The Necessity of Faith
Greetings, brothers and sisters. This is Dr. James Perry continuing with our series where we seek to
explore the deeper meanings of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Over the years, the heavenly
Father has revealed many revelations of spiritual truth to me, and I want to share them with you. This
morning we seek to understand the necessity of faith.
And now, sit back and listen to today's message.
The Necessity of Faith
"But without faith it is impossible to please him; for he that cometh to God must believe that
he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek." Hebrews, Chapter 11, verse 6.
Brothers and sisters, in today's broadcast, we shall examine the basis and the sheer spiritual
requirement for the necessity of faith. We shall use as illustration a segment of a radio program that
I listened to recently. This was a program that featured an actress who was in a play, called "Letting
Go of God." The interviewer asked the actress how she had come to do the play. The play was a
monologue depicting an individual who has supposedly lost her faith in God. Her transition from
light to darkness is chronicled below:
She stated that she had grown up in the Catholic church, and loved the catholic church. She loved
the rituals and being apart of this religious family. The crisis began when her brother came down
with a form of cancer, a lymphoma. He struggled heroically, but after about 9 months he expired.
About this time, her engagement to be married fell apart. This disappointment was devastating to
her, and her whole future life as she visualized it collapsed. While she had always prayed to God,
she began praying with a new fervor. One night while she was praying, she felt a presence in her
room and it became filled with light, and she experience peace and joy which she identified as the
presence of God. At this point, she returned to the Catholic Church with a vigor. She began studying
the Bible, starting with the Old Testament. She studied the character of God depicted there and
became demoralized. This God demanded Abraham to sacrifice his son for his faith, which dowsed
the water of darkness upon her newly acquired consciousness. She realized that, according to that
account, she was more just and ethical than God but how could that be?
She began studying the New Testament and was further disillusioned. The Jesus depicted in the New
Testament depicted the Son of God as being angry, impatient, and speaking in parables which no one
understood. He was also disrespectful of family values, having said some very rude things to his
mother. When she tried to resolve these religious contradictions with her priest, she became even
more frustrated, for she could not obtain a satisfactory answer to the conflicts she felt about the God
of her highest ideals and the God of the Bible which she had been taught was the word of God.
Finally the priest told her that the stories in the Bible were legends and were intended for the people
who lived at that time and that people who were enlightened could know the truth. This did not help
her very much. The solution to her difficulty was to " wink" at the literal interpretation of the Bible,
while the masses were told to take it at face value. The priest did say that she had to have faith to
study the Bible as opposed to studying the Bible to receive faith.
This was the final deluge that drowned her God consciousness. She turned away from the Catholic
faith and began to pursue "New Age Religions." One of the religions that she pursued was the
quantum mechanics approach to religion popularized by an eastern devotee. She said that this
approach did not help, but was the beginning of the end of her religious faith, for through it she
found a desire to study Quantum Mechanics and found that the eastern devotee had more or less
gutted the concept to fit his particular religious persuasion. This study led her to the scientific
method, which spelled the doom of her religious faith when she applied it to the spiritual experience.
According to this standard, she reexamined and redefined all of her religious and spiritual
experiences. The spiritual experience of light and divine presence she defined as a complex seizure,
having its origin solely in her brain. The voice that prompted her to look for the good in others and
try to live a better life she defined as being apart of the evolutionary process that produced humans.
Humans were social animals and qualities of altruism were necessary for humans to live in
community.
She said she felt liberated now that she had removed all this imaginary reality from her mind. When
asked how would she explain to her daughter who asked what happens when you die, she replied,
"I told her your body decomposes, and she found a dead bird in her yard and watched it decompose.
which proved what I was saying was true." Her daughter accepted that answer. She explained that
the values of another human being survived in the lives of other human beings as they loved and
fondly remembered their loved ones. The values survived, the value discoverer did not. When asked
how she would respond if she had another crisis in her life, how she would receive comfort, she said
that she would make it through it, that it was better to know the truth of life, rather than have some
imaginary comfort. This is the gist of the interview as I remember it. But there are some profound
lesions to be learned from this person's life as well as to ask some new questions about faith.
We cannot escape the physical facts of our existence. As a part of nature, we are subject to nature.
Though we cannot escape it, our spiritual natures can. The error that this lady made was the same
error that many people make and that is to go in search for a material validation of a genuine spiritual
experience not understanding that the spiritual experience is unique and personal to each individual.
While there may be similarities in experiences, no one can validate another's experience. The
spiritual experience may be entirely real even though the explanation of that experience by the
material mind may be completely false. When we allow outside authorities to contradict our highest
ideals we are indeed in trouble. She failed to recognize that her experience was a faith experience
and could only be validated by experience, by living the values and thus realizing them. Her mistake
was to reject a genuine spiritual experience because they were at odds with outside authorities. The
authority for the truth of a spiritual experience is the Father's spirit, the source of truth, and the Spirit
of Truth, the interpreter of truth. They both dwell within our minds and souls.
Our material minds can never comprehend the spiritual experience. It can never progress beyond the
intellectual fact of religion, which contains various amounts of error. The material mind is adapted
to manipulate material reality. Only spiritual consciousness can comprehend the way of faith. And
this is why faith must remain above and beyond intellectual doubts. The intellect can never prove
a spiritual truth just as spiritual truth can never prove a material fact. They are two different realities
and operate by different laws. Render to Caesar the things of Caesar, and render to God the things
of God.
The light of faith burning in our spiritual consciousness is a true light that will lead us through our
humble material beginnings to the heights of divine reality. This light will help us discover divine
values and meanings. It is not a light that can be used to find our way through material reality. That
is the function of the intellectual light This true light must be followed no matter how hard it is for
the material mind to see it. No matter how desperate our material state become, the light of faith
must still be viewed. No matter how erroneous the intellectual beliefs may be or how shocking their
corrections, the light of faith must still be followed. The goodness of God must not be discounted
or disbelieved because of the skeptical forecasts of the intellectual mind, a mind that is prone to
error. This light is like a light in a long dark tunnel that, if followed, will lead us out of the tunnel
of darkness into the light of day.
Finally faith is a necessity because there exists no other way that our souls can find their way out of
material states. There is no other way that divine values and meanings of the heavenly Father can
be grasped. Yes, faith is a precious and necessary gift.
This concludes today's message on the necessity of faith. We hope you find something in this
message to ponder and pray about as you go about your day.
Until next time, this is Dr. James Perry.
Inspirational Messages
By Dr. James Perry
The Necessity of Faith
