The christian faith: Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him. 1 Peter 1:8

The apostle Peter in his first epistle addressed to various Churches located in the region of Asia wrote about the importance of that hope received with the sacrament of baptism, because the spiritual gift of hope is the concretization of the eternal life, the contemplative activity, in the true believers of the kingdom of God, the dominion or empire of God's perfections: "God has given us a new birth because of his great mercy. We have been born into a new life that has a confidence which is alive because Jesus Christ has come back to life" 1 Peter 1:3.
And this hope in Jesus is linked to a faith that must bear witness to the new life according to the spirit, living the gifts inherited from God, as Jesus taught: "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" Matthew 5:48. How important faith and hope are for the followers of Jesus Christ, the apostle Peter emphasized in his letter, because through these gifts every christian baptized in the name of Jesus dies to the flesh and is reborn in the spirit.
The grace received from above then should not act as in the case of the apostle Thomas who, when he heard about the resurrection of the Lord, responded with foolishness and lack of faith: "I won't believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side" John 20:25.
Grace must then give rise to a special knowledge of truths that cannot be reached rationally, wrote the apostle Peter, and with these words, he expressed this spiritual truth: "Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy" 1 Peter 1:8.
As it happened to the disciples at Pentecost and as the apostle Peter himself observed with the conversion of the centurion Cornelius and his family as recounted in the Book of Acts, the action of grace is mysterious, but not for that reason incapable of giving a faith that gave birth to the first world religion in history.

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