Lumen Fidei - page 22

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addition to “believing that” what Jesus tells us is
true, John also speaks of “believing” Jesus and
“believing in” Jesus. We “believe” Jesus when
we accept his word, his testimony, because he is
truthful. We “believe in” Jesus when we person-
ally welcome him into our lives and journey to-
wards him, clinging to him in love and following
in his footsteps along the way.
To enable us to know, accept and follow
him, the Son of God took on our flesh. In this
way he also saw the Father humanly, within the
setting of a journey unfolding in time. Christian
faith is faith in the incarnation of the Word and
his bodily resurrection; it is faith in a God who is
so close to us that he entered our human history.
Far from divorcing us from reality, our faith in
the Son of God made man in Jesus of Nazareth
enables us to grasp reality’s deepest meaning and
to see how much God loves this world and is
constantly guiding it towards himself. This leads
us, as Christians, to live our lives in this world
with ever greater commitment and intensity.
Salvation by faith
19. On the basis of this sharing in Jesus’ way of
seeing things, Saint Paul has left us a description
of the life of faith. In accepting the gift of faith,
believers become a new creation; they receive
a new being; as God’s children, they are now
“sons in the Son”. The phrase “Abba, Father”,
so characteristic of Jesus’ own experience, now
becomes the core of the Christian experience (cf.