Healthy, sound faith doesn’t ignore reason, morality, history, or science. However it also doesn’t limit itself to what fits within common sense, morality, and science. In other words, faith respects reason and common sense, but it can go beyond them. What do I mean by that? Faith isn’t unreasonable, it’s beyond reason. It isn’t immoral, it’s beyond morality. It isn’t unscientific — it’s beyond science.

Here’s an example. A business owner who’s a believer could make the most money on a Sunday, but closes the shop that day because they treat it as the Sabbath, a day set apart to worship God. From an outsider’s perspective, that doesn’t quite make sense, but it’s not the kind of behavior that makes people recoil as bizarre or offensive. In the same way, Jesus being born of the virgin Mary wasn’t immoral, like the claims made by so many cult leaders throughout history, it was something beyond the categories of morality altogether.

Science explains existing life through evolution, and on that basis some dismiss Christianity as unscientific, but that claim doesn’t actually hold up. If you look at ancient history, the East and the Islamic world were far more advanced civilizations than the West. Science ended up emerging from the West because, under Christian influence, people stopped treating the natural world as something to be worshiped (as was common in the East) and instead saw it as God’s creation, something entrusted to human beings to study and steward.

If science ever advances to the point where evolution becomes as undeniable a fact as the earth orbiting the sun, I’ll accept it. Christians aren’t backward people who ignore evidence. But even now, all the research is focused on the process of life and the universe, the origin is still a mystery, and theories about how life began keep getting proposed and then discarded. If anything, the more precisely science examines the universe, the more reasonable it seems to assume there’s an intelligent designer behind it, rather than pure chance.

We need a balanced view, between common sense and what’s beyond it, between morality and what’s beyond it, between science and what’s beyond it. Valuing ability, skill, and effort is part of respecting common sense. So when we read about the miracles in the Bible, if we start expecting miracles while excusing our own laziness or waiting on blind luck, and then mistaking that for “faith”, that’s not faith, that’s being unreasonable.

Even so, Christians respect reason, morality, history, and science, we just don’t live bound by them. That’s because we live in relationship with the God who created all of it. The world puts a high price on ability and skill, but that doesn’t mean my success or failure, my happiness or unhappiness, is determined by those things. If it were, what hope would there be for someone who simply wasn’t born with much natural ability, or someone like me, whose skills are lacking because I didn’t get the support I needed growing up?

That’s why, after coming to faith in Jesus, we have to deliberately practice leaning on God’s grace more than on our own ability. This kind of life looks strange to the world, but it’s true: “when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9–10); “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:26–28); “by the grace of God I am what I am” (1 Corinthians 15:10). These verses need to become our own personal confession. Even as a pastor, I’m still learning this every single day, especially as I try to apply it in raising my children.