Everyone has faith. That has never really been the issue. Anyone who believes anything at all has exercised common human faith.

Even atheists fully expect the sun to come up tomorrow, and they believe that taxes are likely to increase. Agnostics also believe that if they keep shying away from making decisions, the issues will go away and leave them alone.

Everyone has faith.

Unbelievers have almost always outnumbered believers in this world. True Christian believers are a very small minority. That's why the Bible often contrasts the truth and life of God with the ideas and ways of “the world.” With Christian believers it is very often "you and me against the world."

Faith itself is not what makes us different as Christian believers. We are different because we trust in God and in His Son Jesus Christ.

Unbelievers also exercise faith. They believe in a universe that “somehow” caused itself to exist from nothing. Or they believe in a universe that is made up of things that have always been there -- forever and ever and ever. And they also believe that with enough time, things that came from nowhere will take on new forms and develop into complex things. Even develop into living things and into even conscious beings.

Everyone has faith, alright.

We each one must decide at times in our lives what we will believe. We must choose who we will believe. We must decide what we will trust in, who we will trust. Unbelievers often believe that human reasoning is a good path to all truth. And that might almost work except that human reasoning requires sufficient data, and there is (relatively speaking) very little data that can be gathered by the human senses. The rest must be hypothesized.

So we all act on faith.

Christians believe that God has spoken and revealed Himself. We also believe He has revealed to us certain truths about the universe, about human nature and about eternity. We believe that Jesus Christ is the living God who came down to walk among us, to die for us and to rise again in order to seal our redemption, our salvation. We believe in the God that Jesus reveals to us.

Unbelievers often reject God and opt for a less plausible scenario. Many even believe that the entire universe exists in a spiritual and logical vacuum, without design or creator, without meaning or purpose. And then they commit suicide when they can no longer stand to live in a world or participate in a universe that is wholly without meaning or purpose. Who can blame them for hating such a life?

God speaks. Anyone at all can choose to listen. The evidences are abundant and available to all people.  Anyone can observe them and learn.

Yes, it still requires faith, even when you believe God. But it takes a faith more reasonable, a faith more anchored in the facts than the faith of unbelievers who choose to do their own thing (which is simply to think and do what all the other unbelievers are thinking and doing) and then blindly hope that everything will make more sense in the morning.

Everyone has faith. But not everyone makes good use of what they have.

Jim