To have faith it seems there are many different things we have to believe. For starters we have to believe in God and Jesus. We have to believe that He loves us and will help us. We have to believe in the bible and everything it says. Growing up I believed in God but didn’t think about Jesus much. Other than occasional prayers I did not have a relationship or feel close to God. It wasn’t until the last couple of years I had any faith beyond that and it was only a few months ago that I finally gave in and decided to “just believe”. It’s the only thing that helped me to move forward in my faith. Sometimes I still struggle with believing but I think I have a trust now and can turn to God when my faith feels weakened. It helps.
How exactly do we believe? Is it a gift from God? Is it something that happens to us or is it a choice to believe?
It’s a difficult question to answer. I don’t have any doubts God exists (or the devil and judgement for that matter), but I’ve had certain “advantages”. For example the night my father died, he appeared in my bedroom. There have been other spiritual experiences as well. This doesn’t mean I always like God, since I think He can be very unfair, but I’d only be kidding myself if I tried to belief He doesn’t exist.
I think at some time God appeals to all of us to think about something we can’t see. It might be the birth of a child; a beautiful scene; a pleasant day with friends. It might even be something appalling or evil, in the hope that this might prod us into wondering if there’s something better, which we can search for. I remember for example that when Pol Pot was unleasing his satanic forces on the suffering people of Cambodia, that I hoped something would be done about it. In the end it was the Vietnamese Communists who stopped him, for all their own faults. Now I was an atheist at the time, and very far from fault free, but I also recognised that evil was alive and well in the form of the Khmer Rouge.
If we search for God, He begins to respond, as with the Prodigal Son, **who had to come to his senses first, **before the Father came running. That’s often overlooked.
But our wills are involved. I mentioned above that my father appeared the night he died. At one point in the exchange, he said with a sort of desperate urgency, “I always was doomed! I didn’t really have any choice!”. I was an atheist at the time, but I argued back, saying 'That can’t be right!" (How’s that hey? An atheist, confronted by a very unexpected apparition of something that he didn’t believe in arguing on the spot that the ethics of the appartion couldn’t be right? Where did this sense of outraged ethics come from? But I digress.).
My father responded, “Oh, it’s right all right! You can see that from here.” But later he also admitted “I was WILLING…”.
When I talked to my old pastor about this, he considered my father was
“very willing” to be cruel etc.
So our wills come into it. Nevertheless, I think God makes some sort of appeal to everybody at some stage in their life. It’s up to them what they make of it. But you can be sure that the devil will be following very close behind, and if the seeds fall on rocky ground, the appeal will very soon disappear or be diverted to something else.
Take for example a young bloke standing on a beach, enthralled by the beauty of surf, sun and sand. He begins to wonder where this beauty came from. And just as he’s about to get onto the possibility of divine matters, two bikini clad beauties walk past and smile cheekily at him.
What’s going to happen to this budding faith?
