It’s time to explore faith and grace more deeply than we previously looked at it. We want to see how grace and faith relate to sound reason and discerning truth. We can only reason sanely “by grace through faith.” When the Holy Spirit births us into God’s family, we can immediately recognize truth better than before we were born again. However, as we mature, our spiritual senses grow. And we continually increase our ability to tell truth from error.
What are Grace and Faith?
We often hear people misusing these two words “grace” and “faith,” but God defines these words correctly in Scripture. By God’s definition, faith is none of the following:
- rationalized belief
- pretending
- making believe
- believing what’s seen and experienced [actually interpretations of these]
- self-generated unsupported belief
Instead, faith is God’s gift lest anyone should boast. Ephesians 2:8 And though some people speak of something they call “blind faith,” real faith isn’t blind, but rather, faith sees the vision of God’s hope. Faith is absolute because “faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the rhema (utterance) of God.” And since faith comes by hearing God’s utterance, faith is supernatural, and it’s both certainty and substance. Romans 10:17 That’s why faith is the actual existence of the heavenly vision of reality. It’s absolute proof of the reality that our natural human senses can’t detect. Hebrews 11:1
Then, on to grace, unmerited favor, the gift. God gives the awesome gift of pardon from sins, but He also gives supernatural power to do what’s right and to destroy sin. We need this power to do good because we don’t have righteousness in our natural selves. God designed us in a way that makes us depend on Him to work His good works through us. John 15:4-5 And He designed us to receive His love, flow in His love, and have our lives, our actions, and our beings in Him. Acts 17:28
See https://realreality.org/is-faith-the-same-as-making-believe/
