Faith In Faith

"I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world" (Romans 1:8)

True faith requires that we believe everything God has said about Himself, but also that we believe everything He has said about "US". Until we believe that we are as bad as God says we are, we can never believe that He will do for us what He says He will do.

Right here is where popular religion breaks down. It never quite accepts the severity of God or the depravity of man. It stresses the goodness of God and man's "misfortune." Sin is a pardonable frailty and God is not too much concerned about it. He merely wants us to trust in His goodness.

To believe thus is to ground faith upon falsehood and build our eternal hope upon sand. No man has any right to pick and choose among revealed truths. God has spoken.

Faith in faith is faith astray. To hope for heaven by means of such faith is to drive in the dark across a deep chasm on a bridge that doesn't quite reach the other side.

The first act of faith is to believe what God says about sin.

~A. W. Tozer~

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Faith In Which Jesus?

"Righteous art thou, O Lord, and upright are thy judgments. Thy testimonies that thou hast commanded are righteous and very faithful" (Psalm 119:137 -138)

To manipulate the Scriptures so as to make them excuse us, compliment us and console us is to do despite to the written Word and to reject the Living Word. To believe savingly in Jesus Christ is to believe all He has said about Himself and all that the prophets and apostles have said about Him. Let us beware that the Jesus we "accept" is not not we have created out of the dust of our imagination and formed after our own likeness.

True faith commits us to obedience. "We have received grace and apostleship," says Paul, "for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name" (Romans 1:5). That dreamy, sentimental faith which ignores the judgments of God against us and listens to the affirmations of the soul is as deadly as cyanide.

That faith which passively accepts all the pleasant texts of the Scriptures while it overlooks or rejects the stern warnings and commandments of those same Scriptures is not the faith of which Christ and His apostles spoke.

Faith is simply that which takes hold of the promise and the fullness of Christ.

~A. W. Tozer~