Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Every few weeks, I like to point out some of the highlights of our faith.  There are lots of ways to come to believing, or having the faith that saves us.

Blind faith works.  But only if based on the truth.  You don't have to know what the truth is, but can just blunder in the right direction and get there.  You don't have to know very much to have faith in Jesus.  But blind faith can get you in trouble if you believe in the wrong things.

Historical faith.  If you are reading the right history.  And the more authors that record the event from different points of view, the better.  You might call it convergent faith.  Like, if I split the difference between two points, then do it again, and again, and again, the distance between us will effectively be zero.  You get there by converging on the truth.

Experiential faith. All of us who are Christians have that.  The problem is transference.  You can't really transfer your experience to another person.  It's yours.  And yours alone.  But you can share it.  And when thousands and thousands share the same story, it holds great weight.
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The Bible does that.  It isn't one book, it is many, many accounts of the same event by people who were there.  Who wrote it down in their own words.  And gave the same story.  When you read Matthew, then read Paul, or Luke, you can tell different people were writing.  They put their words together in different ways.  But they say the same things.  And James, John, Peter, Mark, Jude, etc. etc.  All different.  Same experience--converging on the truth.

He is risen.  We have seen him.  We touched him.  We sat down and ate with him.  He spoke to us.
I don't know about your family, but in mine, if I could get five or six of them to agree on anything, it would be a miracle.  But eleven.  That's a miracle.



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