I sometimes like to approach faith in Jesus from an intellectual perspective – needing it to make sense or to find evidence that Jesus is real, that he did die and was resurrected. However, this post is about a more basic, raw faith.

Imagine you’re hanging over the side of a cliff, grasping onto a rock with both hands for dear life. After a few moments as you try to pull yourself up, you sense the rock is loosening and just as it is breaking away from the cliff’s edge, you notice out of the corner of your eye a small branch hanging over the edge just to your left. The rock suddenly comes loose and you must make a life or death split second decision, so you reach over quickly to the branch and grasp it with your left hand, then with your right. You are saved from certain death for the moment. Now, you use the branch to pull yourself up to safety. Your decision to grab the branch saved your life.

I know this scenario is a bit dramatic. The intended point is that you didn’t need a lot of faith in the branch when you knew the rock that was sustaining you initially was about to fail. You only needed enough faith to believe that grabbing hold of the branch was going to be better than falling to your death and also likely a better option than continuing to grasp the loosening rock.

How much faith and how much intellect do you need to make your faith choice?

Is your requirement a completely airtight response to all evolutionary theories and how these are disproved through various bible verses? A concrete explanation of the six-day creation? All theories of how Jesus body could not have been removed from the tomb by any other means than his resurrection?

Yes, we should use our reason and intellect to make all key decisions in our lives, and especially those surrounding our faith. Yet at some point, after all the available evidence is in, we must rely on faith to make our decision. There is no position surrounding faith that doesn’t require some faith to choose it – even the Big Bang and other scientific platitudes cannot answer every question. So, faith and science intersect; we use science and reason to provide data, and we use faith to come to our ultimate decision.

God loves to meet us while we hang over the edge of the cliff. So many faith-filled testimonies are about difficulties and challenges in the believers’ life and how God met them in the mess. I think hurts, losses and hardships in our life allow us to let go of the loosening rock and grab ahold of the branch without over analysis. We just know that the rock – our life – is slipping and we don’t like what we believe is going to happen, so we’re willing to grab the branch by faith.

Are you ready to reach for the branch?