How Do You Know If You Have Faith?
By Val Conlon
Faith means agreeing with, believing in, trusting in, something that you can't know or understand on your own. Having faith means being able to live with unanswered questions - sometimes, tough ones.
For example, why does evil exist in the world? Why is it that people still go to war? And what about the existence of terrorism, disease, and crime? Faith doesn't answer these questions. Some think that the answer of, "It's God's will," is sufficient, but it isn't.
Having faith, however, gives you the courage to endure and survive without having the answers. Instead of providing a set of answers to painful and complicated questions, faith provides the means of acceptance. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, has this to say about faith: Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. (section 150).
Faith is a personal act - the free response of the human person to the initiative of God who reveals himself. (section 166).
Faith isn't something you find. It's a gift from God. It is instilled within all mankind but because of the covenant of free will you cannot be forced to have or accept faith. And each individual responds differently. Some reject it, some ignore it, and some treat it too casually. But most people in the world cherish their faith deeply. As the old adage goes: For those who believe, no explanation is necessary, and for those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.
The Catholic faith involves believing in what God has revealed. We look at the revealed truths given by God, which is often called the deposit of faith and you can consider faith as your personal response or acceptance of those revealed truths. By revealed truths, we mean the revelation of God's truths necessary for human salvation.
The word revelation comes from the Latin revelare, meaning to unveil. These truths are truths that you could never know by science or philosophy; the human mind is incapable of knowing them without divine intervention. For example, the revealed truth that it's immoral and sinful to steal, lie, and murder, are inbuilt in all human beings. God reveals these truths deep within us.
The essence of these revelations are known to everyone with the use of reason, so someone can't claim they didn't know it was wrong to commit murder, to steal, to lie, to do violence to another person. We all know these things are wrong instinctively, which is the revealed truth within us.
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