive God's Son, the Lord Jesus Christ as our Lord and personal Savior.