What is Faith?

1. What is Faith? C.S. Lewis’ thoughts on this Christian Virtue.

2. The Two Levels of Faith • Level One: Belief • “Accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity” (MC, 138). • Level Two: Serious Attempt to Practice Christian Virtue • We discover this Faith when we have tried our hardest to be Christian, and we find that we cannot. • We discover our bankruptcy, and discover what God really cares about: “…that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality- the kind of creatures He intended us to be- creatures related to Himself in a certain way” (145).

3. Belief. • Is the Human Mind completely ruled by reason? “The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other” (139).

4. What makes people question Christianity? • Bad news, war, poverty, violence in the world • Trouble- Emotional, physical, monetary • Having conversations with friends/family members who think or believe differently • Encountering teachings we may not understand or disagree with • Temptation-When Christianity not being true would seem convenient.

5. What makes people question Christianity? In these times, your emotions will carry an assault on what your reason accepts. Your moods rise up against what you accepted by reason. Faith “is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods” (140).

6. What makes people question Christianity? “…If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?” (141).

7. Training the Habits of Faith: [Spiritually Working Out!] • Recognize that our moods change • Spend some time, each day deliberately reflecting on some of the main doctrines of Christianity: (quiet time, discussing with friends, prayer, reading Scripture). “We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind” (141).

8. Spiritual Work Out! An interactive activity to learn about the Second Level of Faith. Pink vs. Blue Each team member will try and answer the (six total) question prompts. Stand when your answer is completed. A chosen scorekeeper will track the team’s total number of points awarded. The team with the highest number of points will win an edible prize.

9. Serious Attempt to Practice Christian Virtue [To recap our definition]: • God desires that we become "creatures of a certain kind or quality -- the kind of creatures he intended us to be -- creatures related to Himself in a certain way" (145)

10. Serious Attempt to Practice Christian Virtue temptation • “Only those who try to resist ___________ know how strong it is” (142). • “_________ is the only man who every faced temptation and never yielded -- thereby facing the full fury of temptation and evil” (142). Christ

11. Serious Attempt to Practice Christian Virtue moral • “The road back to God is one of _______effort, of trying harder and harder” (146). • “Have I reached that moment?” (146) • “…it may be so gradual that no one could ever point to a particular hour or even a particular year. And what matters is the nature of the ________ itself, not how we feel while it is happening” (146). change

12. Serious Attempt to Practice Christian Virtue give • “I know the words ‘_______ it to God’ can be misunderstood, but they must stay for the moment” (147). • “Handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop _________. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says” (147). trying

13. What does it mean to trust in God? • Trying to do all he says: “There would be no sense in trusting a person if you would not take his advice” (147). • We don't do the things He commands in order to be saved, but... [we do them] because He has begun the saving of us already. • We don't do things hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for our actions, but[we do them because] the "first faint gleams of heaven" (148) are already planted inside us by Him.