Monday, February 1, 2010

Faith and Unbelief

In general, we think of faith and unbelief as being two separate things. What we miss, though is that there are a couple of different types of unbelief.

The first type is ignorant unbelief. In this situation, we don't believe something because we don't know that we could believe it. For example, before we hear the Gospel, we are ignorant unbelievers.

At some point, though, we may discover our lack of faith. Then, we enter a place of conscious unbelief. Now we know what we do not believe. Our lack of faith may be a purposeful rejection or a simple inability to believe. For example, some people do not become Christians because they reject it while others cannot bring themselves to believe the message.

The most dangerous type of unbelief, though, is intellectual acceptance. In this situation, we know about something and we agree with it intellectually. But the fact is that we do not have faith. We have an intellectual appreciation combined with wishful thinking. It is a soul-generated faith. This type of unbelief is so dangerous because we can deceive ourselves into thinking we actually believe and because it is so prevalent in the Church today.

We must leave behind this false faith and enter into the faith of Jesus. This is a faith of which He alone is the Author. He deposits this faith in our hearts and we truly believe. It is not a faith we have to muster up.

Many of our problems in the Church today are because we lack real faith. We masquerade around in intellectual acceptance and do not really believe the truths we hear. If we did believe them, things would not look the way they do.
Posted by Kevin Grenier at 8:22 AM

4 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 6, 2010 at 7:39 PM

    Do you believe that one can have both intellectual beliefe and true faith?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kevin GrenierFebruary 6, 2010 at 7:53 PM

    I think that is the case most of the time when we have true faith. True faith results in our intellectual belief. However, the converse is not true. Intellectual belief does not result in true faith.

    I suppose there are times when we can have true faith without intellectual belief. For example, that may occur when God gives us faith for something and it takes our theology a little while to catch up.

    ReplyDelete
  3. rhondaFebruary 7, 2010 at 8:32 PM

    fear knocked and faith answerd

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousApril 20, 2010 at 11:29 AM

    Yes! Look at Billy Graham -- God raised him up as an evangelist in our generation-- and enabled him to preach to millions!
    Look at Bill Bright (founder of Campus Crusade)-- God raised him up as an apostle, and enabled him to start a mission which has an outreach to millions!
    And, God is raising up His prophets (one of the five fold giftings in Ephesians).
    What is the "norm" of life in Him? any less is faith devoid of power (e.g. intellectual assent only.)

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)