"Growing in Faith" by David Yount

• No one is born religious, nor is religiosity a character trait.
• Religious conviction in any case is not certitude, it is faith forever grappling with doubt. If Christianity could be proven without a shadow of a doubt, there would still be room for indifference.
• No one is all bad nor all good, nor is anyone good or bad all the time.
• Goodness cannot be a precondition for faith, if it were no one would believe. Quite the opposite is true: faithfulness inspires us to better behavior.
• Faith is a difficult virtue because the truth about Jesus is hard to swallow and it must be swallowed without seasoning.
• The way we act is more likely to be an expression of how we think than the other way around.
• Christianity is essentially an insurance policy.
• Self-love usually does not rise above selfishness.
• Despite devoting themselves to serving Number One, many persons are their own worst enemies and are bitterly disappointed in themselves.
• God’s goodness cannot be equated with special treatment.
• Much that goes wrong in life is accidental, not intentional, and much that causes pain is caused not by God but by men and women themselves.
• The born-again experience carries great emotional conviction but it is not a prerequisite to faith. Jesus requires his followers to be “born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5), and this is accomplished in the rite of Baptism.
• All Christians share the mission to preach the good news of salvation and to bring others to Jesus.
• Religion at times can be a dessert, and faith must be sustained sometimes without any emotional support whatsoever.
• Faith is not a “high” but a habit.
• In simplest terms a Christian is a baptized person who responds to Jesus’ invitation to repent and to follow him.
• The Christian will not be satisfied just by reading the Bible.
• The Bible as we know it comprises the books of the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament is essentially the Bible that Jesus himself knew. It reveals the covenant or agreement made by God with the patriarch Abraham and the Jewish people some eighteen centuries earlier. The New Testament presumes the Old but reveals a successor covenant forged through Jesus and made available to non-Jews as well. Christians believe the Bible is inspired by God, but not all of it is inspirational nor is it a “how-to” guide for the believer.
• The Bible’s individual books were written at different times for distinctive purposes, and the intention of the authors was not always literal or scientific. Evangelical Christians, in contrast to Catholics and mainline Protestant Christians, tend to interpret the Bible literally.
• It was the church that defined the Bible, not the other way around.
• The church is the agent through which God’s Spirit -- the Life-Giver -- works. It is a conduit not only for Jesus’ teaching but for God’s grace and our prayers.
• Christian love is the highest expression of faith, and love requires that people care for one another.
• Christianity may not make your life any easier and may actually make it harder.
• Paganism is now popularly thought of as non-belief, but it is more accurately a religion based on nature. Religion became the glue that held together the community’s approach to life and expressed its values.
• Prayer, initially an attempt to cast spells, slowly evolved into the outpouring of the soul to the divine.
• The eternal three-in-one God is neither limited by time, nor is he oblivious to time, since he enters the world of his creation.
• These accounts [the Gospels], written by believers, follow the rules of neither history nor biography. Nor do they attempt to convince the unbelieving. Rather, they are straightforward accounts of the principal things Jesus said, did, and promised.
• The Gospels account for no more than fifty days in his [Jesus] adult life.
• Jesus gave but one law: to love.
• According to Jesus, worldly success is no indication of God’s favor. Poverty and humility are not to be despised because simplicity helps to make a person wholehearted in loving service.
• Although Christians are confident that they are heard by God, prayer is typically a one-sided conversation that is helped by the ability to visualize Jesus.
• The ability to forgive is the key to the Kingdom of God because it tests the genuineness of our love.
• The hardest part of being a Christian is faith, not morality -- believing, not behaving.
• Basic “good behavior” is nothing more nor less than civility driven by habit and aided by conscience.
• Morality predates religion and is based on responsibility to oneself and one’s society.
• The Mosaic law, for example, permitted justice proportionate to the offense.
• Jesus does not allow us to respond to aggression with aggression.
• The Christian enjoys what everyone else enjoys with this distinction: he does not indulge himself, because self-indulgence leads to overindulgence and distraction from God.
• The church developed many of these Jewish rituals and added others, seven of which Catholic Christians consider most important because they represent Jesus’ major initiatives. The seven rites are Baptism, Penance, the Eucharist, Confirmation, Matrimony, Holy Orders, and the Anointing of the Sick.
• Baptism is initiation into the church -- Jesus reaching through his church to call men, women, and children to accept God’s love and salvation.
• Penance is Jesus acting through his church to forgive the Christian who repents of his sins and resolves to live a life of integrity.
• The Eucharist is Jesus sharing himself again with his friends through the church in a memorial of the Last Supper he shared with his apostles. It is also known as Communion.
• Confirmation is Jesus confirming the adult commitments of his followers.
• Matrimony is Jesus raising human love to approach the love God bears for his church, and Jesus joining the Creator with the human act of regeneration.
• Holy Orders or ordination is Jesus calling through his church to select Christians as he did his apostles -- “Follow me” -- to minister to his church.
• Anointing is Jesus in his church continuing to console the sick and dying, just as he did when he walked among men and women in Israel.
• Christian life rests on a paradox that only God is good yet the Christian must seek the perfection that properly belongs to God.
• We do not grasp God with our physical senses. He is not visible to our eyes, nor does he speak private words in our ears.
• Although we search for God, he has already found us.
• Prayer is conversation with God. As far as mere words go, prayer is admittedly one-sided.
• Jesus wrote nothing.
• The New Testament we know is a second-century compilation of writings, all or most of which date from Jesus’ own century.
• Galileo, one of the new men of science, was also a man of faith. “The authority of Sacred Scripture,” he wrote, “has as its sole aim to convince men of those truths which are necessary for their salvation. But that the same God who has endowed us with reason and understanding should not wish us to use them -- this is a thing I do not think I am bound to believe.”
• Christianity is not a do-it-yourself religion and never has been. The members of God’s family do not live private lives. Christ’s command to love requires that we embrace both God and our fellow man. That is done in the church and is exemplified in the local church community you will seek.
• Faith is not just intellectual assent to a creed but a total personal commitment of the self to God. But the Christian does not even generate his own faith. Rather, faith is a gift from God to be accepted.
• Faith comes not from doing but from hearing the word of God as contained in the Bible.
• Damnation is not accidental, it is chosen. It is the consequence of rejecting God -- a divorce initiated by creatures against their Creator.
• We are dealing with faith, not certainty, and reluctance will always tug at you, as it does every other man or woman of faith.
• When I was in college I lost the faith of my childhood and painfully searched for reasons to restore my confidence in God’s existence -- this time as an adult.
• After years of search, I finally gave up looking for the God of logic when I realized that my personal “proof” of his existence was that I kept chasing him and was miserable when I doubted him.