Why I believe

A child-like faith

I became a Christian as a child of six. Owasso was a tiny little hamlet of about 250 people, barely four blocks long and two blocks wide straddling a two-lane concrete highway meandering southward towards Tulsa through the perennially-flooding bottom lands and across an old bridge over Bird Creek. This little wide spot in the road had two or three churches, a grocery or two, a school, a collection of small houses, and not much else. Our children’s church teacher and her husband (a nonbeliever) were dairy farmers as were my parents and as my mother’s parents had been. Our teacher helped with the milking and some of the farm work, but on Sunday mornings after chores, she would pick up her grandchildren and any other neighbor kids that were so inclined and take them to church. I still remember well those Sunday mornings when she taught us flannel graph stories from the Bible including Noah, Moses, Joseph, David and Goliath, and Daniel in the Lion’s Den. She mixed in her own stories of “Barney in the Barrel,” “The Little Red Hen,” and others, all reflecting the truth of Christ’s love for each of us.

One Sunday morning she asked if any of us (probably about eight or nine in attendance that morning) would like to accept Jesus into their heart. I moved from the back row of three homemade benches and came to the front and accepted Him as my Lord and Savior. Why did I believe? Some will say my child’s faith was mere emotional manipulation. Others will say it was the Christian influence of family and friends to conform. But the Bible gives the real reason. I believed because my child-like faith responded to the gentle wooing of the Holy Spirit. Luke recorded Christ’s words as He described the utmost importance of a child-like faith, “Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” [Luke 18:17. RSV]

Reason

As we grow physically and mentally, our child-like faith must not remain static. Since that day I moved from the back bench to publicly profess my belief, my faith has grown and continues to grow because of reason. Right reason applied to my observations and experiences in the light of the biblical revelation and divine guidance increases my faith and helps me in my everyday life’s walk of faith. Life happens, and bad things happen to people who are faithful to God. How should Christians respond when they experience the trials of life such as when a spouse unexpectedly files for divorce, the death of a child or spouse, loss of job, betrayal by friends, and agonizing pain or loss of health? Here, right reason helps sustain faith in times of adversity. The believer continues to believe because he or she knows the truth of God’s word and because their life’s observations and experiences substantiate the truth upon which their faith rests. All the while the world shouts that there can be no faith in a God who would allow such tragedies, but the world only sees the natural and temporal. Faith transcends the natural to the realm and reality of the supernatural. The Apostle Paul wrote of how Christians should deal with the difficulties of life in their faith walk.

How weary we grow of our present bodies. That is why we look forward eagerly to the day when we shall have heavenly bodies which we shall put on like new clothes. For we shall not be merely spirits without bodies. These earthly bodies make us groan and sigh, but we wouldn’t like to think of dying and having no bodies at all. We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will, as it were, be swallowed up by everlasting life. This is what God has prepared for us and, as a guarantee, he has given us his Holy Spirit. Now we look forward with confidence to our heavenly bodies, realizing that every moment we spend in these earthly bodies is time spent away from our eternal home in heaven with Jesus. We know these things are true by believing and not by seeing. [2 Corinthians 5:2-7. Living Bible]

Is Paul saying that faith is blind and denies reason? Absolutely not. Paul is speaking of the eternal hope of the Christian in spite of present circumstances. Faith is not an abandonment of reason. C. S. Lewis challenged the widespread assumption that there is a battle between faith and reason, “It is not reason that is taking away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions [that attack faith]. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”[1]

Reason is an ally of faith. Our observations and experiences of life aided by right reasoning lead us to belief in the truth of Christianity and all upon which it rests in spite of circumstances. In one sense reason leads us to the door of Christianity, but faith invites us in and holds our hand as we continue the faith journey. However, reason was not left at the door. As we move along our faith journey, we encounter life—all sorts of thoughts, ideas, things, situations, difficulties, trials, struggles, disappointments, opportunities, and so forth. At that point reason continues to assist and guide within the framework of truths we hold and have incorporated into our faith walk. In this sense, reason helps us to accept the seemingly unreasonable as we search the Bible, pray for Divine guidance, and work out our own salvation.[2]

Lewis captures well the linkage between faith and reason when he wrote that faith “…is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”[3] It is not blind faith but a faith that is supported and increased through right reason. In time faith grows to be more important to our belief in the God of the Bible than our reasoning ability. Faith never abandons reason for it continues to play a secondary and supporting role. As faith grows and reason diminishes, reason has helped us come full circle once again to a child-like faith, and through faith we can withstand changes in our moods, our failures, our doubts, our circumstances, or any other of life’s challenges.

I believed because of a child-like faith. I continue to believe and my faith grows as right reason filters my observations and experiences in life in the light of the biblical revelation and divine guidance. However, there is a third reason I believe.

Best evidence

We humans have an insatiable thirst for truth about the meaning and purpose of life. Man has always recognized a divine order in the universe, nature, and human relationships. The more science reveals about the earth’s exquisite and complex order, the greater the evidence for a supernatural creator of that apparent order. Those that deny a supernatural creator continue to search for an over-arching theory of everything. For them the universe nothing more than a cosmic box full of puzzle pieces in which each piece must to be analyzed in its minutest detail. Once understood, the pieces can be fitted together to answer the basic questions of life, all of which is to be accomplished without help from a mythical God. In their attempts to fit the pieces together, often forcing un-natural and harmful configurations, they focus on the minutia, constantly arranging and rearranging, and end with meaningless patterns which reveal neither truth nor offer satisfactions demanded. Richard Weaver diagnosed modern man’s affliction which he described as a “…severe fragmentation of his world picture…which leads directly to an obsession with isolated parts.”[4]

The Bible is a book of history, poetry, prophecy, parable, and allegory in which God reveals Himself and paints the grand mural of the creation, the purpose of man, our present sorrow, the means of redemption, and our eternal destination.[5] It is the unifying picture on the puzzle box which in one grand sweep makes sense of everything in man’s experience since his creation. However, the picture is not enough for it is prescriptive and must be applied by each human being in order to fit the pieces together in a way that gives meaning, purpose, and satisfaction in this life and the next.

In spite of all the protestations of humanists, Darwinists, atheists, intellectuals, pundits, false religions, and others, the long view of man’s sordid history on this planet and the heart-breaking immediacy of the world’s pain and suffering revealed by today’s 24/7 news cycle point to man’s failed efforts to answer the basic questions of life with false philosophies and religions that deny the God of the Bible. It is the biblical revelation that gives the best explanation and evidence of who we are, what went wrong with the world, and how we can get out of the mess we are in. This is the third reason why I believe.

Larry G. Johnson

[1] C. S. Lewis, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, Mere Christianity, (New York: Harper One, 2002), p. 116.
[2] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods-Humanism and Christianity-The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 111.
[3] Lewis., pp. 115-117.
[4] Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences,” (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 59.
[5] Johnson, p. 176.