Faith: The Substance and the Evidence

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The Greek word for faith, pistis, is derived from the verb pisteuo, which means “to convince by argument.” Hebrews 11:1 explains that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Some translations replace “conviction” with “evidence.” Faith, then, is being convinced that the things we can’t see (e.g., God, heaven, the resurrection, etc.) are real.

The word “faith” is so often misunderstood that I avoid using it in most conversations. I use a different word in its place: trust. This better characterizes the Bible’s use of faith, but is free of the misleading baggage. Biblical faith, then, is not blind, but functions the same way as trust. You don’t blindly trust people. They have to earn it. You put your trust in people you have good reason to trust.

Biblical faith is also not contrary to reason. It’s consistent with reason. You put your trust (faith) in what you have good reason to believe is true. [God] routinely reminds the Israelites why they can trust Him (put their faith in Him). God is the One who delivered them from slavery. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”1 This is repeated over and over and over.2 That’s why the Jews can trust—put their faith in—God.

Jesus also operated with this understanding of faith. John wrote 21 chapters about Jesus in his Gospel, and much of it records supernatural works. Why? He explains, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”3 In other words, you can trust Christ because His miraculous works are a testament to His claims and credibility.—Alan Shelemon

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Some people have the idea that running on faith means running on nothing. Faith is not nothing! “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” It’s knowing God and that God is and that God is going to take care of you somehow, if you obey Him and do His will. Real faith knows and it happens: it never fails! God is still the God of the faithful and the believing.

With faith, believing is seeing. A little mustard seed of faith can move mountains, but how many mountains fail to be moved for lack of that tiny seed of faith? You must be willing to act by faith on what God has shown you, or it could never happen!

You know, the world’s motto is “Seeing is believing! If I see it, then I’ll believe it.” Well, that’s not God’s motto. The motto of God’s Word is “Believing is seeing!” If you’ll just believe and trust God’s Word and trust Him and obey Him, God will give you the answers. You will eventually see what you’re supposed to do and where you’re supposed to go and how to do it. I have found that so many times.

Great faith chooses God in spite of the other possibilities. “For without faith it is impossible to please God, for he that cometh to Him must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.”4 “For faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen!” In other words, you’ve really already got it!

Accepting faith through His Word is a work of God’s grace. “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy … For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is a gift of God.”5

God is still the God of the faithful and the believing, and He’s proven that it can still be done, that we can still believe and trust in Him by faith. God bless us with more faith!—David Brandt Berg
Faith equals trust

In today’s culture, the word “faith” comes with too much baggage. For many, faith is a blind, arbitrary leap in the dark that has no relationship to reason, evidence, or knowledge. So let me make a suggestion. Let’s use the word “trust” instead. “Trust” accurately communicates the biblical idea of faith. In addition, it helps us reunite true faith with reason, evidence, and knowledge. Why? Because we know people only put their trust in what they have good reason to believe is true.—Brett Kunkle

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What, then, do I mean by “faith?” Again, there are two ways of understanding this term. On the one hand, one might mean the content of the (Christian) religion. In this sense, “faith” is used to designate the truth claims of the Christian worldview. We might in this sense contrast the tenets of the Christian faith with, for example, those of the Muslim faith. When we speak of faith in this sense we mean a body of doctrines. To say that faith is reasonable in this sense is to claim that these doctrines are rational for a person to hold.

On the other hand, “faith” may be taken to mean the act of believing. According to the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, faith in this sense has three components. First, there is notitia, or understanding. That is, one must understand the truth claim being made. Second, there is assensus, or assent. One must accept intellectually that the claim is, in fact, true. One not only understands it; he assents to it or agrees with it. Finally, there is fiducia, or trust. Saving faith involves not merely intellectual assent to some doctrines but a wholehearted commitment or trust in God, about whom the claims are made. To say that Christian faith is reasonable in this sense is to say that believing in the God of the Bible is a rational thing for a person to do. To take the step of faith is a reasonable step for an intelligent and informed person.—William Lane Craig

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Christians in all disciplines of inquiry and discovery have used their reasoning power to investigate the evidence. Christians are not irrational, and Christian faith is not blind. The rich intellectual history of Christianity calls each of us to have a reasonable, examined, evidential, case-making faith. This kind of faith honors God and withstands skeptical criticism and personal doubt.—J. Warner Wallace

Published on Anchor June 2015. Read by Debra Lee.



1 Exodus 20:2.


2 Exodus 13:3, 13:14, 33:1; Leviticus 25:38; Deuteronomy 5:6, 6:12, etc.


3 John 20:31.


4 Hebrews 11:6.


5 Titus 3:5; Ephesians 2:8–9.

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Russia warns will retaliate if US weapons stationed on its borders

Gabriela Baczynska, Reuters, June 16, 2015

Moscow: A plan by Washington to station tanks and heavy weapons in NATO states on Russia’s border would be the most aggressive US act since the Cold War, and Moscow would retaliate by beefing up its own forces, a Russian defence official said on Monday.

The United States is offering to store military equipment on allies’ territory in eastern Europe, a proposal aimed at reassuring governments worried that after the conflict in Ukraine, they could be the Kremlin’s next target.

Poland and the Baltic states, where officials say privately they have been frustrated the NATO alliance has not taken more decisive steps to deter Russia, welcomed the decision by Washington to take the lead.

But others in the region were more cautious, fearing their countries could be caught in the middle of a new arms race between Russia and the United States.

“If heavy military equipment, including tanks, artillery batteries and other equipment really does turn up in countries in eastern Europe and the Baltics, that will be the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War,” Russian defence ministry official General Yuri Yakubov said.

“Russia will have no option but to build up its forces and resources on the Western strategic front,” Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

He said the Russian response was likely to include speeding up the deployment of Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave bordered by Poland and Lithuania, and beefing up Russian forces in ex-Soviet Belarus.

“Our hands are completely free to organise retaliatory steps to strengthen our Western frontiers,” General Yakubov said.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said: “We hope that reason will prevail and the situation in Europe will be prevented from sliding into a new military confrontation which may have dangerous consequences.”

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Fair to boycott Israel? Global momentum grows

By Dan Perry, AP, Jun 5, 2015

In boardrooms and campuses, on social media and in celebrity circles, momentum seems to be growing for a global pressure campaign on Israel. The atmosphere recalls the boycotts that helped demolish apartheid South Africa a quarter century ago.

Israel and its partisans can be expected to mount a ferocious defense, but their public relations Achilles’ heel may be the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The boycott notion has been around for years. Former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters has long called on fellow artists to avoid performing in Israel, with limited success.

A new spur appears to come with the March re-election in Israeli of the hard-line Benjamin Netanyahu–despite extraordinary opposition both internationally and domestically, among the country’s security, academic, artistic and media establishments.

Last week, Israelis saw FIFA, the world’s main soccer body, consider their country’s expulsion at the request of the Palestinians, who at the last minute withdrew it. This week they heard that the French telecoms giant Orange wants to terminate its relationship with the Israeli company that licenses its brand. Then came testimonies by academics suggesting they were already facing an undeclared boycott–a big deal in a place that prides itself on its Nobel prize-winners. Increasingly prominent is the so-called “BDS” (boycott-disinvestment-sanctions) movement, run by Palestinians and leftist activists from around the world.

In Israel, politicians have lined up to offer responses, and the talk of the town is how to defend against the boycott peril from abroad.

Comparisons of its treatment of Palestinians to the former South African apartheid system have long been rejected by Israel and its supporters. They also ask why the world focuses so much on Israel and the Palestinians when there are so many oppressive regimes around the world.

They argue that opposition to Israel’s occupation of lands the Palestinians want for their future state often masks a more far-reaching aim of destroying the Jewish state as a whole.

The key part of the Israeli defense rests on Israel’s democratic credentials: the country’s Arab minority, sharing an ethnicity with its enemies, has citizen rights, and in fact, an Israeli Arab political party just posted the third-best result in the election.

Critically, however, this argument excludes discussion of the lack of rights for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Over 2 million Palestinians live in the territory, which along with Gaza was seized from Jordan in a war that began exactly 48 years ago, on June 5, 1967. They face an array of difficulties, from limits on movement, to a moribund economy, to arrests and indignities at checkpoints.

Israel’s defense, when it claims it is a democracy, is that the West Bank is not part of Israel–just as Iraq was not part of the United States after the 2003 invasion.

But there are key differences. Israel builds towns there: about a half-million Israelis live either in West Bank settlements or in former West Bank land incorporated into east Jerusalem, also occupied in the 1967 war.

The Israeli settlers can vote in Israeli elections and serve in government as if they live in Israel, but the Palestinians living in the territory cannot.

Israel also controls the West Bank’s only external border, with Jordan, which has renounced its claim to the land in favor of the Palestinians. The West Bank’s other border, with Israel, is a border mostly for the Palestinians; Israelis can freely cross, except for crossings into several Palestinian autonomous zones where Israelis are generally restricted.

The Palestinians have voting rights in these autonomous zones and cast ballots for their own leaders, but general elections have not been held for about a decade; and the Palestinian Authority, which rules the islands of autonomy, is far less powerful than Israel.

For decades, most diplomatic efforts have been geared toward moving toward a separate Palestinian state in defined borders living in peace side-by-side Israel. But some Palestinians by now have despaired of the so-called “two-state” solution, concluding after two decades of failed on-and-off peace efforts that the sides will never agree on terms. The alternative, they say, is a single state in all of former British Palestine.

That would mean Israel annexing the West Bank and giving its Palestinians the right to vote. Counting Israeli Arab citizens, Arabs then would make up about 40 percent of the population.

Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip–the other part of the would-be Palestinian state–in 2005. But “one-staters” see Gaza, with another almost two million Palestinians, as part of the equation. And so, down this path, the Arab-Palestinians and Jewish-Israeli populations would be roughly equal in a unified state.

Such a scenario would be frightening to the Israeli Zionist left, which wants Israel to remain “the Jewish state” but also be democratic, requiring a large Jewish majority. So many Israeli Zionists would be extremely eager for Israel to back off the settlement project and create a greater partition now, with or without the Palestinians’ consent to the borders and other parameters.

Such a unilateral move by Israel would certainly not placate the Palestinians, especially since it would not include east Jerusalem and the walled Old City, key to their ambitions for their own state.

But it could possibly take a lot of the zip out of the boycott movement. Most Palestinians would no longer be occupied by Israel; what remained would be a border dispute with much less potential to stir hearts globally.

This would be opposed by religious Israelis who oppose a pullout from the West Bank because they see it as biblically part of Israel–and right-wingers who emphasize the security risk. For now these groups combined keep winning Israeli elections.

For this reason, ironically, at least some Israelis support the threat of boycotts: to convince their fellow citizens that that they have a problem that must, somehow, be addressed.

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Pacific Crest Trail 2013 - Three Key Moments On My Thru-hike from Mexico to Canada

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2600 MILES IN 4 MINUTES: Time-lapse of Andy's Pacific Crest Trail hike (music by Martin Sexton)

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Man Hikes From Mexico to Canada, Inspires Millions

Flickr blog, June 5, 2015

In April 2013, Andy Davidhazy set out to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, a route running 2,660 miles from Mexico to Canada through the mountains of California, Oregon, and Washington. Five months later, he emerged from the trail transformed and, unbeknownst to him, poised to become a voice of inspiration around the globe.

After 20 years of professional success as a creative director and designer, Andy still had a bevy of unachieved personal goals, particularly connected to his passion for filmmaking and documentary photography, and he was searching for a personal renaissance. “I wanted to take on a big challenge to test some of the fears and limitations that maybe have held me back in life,” he tells The Weekly Flickr. “I was attracted to the Pacific Crest Trail because it was the hardest simple thing I could come up with.” After two decades in a career that rewards finding shortcuts around problems, he craved a clear, straightforward challenge he couldn’t sidestep. As he puts it, “You either hike every foot of the trail or you don’t.”

Before setting out, he decided he would snap a selfie at each mile marker of the hike. He was not only attracted to the novelty of the idea–he had never heard of it being done before–but he also hoped the practice would hold him accountable to staying on the trail. He explains, “If I were to take a shortcut or quit at any point, myself and everybody else would know about it, because I’d be missing a mile.”

Only a few weeks after deciding to hike the PCT, on April 22, 2013, Andy found himself standing at the Mexican border. As he began traversing the California desert, he discovered that while hiking 2,660 miles would be physically demanding, the psychological challenges would be his real nemesis.

“You’re confronting fears and anxieties that you have, whether it be a fear of heights, or fear of falling, or fear of bears and wildlife,” he recounts. He describes himself as something of a control freak going into the hike, and explains, “Doing this hike and living outdoors for five months was a direct assault on my need to control things, and the fears that are attached to doing that. You have no control of the scarcity of water or the weather.”

Although Andy was hiking in the summer months, inopportune weather turned out to be more problematic than just the occasional thunderstorm. With autumn looming, he arrived at Snoqualmie Pass in Washington in late September, a mere 250 miles from Canada, only to be greeted by disaster. An early and massive snowstorm struck suddenly and dumped between 6 and 7 feet of snow on the trail ahead. Anxiety and fear loomed large. “A lot of hikers went missing. I didn’t want to quit, but I also didn’t want to die,” he recounts.

Faced with an insurmountable impediment to his goal to “hike every foot of the trail,” he decided he would do the next best thing and hiked the last 250 miles along a road that circumvented the blizzard, depositing him in British Columbia on Oct. 12, 2013. The following summer, he returned to rehike those 250 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, which also gave him the opportunity to redo the last 250 selfies on the actual trail.

In 2015, Andy edited all the selfies into a time-lapse video. “The first thing people tend to notice is the weight loss,” he says, referring to the shocking physical transformation immediately evident in the short video. “But for me personally, the weight loss was a collateral benefit. I was out there to gain a new level of confidence that I could take and apply to other aspects of my life.”

In the end, he was not the only one who gained new confidence from his journey. Andy posted the video online, and within two months, it received more than 2 million views and resulted in his story being told by numerous media outlets, including CNN, PBS NewsHour, the Discovery Channel, the Weather Channel, BuzzFeed, and internationally in countries like Brazil, Slovakia, Hungary, Australia, New Zealand, and many others.

To his surprise, he began receiving letters from people around the world who had been deeply inspired by his story. “To see how what was inherently a fairly selfish journey of mine turn into a source of inspiration to many is not an experience I expected to have,” he says.

“Life happens very quickly on the trail. You feel pain, you feel discouragement, but you also experience great euphoria and beauty. All of that can happen in the course of hours, and that really helped me build faith in the fact that things would get better if I just kind of stuck with it. I would hope that people take away… a feeling of empowerment, that you can do anything you want in life if you just keep moving forward.”

See here on Youtube:2600 Miles in 4 Minutes and here: Key Moments in 2600 Mile Hike

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Boy endures years of teasing for growing hair long to help kids in need

Fox News, June 4, 2015

MELBOURNE, Fla.–A brave 8-year-old boy endured two years of taunts and jeers while he grew his hair long so that he could help kids with pediatric cancer and other hair loss.

Christian McPhilamy began growing his hair out when he was 6 years old after seeing a television commercial for the St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

His mom, Deeanna Thomas, told Today Parents that Christian was determined to grow his hair long even though it meant being teased by other children–and even some adults.

Thomas said that her son was unfazed by comments teasing him about his long hair and not once during the two years it took to grow it did he ask to cut it.

Christian reached the goal of his two year mission last week when he and his mom cut four 10-inch sections of hair off and sent them to Children With Hair Loss, a charity that provides children with wigs made with real hair at no cost. The charity helps children who have lost their hair due to cancer, burns, or other medical reasons.

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Interrogator Gives Life to Christ After Christian Prisoner Shares Gospel

By Vincent Funaro, Christian Post, June 5, 2015

An Iranian interrogator involved in the persecution of religious minorities gave his life to Jesus Christ after a Christian woman locked in solitary confinement for three days shared the Gospel with him.

The woman, a house church leader named Noushin, was arrested for her faith and forced into solitary confinement, according to Open Doors USA, an organization that aids persecuted Christians throughout the world.

“I wasn’t ready to go to prison,” said Noushin to Open Doors. “I knew it was a dirty place, a place where people are tortured and locked up in solitary confinement. I was afraid that I would be so fearful that I would give up all the names of the members of house church. I even feared that I would deny my faith if they tortured me.”

During her imprisonment, however, she shared the Gospel with her interrogator after three days of being locked in solitary confinement.

“We talked about Jesus for hours until finally the interrogator gave his heart to Jesus. We prayed together,” said Noushin.

“It’s an honor for me to talk about Jesus,” Noushin told the guard. “You also need Jesus in your life. I cannot be indifferent toward you. I want you to experience the joy and blessing of salvation. I can’t keep silent about this.”

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