john on Firm Belief

To a twentieth-century mind the notion of a virgin birth is intrinsically and preposterously inconceivable. If a woman claims–such claims are made from time to time–to have become pregnant without sex...

Preaching Commentary Death Is Common to All Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude of Denmark implores her son Hamlet to move past mourning his deceased father, Thou know’st ‘tis common,—all that live must...

I believe though I do not comprehend, and I hold by faith what I cannot grasp with the mind.

Preaching Commentary Context Jesus' Ministry Begins This passage is from the first chapter of John’s gospel and describes the beginning of Jesus’ ministry—fitting for the beginning of a new ye...

There was what an Orthodox Hasidic rabbi had said on a flight westward. He’d put his prayer shawl in the overhead compartment and sat down, sweeping aside the tassels dangling from his pockets. And so...

To hold to a doctrine or an opinion with the intellect alone is not to believe it. A man’s real belief is that which he lives by.

I do not put much stock in "believing in God." The grammar of "belief" invites a far too rationalistic account of what it means to be a Christian. "Belief" implies propos...

When people are asked what they believe in, they give, not merely different answers, but different sorts of answers. Someone might say, “I believe in UFOs”—that means, I think UFOs are real. “I believ...

We live in an age when belief comes hard because we’re much more afraid of being gullible (believing something that’s not true) than we are of being skeptical (not believing something that is true). W...

We shall now have a full definition of faith if we say that it is a firm and sure knowledge of the divine favor toward us, founded on the truth of a free promise in Christ, and revealed to our minds, ...

Faith is believing what you know ain't so. (1897)Consider checking out our illustrations page on Faith.

Belief doesn’t create truth. Unbelief doesn’t destroy truth. Christian faith goes beyond reason but not against reason.

Lauren F. Winner tells a story about her friend Julian. When she was 12 and going to be confirmed, she had a crisis. She told her father, the pastor, that she wasn’t sure she could tell the church tha...

It is always crucial to remember that our beliefs are formed not only through reason and argument but also through social conditioning.

Now faith is not just a cognitive affair: its being “sealed upon our hearts” is a matter of will and affect; it is a repair of the madness of the will that is at the heart of sin. Still, it is at leas...

Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.

To tell someone what you believe may be to answer the wrong question—better to say, instead, what the church believes, better to use the language the church has bequeathed to us to shape our experienc...

We confess, “I believe in God.” That confession is not an expression of a creative imagination or an instance of projection, but a response to the One who manifests himself in creation, in history, in...

Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

People...think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross...You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clea...

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

We can rest knowing the Lord’s presence transcends what we feel. Just like the flow of the air, he is moving even if his movements cannot be perceived. And where God is not just felt but known, faith ...

“I know” seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, “I thought I knew.”

In his book, A Peculiar Glory , John Piper provides an illustration of the kind of faith we are called to. This is no “blind faith,” in which we are supposed to simply believe without using our minds...

You can only build an effective Christian life when you have a “settled core”: an inner self “hidden with Christ” (Colossians 3:3). When you go to the gym or a Pilates class, your instructor might enc...

Faith, thankfully, does not preclude doubt. It consists of staking your life on the rumor of grace.

Have you ever noticed that the phrases in our culture favor doubt over faith? The famed missionary and theologian Lesslie Newbigin pointed this out when we speak of “Honest doubts” and “blind faith”. ...

One of my favorite stories of revealing authentic belief is the story of Charles Blondin, the French tightrope walker. On June 30, 1859, he did his most famous act when he became the first person to c...

The call to 'believe in the gospel', or to 'believe in me', does not suggest that Jesus was inviting Galilean villagers to embrace a body of doctrine – not even a basic 'theory'...