“By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.”
Heb 11:3 (NLT)
Your physical senses will deceive you because the spiritual realm cannot be detected by your senses, yet it is more real than the physical. Your mind can reason all day long every day, but only with our human mind's limitations. Understanding & making sense of our world does not precede faith, but it is by our faith alone that our blindfolds are removed.
When our eyes become open and we begin making sense of the chaos around us called our world, we acquire wisdom, knowledge, truth, and satisfying proof. If you expect your physical senses to capture reality, your mind to decipher truth, and the proof to secure your beliefs, then you will never know genuine “faith”. You will go about life searching for the answers & never really finding them. You will not know pure satisfaction with your level of understanding through reason alone. You will literally reason yourself into ignorance.
Faith is blind & fully trusting, like a little child looks upon his mother for all the answers. Faith is easily extinguished by a reliance on human reason. A young child has not the ability to reason the answers out for himself, so he acquires blind trust in his mother. Faith is a childlike trust in that which you cannot see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.
Faith gives you all the information, the whole picture, and it is then that you have all the elements needed to make cognitive sense of the world & life itself. It's like missing puzzle pieces that lend to an obscure picture. But faith provides those missing puzzle pieces, which in turn produce the whole picture. Once the observer has the whole picture, they can make sense out of what they're looking at in the puzzle picture. Convert that puzzle picture into our world & lives, both physical & spiritual. Now, with the whole picture and both what is physically sensed and not sensed, we can actually wrap our minds around our full reality & the answers emerge with the approval of our reasoning. This is wisdom gained through faith alone. Without faith, wisdom & true understanding of our life & our world is simply unattainable.
This has been my personal experience. Before my faith came to be, the answers I came up with were never fully satisfying to me. My understanding was crippled by too many unanswered questions caused by a failure to satisfy my required reasoning. After acquiring faith, my world & my life just started to make sense to me for the first time. Now I find myself constantly proving to myself by way of reasoning that which I know & believe by faith. I feel as though I actually have the full picture now, at least to my limited human mind's ability to conceive. My mind has been wrapping itself around this "picture" since then & discovering one satisfying answer after the other.
“You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls.”
1 Peter 1:8-9 (NLT)
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