Thank you very much for singing that hymn. I was introduced to that hymn here on the West Coast. I tell you, of all the places I go, this is the only place I hear it sung. It is just a wonderful blessing to hear that.
I hope that last little phrase is becoming real to us: that we are finding out the greatness of His loving heart—how much He really loves us. Well, it is wonderful.
It is good to be here with you, my brothers and sisters. You do not get opportunities to fellowship very often, but I am grateful for the times the Lord gives us.
There are a number of things that bless me. One is that it is good to see the saints seasoning in the right way. Some of us are getting older, and something more of the beauty of the Lord is manifested even in physical appearance. It is good to see that.
It is good to see new people and new faces. We have not had the opportunity to meet and greet, but it is good that the Lord brings others among us.
But I have to admit to you, brothers and sisters, that the thing that blesses me most is seeing the wonderful work the Lord is doing among our younger brothers and sisters. It is such a joy to my heart.
I think it was in 1984 that I was first given the joy and privilege of coming among you brothers and sisters. It was my brother Lance’s fault. He was supposed to come and could not come, so I was the fill-in for our brother.
It was one of those wonderful things the Lord does unexpectedly, and it has been a joy for me. When I first started coming, some of these young brothers and sisters were just snotty-nosed kids running around. Now they have grown up to be beautiful young men and women, and the Lord is doing something very wonderful.
It is a blessing for me to be among you and to witness what the Lord is doing in all of your lives.
I am a little disappointed in the brochure. They did not teach us the Santa Barbara salute before we got here. You know the Santa Barbara salute? Lance was just practicing here. Lance has lots of opportunities, so if you do not know, just keep your eye on Lance. These flies seem to like him very much.
Would you turn with me to the Epistle of James? I want to be as simple as I can be, and if I am myself, I will be very simple.
For these two sessions that I have been asked to share, I want to take some of what James has to say in his epistle and focus on two aspects that have to do with faith. One is the testing of our faith. Our faith has to be tested. The other is living faith.
This morning we want to read some verses from James 1—the first eight verses—and then verse 12.
James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes which are of the Dispersion, greeting.
Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into manifold temptations;
knowing that the proving of your faith worketh patience.
And let patience have its perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, lacking in nothing.
But if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all liberally and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.
But let him ask in faith, nothing doubting: for he that doubteth is like the surge of the sea driven by the wind and tossed.
For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord;
a doubleminded man, unstable in all his ways.Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he hath been approved, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord promised to them that love Him.
Lord, thank You for giving us opportunities daily to discover, in a fuller way, the greatness of Your loving heart. Thank You that we can be here today, meeting in Your presence, sitting before You, and acknowledging You, our Lord, as our Teacher.
We want to say with the disciples who followed You while You were here, “Lord, You alone have the words of eternal life.” We are not looking to even the written page itself or to the speaker, but we are looking beyond all of that.
In ways that we do not understand, You are able to take Your written Word and the spoken word and make it a living word to every one of us. Lord, You are able to personalize it to each one of us. There is no mass production. You personally know us.
You know everything that is going on in our lives, and You know what we are going to encounter in the days, months, and years ahead, if You tarry. Lord, we know that You will speak to us, and we want to have hearts that are listening.
Even there, Lord, we need You to help us. We know how easy it is for us to get distracted and begin thinking about other things, and maybe miss what You have to say to us. Would You help us this morning to hear what You have to say with hearts willing to obey? We ask it in Your name. Amen.
As I read the end of the New Testament, especially the letters beginning with Hebrews and continuing through James, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Jude, and especially the first part of Revelation, it seems to me that you find Christianity in a crisis.
Now, I do not like the word Christianity, I have to admit to you, because it has so many connotations. But I hope you understand what I mean: that which God is doing in His people under the new covenant is under crisis when you read these particular letters.
That being the case, it seems to me that the Lord wants to speak in such a way that His people will be helped in their crisis.
Many of you, I am sure, have studied and read the Epistle of James. I know some people who have actually memorized the whole letter. But I hope you realize that sometimes the letter of James has gotten a bad rap.
There were those who, even when it was being brought into the Scriptures, had serious questions about whether it should be included in the Bible. Nothing is mentioned about the person of the Lord Jesus, nothing about His life or teaching, nothing about His death, and nothing about His resurrection.
They had a criterion, and some people felt that James did not meet it. There have been others, like Martin Luther, who had big question marks. Martin Luther’s favorite book in the Bible was Galatians.
When you look at Galatians, especially Galatians 3, and compare it with what James has to say, it can look as though there is a big contradiction. Martin Luther referred to the Epistle of James as a “straw epistle”—that is, it was not worth very much. He questioned whether it should be part of the divine record.
But I think it may be helpful if we realize the conditions under which James was writing his letter. He was writing to believers in the Lord Jesus Christ who were scattered abroad in different places.
From the very outset of his letter, it is clear that these people were going through difficulties in their lives.
Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into manifold temptations.
That is not usually the way you would want to start a letter, but James is getting to the point. He is not putting anything ahead of it. He is simply trying to get to the point.
With this in mind, I think we can begin to understand a little better why James says what he has to say.
I do not want to spend the time this morning sharing what little I understand about what may have been in James’s heart, but simply to say this: it seems to me that James’s main burden was practical righteousness.
You will discover, in reading the Epistle of James, that there are correlations between James and what we call the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7. There are a number of references to the words we find in those chapters.
You remember how the Lord Jesus concluded the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:
Every one therefore that heareth these words of Mine, and doeth them, shall be likened unto a wise man, who built his house upon the rock.
Brothers and sisters, from my own experience and some observation of others, I think we all fall short in this matter of acting upon what has already been spoken to us. Maybe I am wrong in my observation, but I am telling you that in me, I know a lot more than I live.
So what does the Lord do about it? I think He puts people like James in the body of Christ and has him be an instrument in writing the Word of God to address some very practical and needed areas of our lives. He does this so that He can help us implement in our lives the things we already know.
James takes up some issues that seemingly nobody else takes up, or at least not to the degree that James does. He spends quite a few verses talking about the use of the tongue.
He makes some pretty hard statements. He says that if a man is religious and does not bridle his tongue, his religion is useless. Now you understand why some people do not like to read James. He gets right to the point.
James identifies himself as a bond-servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. We know that he was also a brother of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he could have pulled rank in some ways. He could have dropped that little bit of information and made us feel pretty great about it, but he did not.
He did not identify himself as a brother of Jesus of Nazareth. He identified himself as a bond-servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Brothers and sisters, I do not know how you feel about it, but I think there is a lot I can learn from any bond-servant of the Lord Jesus Christ—someone who is a love slave to Him. I can learn much from him.
James has some things that he can say to us that can be a source of great encouragement. He takes up this matter of faith and the necessity of it being tested. Then he talks about faith without works being dead. He wants us to know the experience of having living faith.
This morning, very simply, we want to share for a few moments about the testing of our faith. But before we can do that, we may need to cover some other ground and ask ourselves a few questions.
First of all, what do we mean by faith? This is probably one of those words that we use a lot. It is very much a part of our vocabulary, but I am not sure that we spend adequate time considering what we are talking about when we use the word faith.
When James says, “The testing of your faith produces endurance,” what is he talking about? Is faith a noun or a verb?
Both. Faith is not just a noun; it is a verb as well. It is important that we try to have some understanding of what James is talking about when he speaks of faith, and what other places in Scripture mean when they speak of faith.
In Jude 3, we read:
Beloved, while I was giving all diligence to write unto you of our common salvation, I was constrained to write unto you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints.
There, brothers and sisters, it seems to me that faith is a noun. It describes a thing—something. Here Jude has reference to all that God has revealed of Himself, of His purpose, and of His ways.
Jude talks about contending earnestly for the faith. Applied to our own situation and lives, I think we need to see that faith is all that God, in His mercy, has been faithful to make real to us about Himself.
That is the faith that we have. It is something God has produced in us. He has revealed Himself, His ways, and His purpose.
In trying to get hold of what faith is, we have to see that it is what God has revealed to us. Faith is revelation. It is the accumulation of all that God, in His mercy, has opened the eyes of our hearts to see about Himself, about what He is doing, and about the ways He does it.
We find another use of faith in Ephesians 4:13:
Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God.
Here again, it seems that Paul is talking about the revelation God has given. If somehow we can allow the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and produce understanding in us, we can come to a place where we agree on the revelation God has given. There is a oneness God wants us to come into in believing what He has revealed about Himself.
There is another example that may be of help to us in Matthew 8. This time it is with an individual.
And when He was entered into Capernaum, there came unto Him a centurion, beseeching Him,
and saying, Lord, my servant lieth in the house sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.
And He saith unto him, I will come and heal him.
And the centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldest come under my roof: but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed.
For I also am a man under authority, having under myself soldiers: and I say to this one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.
And when Jesus heard it, He marvelled, and said to them that followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.
This centurion had something that allowed him to take a stand with the Lord Jesus. He understood, I believe by the revelation of God, that in this person, Jesus of Nazareth, was absolute authority to do anything that needed to be done.
Jesus said, “That man has great faith.” He did not say that about many people. He considered it so great that He marvelled.
As I read the New Testament, there are only two times I remember the Lord having marvelled. The other time was because of unbelief. He marvelled at their unbelief in His own hometown.
But here He marvelled because He met a man who had greater faith than anybody He had met among all those covenant people of God. In this man, He found great faith.
There was something in this man that enabled the Lord Jesus to say that he had something great. What was it? He had an understanding of the Lord Jesus and who He was.
We can see that faith is a noun. There are many other words we find in Scripture that may help us get a clearer understanding of faith. What are some words that might describe this matter of faith?
Trust. Belief. Rest. Confidence. Heart obedience. Abiding. Seeking.
There is a whole range of words that we use, but when you look at them, they basically mean the same thing.
There is one that perhaps does not always come to our minds: Isaiah 40:31.
They that wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings as eagles;
they shall run, and not be weary;
they shall walk, and not faint.
What does the word wait mean? I remember sharing this a number of years ago in one of the conferences. It means to be united together by twisting. It is like braiding together.
It is not just sitting and saying, “Well, I am waiting for the Lord to move.” No. It is being united together with Him, waiting on Him, having His life braided together with ours, and trusting His life rather than our own.
Brothers and sisters, I do not know how much you have stopped to think about this wonderful event in human history called the incarnation. It takes a long time for us to fathom the great mystery of how God could be one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man.
Neither humanity got in the way of divinity, nor was divinity in any way affected by humanity. Brothers and sisters, that is a great mystery: how Jesus of Nazareth could be both the Son of Man and the Son of God, absolutely without imbalance in one direction or the other.
He liked to refer to Himself as the Son of Man, but He was the Son of God.
This matter of waiting on the Lord—of having His life become our life—is also an element of faith.
When we come to the matter of verbs, many times we simply change the word a little: from belief to believe. To believe means that you exercise what you believe. It becomes something active.
We trust, we put our confidence in, we rely upon, we rest in, we abide, and we obey. There are many other words.
For a moment, let us consider abiding. In John 15, after the Lord Jesus had introduced the disciples to the matter that He was going to leave, He told them it would be better for them if He left because He was going to send Another like Himself to be with them and in them.
As He began to speak in a way that would bring comfort and encouragement to the disciples, it could be that He was walking with them and they passed a vine, or perhaps a figure of a vine. The Lord Jesus took the occasion to say:
I am the true vine, and My Father is the husbandman.
The issue He wanted to get across was this matter of abiding: of His abiding in us and our abiding in Him.
Our Lord chose a wonderful way to convey to us, in simplicity, what faith is. It is by God’s doing—not our doing—that we are in Christ Jesus, who becomes to us everything that we need, both in this life and in the one to come.
Did you hear that? He becomes everything we need, both in this life and in the one to come. We are in Him, and He is in us. Faith simply accepts and lives in that reality.
As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:30, “By His doing ye are in Christ Jesus.” That is, by God’s doing, we are in Christ Jesus. Now we need, by faith, to stand there, to live there, and to let it become a living reality.
The Lord Jesus says to us:
Abide in Me, and I in you.
To me, that does not seem like merely a suggestion. It is a command. Why does He command it? Because He tells us:
Apart from Me ye can do nothing.
It is difficult for us to register an amen to such a statement because we prove day in and day out that we do many different things. So what is He talking about when He says, “Apart from Me ye can do nothing”?
You can do nothing that pleases the Father without being united to Him—without Him being in you and you being in Him.
Faith means that we stand in that place and learn how to abide in Him. We learn how to discover His victorious life—how He is the One living in us and through us, and how it is no longer we who are living.
This is faith. At least it gives us some idea and perhaps some handles that will help us get clear about what we are talking about when we use the word faith.
We have talked about faith as the revelation of God, but faith on our part is a response to that revelation. Unless God does something, there is no place to put our faith.
We will discover that our natural faith is no good anyhow. The faith we were born with naturally cannot get anything from the Lord. No spiritual results can occur in our lives with just our natural faith.
To me, faith is the response to what God reveals to us of Himself through His Son by the Holy Spirit.
We worship by faith. We pray in faith. We walk in faith. We live by faith. It is a response to what God has made real in our hearts.
As our brother Lance mentioned last night, it is a walking. It is taking one step after another. It is not taking a plunge into the big pool. It is taking those simple steps, one after another, in obedience.
When we were asking for synonyms for faith, someone said obedience. Brothers and sisters, I think that simplifies it greatly.
I do not know what is happening to me in these latter years, but simplicity seems to be the thing I am most concerned about. God has made it so simple—not easy. Actually, it is impossible for us, but it is very simple.
Our brother Lance mentioned 1 John 5. Eternal life is in the Son. Listen to how simple it is: if you have the Son, you have life.
To me, I think four- or five-year-olds can understand that. But what has to happen is that we have to believe it. We have to act upon it. We have to have a response to that wonderful revelation that all we ever need for our lives is in the Lord Jesus Christ.
He is enough, and we are in Him. It is not just a single abiding, brothers and sisters. It is a double abiding. God wants to make sure you have access to everything you need.
Let me try to illustrate. I know I have used this illustration before, but you have to put up with it again.
Suppose I take my right hand and put it in my left hand. Which hand is in which hand? My right hand is in my left hand. If I change them, then I have my left hand in my right hand.
But what if my hands are clasped together? Which one is in which one? Is my right hand in my left hand, or is my left hand in my right hand? This is what the Lord wants us to know: it is both us in Him and Him in us.
That is faith’s response to the truth revealed to us: God has put us in His Son, and He has put His Son in us. Normal Christian living is no longer I, but Christ living in me.
Faith is what God requires of us. In Hebrews, we are told that without faith no one can please God. Faith is what God requires if we are going to experience anything from Him.
There has to be a faith response to what God has revealed of Himself.
Even in Romans 1, Paul points out that God has revealed Himself. He has revealed His nature. He has revealed His power. There are those who see God’s wonderful creation, and there is a responsibility.
I am going to leave it up to the Lord to decide how He will judge all of that. I do not know. I do not have to answer that question. The question I have to answer is: How do I respond to the revelation God has given to me in His Son? That is what faith is for me.
Many times, when we are trying to work out a definition, our minds go to Hebrews 11:1. Most of you know the verse:
Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.
Sometimes we say, “Well, that is what faith is.” I do not think so, brothers and sisters. I think the writer is telling us what faith does—how it works—not necessarily what it is.
For example, I can point out a car sitting in the parking lot and say, “It is a car.” But I have not told you how it works. I have not told you about the combustion engine, the pistons, the fuel injector, the cylinders, the compression, and the spark.
That is how a car works. I am sorry—that is very, very simple—but that is how it works. Yet that is not what the car is.
Faith is the response of our heart to what God has revealed to us. But what does faith do?
I like Darby’s translation of Hebrews 11:1. I admit that I do not read Brother Darby’s translation very much, but I like his translation of this verse:
Now faith is the substantiating of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
What does faith do? Faith takes that which is a spiritual reality in the Lord Jesus Christ and brings it down, making it a practical reality where we live every day.
We have to grow in our understanding of this, and we have to grow in putting it into practice. This is what James is concerned about: that we learn how to practically apply our faith in all the circumstances of life.
It is easy for me to say to you this morning, brothers and sisters, that all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in my Lord Jesus. It is easy for you to say amen. But it is not so easy to work that out in everyday living, when we go somewhere else to find our food and supply, even though it is all in Him.
How do we discover? How do we come into a knowing—not just theological or biblical knowing, but a knowing in the depth of our being—that in the Lord Jesus Christ is all the fullness of God, and that we do not need anything else?
This was something real in David’s heart in Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
What do I need, brothers and sisters? I do not need anything. David saw it.
But it has become very clear in the person of the Lord Jesus that God has placed everything we need for every situation in this life, and also for the age to come, in the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
Here we are. We are not there yet; we are still here. We are to live by faith, not by sight. Faith in whom? The focus of our faith is the Lord Jesus Christ alone.
You see how wonderfully simple the Lord has made it. This Book tells us about Him and how to get to know Him by the Holy Spirit.
It is not that we merely have faith in this Book. We believe it, and we have faith in that sense, but it always leads us to the person of the Lord Jesus Himself.
The fact is, brothers and sisters, that for many of us as God’s people, this is only a teaching or doctrine to which, to one degree or another, we can say amen. But the writer of Hebrews says faith brings it out of spiritual reality and makes it a very real, practical reality in everyday living.
Can I try to apply this in one area? Some of you can be dismissed from this—not completely, just a little bit. Let us take this whole matter of family life.
Have you ever asked yourself why Paul, in the Ephesian letter and the Colossian letter, takes us up to such great heights? Without Colossians, our understanding of the fullness of the Godhead being in Christ would not be quite as clear. Paul says it twice—in Colossians 1 and Colossians 2—that all the fullness is there.
He takes us up into the heavenly realm, but then suddenly he seems to plop us down right where we live every day—in our house: husbands and wives, parents and children, servants and masters.
Why? Because he wants us to understand that this heavenly vision is to have a practical manifestation where you live and how you live every day.
Husbands, do what? Love your wives. How? Is this merely theology—something that sounds like a nice teaching—or is it something the Lord expects to be a living reality in the homes of those He has redeemed?
How, my brothers and sisters? I ask you, brothers: where do you find that kind of love? If you have tried to pull it off on your own, you have already failed.
There is no resource outside the person of the Lord Jesus Christ where you will find the kind of love that enables you to love your wife as Christ loves the church.
When you lay hold of that resource and say, “Lord, I want You to flood my heart with the same love with which You love the church, and I commit to You that, by Your grace, I will love my wife that way,” do you know what He will do? He will turn the spigot wide open and let it flood in.
How about you, sisters? Sometimes the sisters feel that they get the short end of this thing—that they get the hard part. “Wives, submit to your husbands.”
Let me ask you a question, sisters. Do you think it is any easier for your husband to love you than it is for you to submit to your husband? Somehow we have this erroneous idea that it is easier for a husband to love his wife than it is for a wife to submit to her husband.
How can you submit? There is only one resource for it: in the Lord Jesus. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience. He became a man, a bond-servant, and was obedient unto death. You can find it only in Him.
You cannot play this game of saying it is easier for one or easier for the other. Some husbands say, “It is no big deal for my wife to submit to me. It is a major undertaking for me to love her, but it is no big deal for her to submit to me.”
But I suggest to you, brothers, think about what she is submitting to if you are not loving her as Christ loved the church.
It is an amazing thing to me that God identifies His throne as a throne of grace. When we think of a throne, we think of authority, power, and splendor. But in Hebrews 4:16, we are told:
Let us therefore draw near with boldness unto the throne of grace.
The way God rules in His kingdom is by love, not by barking out orders. Even though all authority is given to our Lord Jesus Christ, how does He lead us? He leads us by His love.
It is almost as though His commandments are suggestions. You have to learn to listen carefully with a heart willing to obey, so that you obey the suggestion. He does not have to raise His voice and become authoritative. If you are a love slave, you submit to Him.
This matter of faith can touch us and become real where we live every day: parents and children.
Parents—fathers—bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
My brothers, and some of you know this, some of our kids are not perfect. They create some big problems for us. We try to find some wisdom, some way of doing things that will make our kids turn out the right way.
Where is that resource? Parents, where can you be the kind of parents you are supposed to be? In the Lord Jesus.
How about it, kids? Mom and Dad make it tough at times. I know most of you are older here, but you understand what I am saying. Honor your mother and father.
There can be a relationship and an attitude of respect toward your mother and father all the way through. Where do you find that? You find it in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Faith lays hold of what is ours in Christ and brings it down to where we live every day.
When you read Hebrews 11 about all the people the writer mentions from past centuries, we sometimes refer to them as the heroes of faith.
If any of them were here today, they would say, “I am not a hero, and I was not a hero when all of this was going on.” Do you think Abraham would stand on this platform this morning and say, “Yes, I am a hero”? I do not think so.
These were just run-of-the-mill human beings, like you and me, to whom God revealed Himself. They responded to the revelation and to what God required.
Let us spend a few moments considering what I call different kinds of faith. It seems to me, as I have looked at it, that there are basically four kinds of faith:
Natural faith is something we use hundreds of times every day. Every one of you is using natural faith right now. You came in from wherever you were, walked over, and sat down in a chair.
You did not have to think about it much, but you are having faith in that chair. If you were not, you would be standing right now. If you did not think that chair would hold you up, you would go somewhere else. You would stand against the wall, or you would do something else.
But you believe that chair and trust that chair to hold your weight as you sit there. We do this hundreds of times every day.
When you had breakfast this morning, you probably did not think about it, but you put food in your mouth believing that your body would digest it, take the energy in the food, and transfer it to your body so that you could keep functioning.
You did not think about it, but you believed it, trusted it, had confidence in it, relied on it, and obeyed your urge to eat. It produced results.
Natural faith is something every one of us is born with, though we develop it along certain lines.
Then there is what we call supernatural faith. Brothers and sisters, there is a spiritual realm that is not visible to the human eye. It is invaded and controlled by spiritual beings who are one hundred percent antagonistic to the Lord and everything that has to do with Him.
We do not want to draw much attention to this today, but it is a reality. We are fools if we do not recognize that miracles can be performed by someone other than God.
There is a spiritual force able to accomplish what we call miracles—things in the supernatural realm.
When Moses and Aaron went down to deliver the children of Israel out of Egypt, Moses used his rod to perform miracles. Who else performed miracles? The magicians and sorcerers. They had a power and could reproduce the very things Moses did.
Living in our particular society, we can get numb and oblivious to what is happening around us. If you travel to certain countries in the world, it is much more evident that demonic forces are at work.
You can see people under their control. I remember being in Haiti many years ago, and somebody pointed out people walking like zombies. This person was so invaded by an evil spirit that he had no control over it. He was like a living dead man.
For most of us in America, we are sheltered from this kind of thing. But it is possible for people to put their trust in supernatural power, and it produces results. Sometimes we are deceived by it.
Supernatural faith produces supernatural results, but it is faith in the wrong place.
There is another kind of faith that I have chosen to call psychological faith. The place where I see this most evident is in professional sports.
What do they do before a game? They psych themselves up. What do they tell themselves? “We are the best. We can do it. We are the greatest.” Whatever.
But does it work, brothers and sisters? Yes, it works.
What happens today in professional sports is almost unbelievable. What some athletes can do with a basketball is unbelievable. What some guys can do with a golf ball is unbelievable, at least to me.
They spend hours thinking about it. Some professional golfers have their own private psychologists. What do they tell them? “You are the greatest. You can do it. You are number one.”
They believe it, and it produces results. But is it from the Lord? No.
There is another kind of faith that we find in the Scriptures, which I have chosen to call spiritual faith—biblical faith.
What is the source of this faith? Are you born with it? Can you purchase it? No. There is only one source: God Himself.
It is divine faith. It is the faith God Himself has, and He is working it into us so that we can properly respond to the revelation He has given us.
Our brother Lance mentioned Ephesians 2 last night. Let us look quickly there.
For by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
not of works, that no man should glory.
Now, look at verse 8. It says, “By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves.” The word that is a relative pronoun. It relates back to something else.
The question is: To what does it relate? Some say salvation. Some say grace. But for me, brothers and sisters, it is clear that it is by God’s grace.
It seems to me that Paul is saying that if by grace you have been saved through faith, then even the faith is not of yourselves. It is the gift of God.
Stop and think for a moment about your own experience. When you came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, where did that faith come from? Where did you get it? If you had it before, why did you not use it?
Will you allow me this morning to give my own experience? I risk doing this because, brothers and sisters, there is not one thing in my life that I can brag about.
There is no question in my mind that I was a number-one candidate for the grace of God. I had no religious background. My family never went to church.
They got involved one time with Jehovah’s Witnesses, but every time the Jehovah’s Witnesses showed up, I disappeared. I did not like it. I could not get involved.
I had no Christian background. I had never read the Bible one time in my life. I was twenty-three years old, in the Navy, and doing everything that people in the Navy do—better than anybody else.
One morning, at the urging of a man I worked with, I went to a little Baptist church. Some other guys and I would come in so hung over that we could not do our job. This man would cover for us so that we would not get kicked out of the Navy.
One day I went to him and said, “Rich, tell me, what is the deal?” He told me about his experience with the Lord Jesus. Then he said, “Why do you not go to this little church outside the gate?” So I went there.
Living in the United States, you hear about Jesus. You use His name—not in the way it ought to be used, but you use His name. I was guilty, brothers and sisters, very guilty, of that and a lot of other things.
But as I heard this simple little preacher preaching about Jesus, something started to happen inside me.
I found that I was not only seeing that Jesus died for me, but I found that inside me was a capacity to believe what the Word of God was saying.
Where did that come from? It did not come from Ernie Hough. It came through the working of the Holy Spirit, taking the Word of God, revealing Jesus to me, and through that creating in me a capacity to believe and to respond to what had been shown.
It was a little Baptist church that had folding chairs. My first time there, brothers and sisters, I knew nothing about going to church. I did not know the protocol. I did not know what you were supposed to do.
When the preacher finished preaching, he said, “Is there anybody here who would like to believe in the Lord Jesus?” I was sitting in the middle. I did not even go out into the aisle. I just spread the chairs apart and went right down the middle.
I wanted Him. I do not know why, but I was desperate. He simply told me about the Lord Jesus and asked if I wanted to invite Him into my life. I did.
How does faith substantiate? When did the Lord Jesus die for Ernie Hough? In 1958, on February 19? Is that when He died for him? No. He died for him two thousand years ago.
But it became real to me experientially when, through the faith God had created in me and through His showing me His Son, I put my faith in Him. Then it became a living reality for me.
Brothers and sisters, I can take no credit at all. None. Absolutely none.
I went home and lay on my face. I do not know for how long, but I cried until there were no more tears. I had no idea why I was crying. You have to understand: I understood nothing. I understood nothing.
Except I knew that something was happening in me. Where did this thing come from? It came by the grace of God. It was a gift produced in me.
Paul says in Romans 10:17:
So belief cometh of hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.
The Holy Spirit takes the truth of God’s Word and breathes upon it so that it becomes something that gets inside you. It produces faith.
We were not born with it. We cannot do anything to earn it. It is an absolute gift from the Lord.
Romans 12:3 speaks of God having allotted to each one a measure of faith. The source of this faith is God Himself.
You want more faith? Where are you going to get it? He is going to have to produce it. But you find out, brothers and sisters, that the more you use what you already have, the more the Lord is always producing in you.
Maybe, Lord willing, on Sunday we will fellowship a little about this matter of living faith—how God worked it out in Abraham in a wonderful way.
What is the focus of our faith? If the Lord creates faith in us, where does He want us to place that faith? In whom are we to have confidence? Upon whom are we to rely? In whom are we to abide?
Again, He has made it very simple: in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Certainly, we can say that we need to have faith in God. But who is He? Who is the Lord Jesus Christ? He is one hundred percent God.
He said, “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” They are one.
I know that perhaps your mind can work all of that out, but mine cannot. I do not have to work it out, because if I somehow work it out mentally, it only creates bigger problems.
But if I can simply believe what God is making real to me in my heart, then things happen. God comes in and does what only He can do.
God Himself, in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit, is our focus—one place, and one place only.
Hebrews 12:2 says:
Looking unto Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
It began there and is supposed to finish there. It means that through the whole journey, the focus is in one place.
You see how simple God has made it—how wonderfully simple. You focus on Him, just on Him.
He will lead us to know the Father. He will pour out His Holy Spirit. He will do all that we need, but He is the focus.
For a few moments, let us talk about what we are supposed to talk about: the testing of faith. It took us a long time to get here, did it not?
Let us ask the question first of all: Why does our faith need to be tested? Is it for our good or for God’s information?
If I read my Bible correctly, He does not need to be informed about the condition of my faith. He already knows. He knows everything that is ever going to happen to me. He knows my thoughts even before I think them.
He knows everything. He is all-knowing. He is omniscient. That means He knows everything eternally, simultaneously, presently. He knows everything.
The testing of our faith is not for Him. Sometimes we think, “The reason God is testing us is to see whether or not we will fail.” No, my brothers and sisters.
It is never in God’s heart for us to fail. Sometimes He has to let us make great big mistakes. This is one of His testing methods.
Our brother was speaking about Abraham’s journey down to Egypt. He did not have to go there, but he had to go there. He had to learn that going the wrong way is the wrong way.
I know some of you are so perfect that you never have to go the wrong way, but I am telling you, I am an expert at going the wrong way—in a hurry. I am the first one to go the wrong way.
The testing of our faith is for our benefit.
When you consider Abraham, how did he originally get faith? How did he have the faith to leave Ur of the Chaldeans and go out to a place he had never been? He went out looking for a city he had never seen, but he did see it by revelation.
How did Abraham have faith? The Lord of glory appeared to him. He was not following his own dream. He was following that vision of the Lord that he had seen, seeking to be obedient to what he understood was the next step.
In Genesis 22, God tested Abraham so that Abraham would come to know something more of God.
What did God want Abraham to discover about Himself by saying, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest”? Abraham’s son had been given miraculously. Abraham had nothing to do with it. When he tried to do something himself, he made one great big mess.
What was the Lord trying to produce in Abraham when Genesis 22:1 says that God tested Abraham? Did He want Abraham to fail? Absolutely not.
It seems to me that the reason God tests our faith is to bring us into a deeper knowing of Him that will produce a greater faith in Him.
When God appeared to Abraham in Genesis 17, Abraham was ninety-nine years old. How long had it been since the Lord had appeared to Abraham? Thirteen years. How old was Ishmael? Thirteen years.
Do you suppose it may be that the Lord was grieved that Abraham tried to pull it off on his own? God had made a promise and covenant to him, but Abraham went ahead and listened to his wife and did it her way rather than the Lord’s way.
When the Lord came to Abraham on that occasion, how did He identify Himself?
I am God Almighty; walk before Me, and be thou perfect.
It is as though the Lord was saying, “I am God Almighty, and I do not need your help. When I am going to do something, I will do it. If you try to help, you will only create a mess. You need to learn to wait on Me and follow Me step by step.”
For thirteen years, and then the Lord appeared. You would think the Lord would be so irritated with Abraham that He would say, “Okay, Abraham, that is the end. That is it.”
But what does the writer of Hebrews say about Abraham when he was ready to plunge the knife into his son Isaac? He says Abraham believed that God was able to raise him from the dead.
God wanted Abraham to know that He is the God of resurrection. Abraham did not know that before. This is why God tested his faith, and this is why the Lord tests our faith.
He wants us to go on from step to step, from knowing what we know now experientially into knowing something more experientially.
It would be wonderful if you and I were such good students and faithful followers that we would simply go forward naturally. But, brothers and sisters, unless you are different from me, you know what the Lord has to use:
Count it all joy, my brethren, when ye fall into manifold temptations.
It seems to me that ninety-nine point nine percent of us will only go forward when God makes it difficult for us to stay where we are.
Why does He test us? Because He wants us to know Him. He wants us to know Him in a fuller way. He knows our tendency to pitch our tent here.
Peter said on the Mount of Transfiguration, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three tabernacles.” He probably had an idea of putting a little tent on the side for himself, James, and John. But the word was to go home.
What was the cry of Paul’s heart at the end of his life?
I count all things to be loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but refuse, that I may gain Christ.
Without God’s arranging the circumstances of our lives to get us out of being at ease and move us into new ground, it requires trials, problems, suffering, disappointment, failures—even big failures.
I am speaking for myself, okay? But if I am able to assess the situation at all, the greatest lessons I have learned about my Lord, I have learned lying flat on my face in utter failure, only able to cry because of my failure.
But I am so glad this morning that He did not allow me to stay there. He taught me something about myself. He taught me that the Lord Jesus was right when He said, “Apart from Me ye can do nothing.”
You can try to pull it off, but unless you do it out of abiding in Him, you are a failure. The Lord wants to teach us that and bring us into a deeper, richer, fuller, clearer, more wonderful knowing of who He is and what He is able to do.
It seems to me that there are no coincidences in the lives of God’s children. They are sovereignly watched by our heavenly Father.
Either He permits them or He designs them. Some things He does not design; they are already there, and He lets us walk through them. Others He designs.
What about the people in your life? Could they teach you anything about Him? What about the disappointments you experience at the hands of people in your life, especially your brothers and sisters in Christ?
I want to say to you this morning, my brothers and sisters, nobody has ever hurt me as deeply as my precious brothers and sisters in the body of Christ.
What do we learn? We learn that our Lord is Lord. We learn that He is faithful. We learn that He cannot fail us. We learn that He is infinite love.
In the midst of it all, He is there, testing us so that we will move on to a new dimension—a larger dimension, hopefully—of trusting Him and knowing Him.
He uses these different methods to accomplish it. But in James 1:12, the last verse we read, we find:
Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he hath been approved, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord promised to them that love Him.
When you go through the Scriptures and see where people are identified as blessed, it is an interesting thing to consider.
James says that the man who perseveres under trial is a blessed man—not merely someone who has received some blessings, but a blessed man. God has blessed him.
God has blessed him by allowing, or ordaining, that he go through what may seem to him an impossible situation and come out on the other end with a greater knowing of God than he had before.
If our brother Job were standing here this morning and I said, “Job, tell us about your experience,” what do you think he would say?
I think he might say something like I said about being in the Navy: “It was a good experience, but I do not want to do it over again.”
But you know what Job said at the end, after all the dealings of God in his life?
I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear;
but now mine eye seeth Thee.
I think he would say to us, “I would not trade anything for that experience, because it brought me into a knowing of God that was not mine before I went through it.”
The Lord is so wonderfully in love with us that He tailor-makes our trials and our difficulties.
Brother, you are not married to the wrong woman. Sister, you did not marry the wrong man. Young people, you do not have the wrong parents.
Parents, listen to me: you did not get the wrong kids. You have what you needed.
Let us see it as God’s loving hand at work in us, putting us in places where, through the testing of our faith, we discover that God is who He says He is.
Lord, we do thank You so very much today for Your love. We have to admit that our understanding is tremendously limited.
But we thank You that we are growing to know more about Your loving heart, and that everything You permit and everything You ordain for our lives comes out of Your heart of love for us.
Thank You for being so merciful to us, creating in us this ability to respond to what You show us of Yourself.
Lord, we admit that our faith is weak and that it needs strengthening. We understand that our knowledge of You needs to increase.
Lord, would You take us right where we are today and help us understand that You are at work in our lives, producing us to be like Your Son and teaching us to walk in obedience to You? We ask it in Jesus’ name.