The Bible Study Podcast, Episode 286. Today, the Bible Study podcast starts a study on faith.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. Welcome to the start of a study of a series on

faith, and I'm not sure that I even remember what it was that put this idea in my head, but faith is

one of those things that we talk about, but we don't always understand. And so I want to look at

some of the biblical understanding for faith, and no study on faith would be complete without Hebrews 11.

Hebrews 11, verse 1 is probably our best definition for faith.

Now, faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

So let's stop for a second and look at that.

So part of the idea of faith is that

faith is believing in something, as we all know. And it's the idea here is that you can't see it.

Now, I think that gets misunderstood sometimes. I hear people who are Christians defend their faith, defend their understanding with, well,

it's something you just have to believe. And I believe that's true, but it's not something that you

have to believe that there's no evidence for. That's not what we're saying. In fact, it is my belief

that you can come up with a rational defense of Christianity,

that it is not an irrational thing, but it is to some extent, there is some point where you get to

the point where you say, well, you do have to believe this. There is a God or there isn't a God.

Jesus is the Savior. He's not the Savior. I can't prove it to you in the laboratory.

It's not a reproducible experiment. That is the inappropriate mechanism for measuring something like that, nor could I prove to you in a laboratory

about the existence of Abraham Lincoln either. That is something that we would argue from a historical

perspective. And so when we look at what happened

in the Old Testament, when we looked at what happened in the New Testament, there are evidence

for the things that we believe. But what this is saying is that I'm, but notice that this is

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