I'm saved because God acted on my behalf,
and I'm going to trust him with that.
I can't go back in time and watch the real event. I'm limited.
I can't experience it. It's perfectly reasonable,
and I'm going to accept that God did that.
It's often portrayed that faith and reason are at odds.
Can you speak to the relationship between faith and reason
in the life of the believer?
Yeah, I don't think faith is a synonym for irrational.
In other words, faith should be reasonable.
Faith and reason are not completely the same thing,
but one faith is not a license for the irrational.
How do we deal with that?
Well, we have to realize that there are limits to our rationality.
We should do the best we can to think rational thoughts,
to use the gifts that God has given us. We are his imager.
God is a rational being. He has equipped us for rational thought.
But we have limitations.
So, we are not imaging God if we don't care about using our reason,
if we go off into irrationality.
But since we are limited at some point, we're going to just have to accept
something as true if God tells us that it's true.
We're going to hit a wall. And that's where faith comes in.
My faith is reasonable.
Let's just take the gospel.
Why is the gospel more reasonable than anything else?
Short path.
The gospel of the New Testament is the only belief system,
the only mode of salvation or presentation of salvation
that, A) admits that there's a problem.
You take all your world religions.
Some say, yep, we got a sin problem. Others say there's no such thing as sin.
Those who say, yes, there's a sin problem,
the solution invariably is that you need to make the deity happy with you.
And maybe someday you will. Try to do that. Do the best you can.
In other words, it depends on your performance.
If you're on the other side, you're not even worried about the question.
So you fail here because you deny the vitality of evil in your life
and the life of everybody else.
And over here you deny the solution to it.
The biblical gospel is the only one that affirms this side and says,
guess what, there ain't nothing you can do about it.
You've got a problem. You can't fix it. God will fix it for you.
That is the most reasonable thing given those two parameters.
Now, that doesn't mean... I'm not a Gnostic.
I'm not saved because I'm enlightened now.
Because I found a path to talking about this rationally.
No, I'm saved because God acted on my behalf
and I'm going to trust him with that.
I can't go back in time and watch the real event. I'm limited. I can't experience it.
It's perfectly reasonable and I'm going to accept that God did that.
So my faith is faith because I can't relive it. But it's reasonable.
Again, that's how I typically parse those two things.