"Faith... is the art of holding onto things our reason once accepted, despite your changing moods."
-CS Lewis
No matter who you are or where you live at the end of the day, if you are human, it means you are still a finite and limited creature. No matter how much you study or how well you reason things out, there is always going to be some element of uncertainty. Despite all that, at some point you have to simply say, “Based on what I have experienced, I believe this to be the truth” and accept the consequences, right or wrong.
That is the essence of faith. You are making a choice to trust in what you have decided is true, even in the face of the consequences of being wrong. Sometimes it is an easy thing with little room for doubt, like trusting that your ladder will hold while you change a lightbulb. Sometimes it is a hard thing full of doubts and second guessing. Either way, you have two choices, to trust in what you have decided is true, or to shy away and play it safe. The problem is that even the decision to play it safe is an act of faith. How did you decide what safe is? Did you get there by using the same finite knowledge and reason that led you to decide that the other course of action was unsafe?
When you make these kinds of decisions, you are drawing on all sorts of experiences. These experiences all go together into a melting pot where they stew together. While some people spend more time slicing and dicing(i.e. analyzing) their experiences, ultimately everything that happens to us get thrown into the mix in some way, form, or fashion. From that stew emerges the set of beliefs that you use as a guide for navigating the world.
It is not an easy thing for anyone to lay out the full set of reasons why they believe what they believe, but my purpose is to take some time to try to discuss some of the reasons myself and others choose to believe in God, and more specifically Jesus.
“They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” -Revelations 12:11
