And then some verses in the second chapter of James.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes; to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.”
For this reason it is by faith, that it might be in accordance with grace, in order that the promise may be certain to all the descendants, not only to those who are of the Law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all.
As it is written, “A father of many nations have I made thee”—in the sight of Him Whom he believed, even God, Who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.
In hope against hope he believed, in order that he might become a father of many nations, according to that which had been spoken, “So shall thy descendants be.”
And without becoming weak in faith he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb.
Yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief, but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what He had promised, He was able also to perform.
Therefore it was reckoned to him as righteousness.
What use is it, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has no works? Can that faith save him?
If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?
Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.
But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”
You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder.
But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless?
Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he offered up Isaac his son on the altar?
You see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected; and the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” and he was called the friend of God.
You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.
And in the same way was not Rahab the harlot also justified by works, when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way?
For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.
Let us ask the Lord to help us.
Father, we thank You that You have made a way for us to come right into Your presence. Lord, even in Your Word, You have instructed us to come into Your throne room and there to petition You in regard to grace.
This Saturday afternoon, and probably for some of us, is a difficult time to be in a meeting like this. But, Lord, we thank You that You have promised that where two or more have gathered together into Your name, You would be there.
We do not believe, Lord, that this was just the idea of a group of people. We believe that it is Your Spirit that has drawn us together. We are gathered in Your name, and we believe that You have originated this gathering. Therefore, we recognize You as being here this afternoon and as being our portion.
Lord, we have already this morning looked into Your Word and fellowshipped about this matter of grace. Your grace is always sufficient. So, by faith, right now we want to appropriate the grace that we need: grace to speak, grace to hear, and grace to respond to You as You are here by Your Spirit, seeking to minister Your life and love to us.
So, Lord, we cast ourselves fully upon You, thanking You that as we do, we know that Your Holy Spirit will undertake and will keep us awake, aware, and alive to You. We thank You for doing it, in Your name. Amen.
We saw this morning in Genesis that God was involved in the process of creating man. We looked a little bit at the method, or process, that He went through with the creation of man. But there is another question related to that which I feel would be good for us to consider for a moment or two. What do you suppose was in the heart of God that motivated Him to create man?
When you stop and look back over the centuries of all the heartaches that man has brought to God, I think it is a legitimate question to ask: Why did God ever even engage in this process of creating man? There must have been something very, very important to God that allowed Him to go ahead and engage in this matter of creating man, realizing all that was going to happen through those whom He created.
I think the answer that comes to me is that it was really God’s desire and God’s design that there would be those who would share life with God as He knew it.
When we think about eternity past, we have to trust the Holy Spirit to help us. But I think we ultimately have to come to a place of realizing that in eternity past there were only three Persons in the whole universe. Actually, there was only One, but Three. There was God: “In the beginning, God.”
As we have come to understand, God is three Persons and yet one. So what we have in eternity past is a perfect fellowship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. They had this beautiful, harmonious relationship with one another.
But it seems to me—and I hope you will bear with me and try to think with me—as They experienced this beautiful fellowship with one another, They confronted a real problem. At the very essence, or the very foundation, of this relationship was the very nature of God Himself: God is love.
Now, the kind of love that God is, when it is given opportunity to express itself, must give itself away. In other words, it cannot be content merely to be in relationship with itself. So the kind of love, the kind of nature, that God has in Himself required that He find a legitimate, righteous way of extending this fellowship that existed between the three members of the Godhead.
So when God said, “Let Us make man in Our own image, according to Our own likeness,” it seems to me that the Lord was engaging in the process of extending this fellowship that existed between the members of the Godhead.
When He created Adam and Eve, and created man in His own image, He also created man with the capacity to be in fellowship with Him. What the Scriptures mean by fellowshipping with God is actually being partakers—participating in the very life that God has in Himself. We talked this morning about the zoe, the very foundation of God’s being. God wants man to enter in, participate, share in, and become partners in this life that God has.
Certainly, there is an activity in which God is interested. Basically, I think we can very simply say it is the matter of establishing His kingdom—that is, for His will to be carried out throughout the entire universe.
There is an activity in which God is engaged, but that activity can only be energized by the life that God has in Himself. In other words, what God does is energized by the life that He has, the same way that what we do is energized by the life within us. If there is no life in us, we are not doing anything. And so it is with God.
God wants to bring us into the activity of what He is doing in terms of the kingdom. But He also very much wants us to be partakers of His life. It is the only way that we can effectively and legitimately involve ourselves with the activity God is doing: we must have God’s life in us.
When we look at the Lord Jesus during His ministry here on earth, especially in the record we have in John’s Gospel, we find His testimony: “I only do what I see My Father doing. I only speak that which I hear My Father speaking.” In other words, He never did anything or said anything independently of the life of God that was within Him.
Again, it is hard for us to keep this before us because we have so much history behind us. But if we can remember that this is what God wanted with Adam and with all the descendants of Adam, including you and me, He wanted us to have the kind of life that we see in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Many of us are willing, somehow, to allow the Lord Jesus to be something of a model for us, but we somehow conclude that we will never, ever attain to that kind of life, that kind of experience, that we see in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yet I think it really is God’s design to do such a work in us that the outcome will be that we will live the kind of life manifested in the Lord Jesus Christ during His earthly stay here upon this planet.
So God created man with the intention that man would fellowship with God, that he would share with God all that God is and share with God all that He is engaged in doing.
From God’s perspective, after having created man—which we have to say is a manifestation of His mercy to begin with, because outside of His love there was nothing that required Him to make such a decision and carry out such an act—He created man in His own image and for fellowship with Him.
There is this extension of God to us. He is the uncreated Being, the Creator, and He is extending to creatures the opportunity to enter into life on the same level that He knows it. Now, brothers, I do not know how we define such action, but to me, that is grace.
He freely says to us, “I want you to be one of My children, a member of My family. I want you to have My life in you, and I want you to live life, beginning at the moment you receive it, throughout the ages to come. I want you to begin to experience life on the same level that I do.” That is grace.
Since we are fellowshipping about this matter of experiencing the abundant life that Jesus has come to bring us, we see it from God’s vantage point as a matter of God extending His grace to us. But there is something required of us: How do we bring into our own experience the reality of what God is prepared to give us?
Here, I think, the issue of faith begins to come into focus. To me, it is like having two magnets. When I was a teenager, maybe even a little younger, we had these little dogs that were magnets with opposite poles. When you put them together, they would either spin around and come together, or they would repel one another.
It seems to me that in this matter of grace and faith, we have God’s magnet of love drawing on us. Yet there has to be this response on our part to that drawing in order to bring us into union and fellowship with God. Faith is our response to the drawing of God’s grace. When the two come together, a wonderful transaction occurs.
For instance, in Ephesians 2:8, we read that by grace we have been saved through faith. It is not grace without faith, and it is not faith without grace; it is the two working together. On one side, God is extending His grace; on the other side, man responds in faith to that which God is offering. The result is that God’s will begins to be realized.
When we look at these verses we have read this afternoon in Romans and in the Epistle of James, we begin to see that God intended for us to be men and women who are always living by faith.
If we go back to that situation with Adam, until just recently I never thought of Adam in terms of him living by faith. I usually thought about faith as something necessary to get me saved. But for Adam to enter into life as God was offering it to him, it would have been necessary for Adam to put his faith to work.
How would he have done that in that particular situation, in the garden? He would have eaten of the tree of life. They did put their faith to work, but they put their faith in the wrong tree, and the results were very evident.
From the very beginning, God created us with the understanding that the only way we could really experience life with Him was for us to put faith to work. The result would be that God’s life would come from Himself and become our experience. Thus, we would begin to live life on the level that He has.
Notice what the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:17: “The righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.” In the previous verse, Paul has made a statement about the gospel—the good news, the message from God. This good news, when it is believed, produces salvation. That salvation is experienced by those who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
To me, the righteousness of God is somehow coming to grips with an understanding of life as God initially intended it. God is a righteous God; therefore, He always does what is right. It would have been the right thing for Adam to do to eat of the tree of life, and that would have produced a result in his life.
But Adam ate of the other tree. God has had to work a work of redemption in order to make it possible for man to be reinstated, brought right back into what He originally intended. The gospel, the good news, is that God in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, has done everything necessary to bring us back into that original intention.
When we put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the first thing that happens, as I understand it, is that we are given a righteous standing before God. God takes all our sins, all our acts of disobedience, all our rebellion, all our independent living, and cancels it out.
He removes it as far from us as the east is from the west. He intentionally forgets it. He cancels it out, not only in terms of the record but in terms of His memory. He no longer remembers it. When we put our faith in the Lord Jesus, God accepts us before Him as one of His, just as if we had never sinned.
That is what Romans 5:1 means: “Having been justified by faith.” To be justified and to be declared righteous are the same thing. It is an official, judicial act carried out by a judge toward a person who has been accused of a crime. If the heart of the judge can be satisfied, then he can pronounce an acquittal.
But God goes even further than that. He declares a justification. It is not like you were a person who was guilty and your sin has merely been forgiven while the record remains. Justification means that God embraces you and makes you one of His in such a way that He no longer treats you as a forgiven sinner. He treats you as if you had never sinned.
This was brought about by a response of faith in what God has done in His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. It was not done on the basis of who we were born to, our heritage, or the good works we have accomplished. It was done by a simple act of believing, trusting, and faith in God.
God now says, “You are perfect. You are absolutely acceptable to Me,” because He sees us in His Son.
After having this initial experience of being justified by faith, notice what Paul says in his quotation from the Old Testament: “The righteous man shall live by faith.” Romans 5:1 says, “Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God,” but now the justified man shall live by faith.
It is true that in the Lord Jesus Christ the grace of God has been made fully available to anyone who will receive it. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave.” That is His grace. He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
God offers His grace, and for those who receive it, it becomes theirs as a gift. They have forgiveness of sins and the impartation of the life of God as an act of God’s grace.
But here is where I think the crucial point comes for many of us as children of God. We put so much emphasis on what God has done in terms of our forgiveness and causing us to be born again that, sometimes, this becomes the whole issue.
The whole issue becomes whether or not I am going to go to heaven or go to hell. That becomes the only issue in which people are interested. Now, dear people of God, God is interested in something greater than just that.
Certainly, salvation has to be part of the whole experience. But God’s heart is to bring us to the place of maturity, the fullness of being conformed to the image of His Son. Being born again and having our sins forgiven, as marvelous and glorious as that is, is only the beginning.
We need to be careful not to settle merely for the beginning work. I do not mean to be unkind, but so much of Christianity today is preoccupied with that beginning experience. It would be like having, in the whole world, only a pediatric ward or an obstetrical ward. All you care about is getting people born. After they are born, you do not care about their education or anything else.
Most of evangelical Christianity is preoccupied with getting people born again. I hope you do not misunderstand what I am saying. But there needs to be focus as well upon what happens to people after they have had that initial experience.
Being born again is only an initial, momentary experience, but you have a whole life in front of you spiritually. Here is where I feel we need to look at this matter of faith, because it is a matter of going from faith to faith to faith.
The same way that God gives grace upon grace upon grace, even though God offers it, unless faith responds to it, you will not see the results of it. God does not force His grace. Grace cannot be forced.
There are those who would argue with us about this whole matter of predestination, that God has what they call a double-barreled predestination: some are predestined to hell, some are predestined to be saved, and nobody can change it. Somehow, I do not believe our God is that arbitrary.
I think there is an issue involved in the act of the human will. God can offer me something, but He so respects my ability to choose that He will not violate it. He will come at me from every possible angle, make the truth clear, and make the grace available. But when it comes right down to it, I am the one who must choose whether I am prepared to receive it and accept it.
The moment I do, then it becomes mine in experience. But unless faith is at work in someone’s life, it is almost as if God’s reservoir of grace is locked up to me.
When I come with a key, put it in, twist it, and open it up, then the grace becomes readily available. This needs to be an ongoing experience for the child of God.
We were talking this morning about getting to the place where we try to get by without the grace of God. That hymn we sang right at the end this afternoon says, “O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be.”
On the other side of it, some of us get tired of putting our faith to work. We wonder why the results are not showing up in our lives. Again, it is an ongoing process of God offering the grace and a faith response on my part in order to make the grace a reality.
That is why the Word of God instructs and encourages us to go from faith to faith. It is progressive. It is something we will be experiencing, expressing, and working at on into the age to come. Faith is not something that is going to go out of style, or something for which we will come to a place of having no need.
It is so important to settle the issue that we desperately need the grace of God. But, on the other hand, we need to be putting our faith to work so that we find out experientially what the grace of God is seeking to accomplish in our lives.
Maybe we need to ask ourselves, then, what is faith? Faith is one of those words we find difficult to define and explain. But let me throw out a few words that may give us an idea of what is involved in faith: trust, belief, obedience, following Christ, running the race with endurance, and praying the prayer of faith.
So often we think about faith in terms of something mental. But when the Scriptures talk about believing, where is this believing taking place? “If we confess with our mouth Jesus Christ as Lord, and believe in our heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, we will be saved.”
The believing involved in faith is something going on in here, not merely here. That does not mean the mind is not involved, but you have to be careful with your mind. If you are simply going to proceed on the basis of intellectual analysis, you will probably fail to put your faith to work.
If you had been in the boat with Simon Peter when he walked on the water, and Peter had gone through an intellectual analysis of that situation, he would never have gotten out of the boat. Something was operating in Simon Peter that was greater than his intellectual power. It enabled him to get out of the boat and start walking on the water with the Lord. It was his faith.
Noah obeyed God and built an ark out in the middle of the desert, where there was no water. Following Christ is an expression of faith—putting our faith to work. Running the race with endurance is an expression of faith. Praying the prayer of faith is an expression of faith.
Why do you talk to Somebody you cannot see? People put people in places with straitjackets on for doing that. Yet here is Somebody you do not see and have never seen with your eyes, and you talk to Him. Are we putting on a religious show, or are we really talking to Somebody?
That is faith. Praying is the ability to speak to Someone in another realm, Whom we do not see with these eyes, and yet He is more real to us than the things we see.
Spiritual warfare is also an expression of faith. I have never seen an evil spirit, but I know they exist. I know that when we do war with them in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, they have to get on their horses and run. But, you see, as an expression of faith, it is putting our faith to work.
Usually, when we as human beings think about or talk about faith, we are not necessarily talking about biblical faith. We can put faith to work in a number of different realms.
Every one of us, hundreds of times every day, puts faith to work. You are doing it right this moment. You are sitting on a chair made of material composed of atoms. How in the world do you know the thing will hold you up?
Did you go through a process before you sat down on that chair? Did you analyze it? No, you naturally put your faith in that thing because you have done it before, seen others doing it, and know that a chair is for sitting on. You put all your weight on that chair, and there you are, sitting right there now, trusting that chair. Otherwise, you would be standing—and then you would have problems with the floor.
How about breathing? We just finished eating a meal. How did you know what was going to happen to the food you ate? You put faith in your physical body to take in the food, digest it, and distribute nutrition throughout your body.
We do this many, many times every day. But I want to say to us that this is not biblical faith. That is what we might call natural faith.
It is healthy for us to realize that there is a realm beyond the natural. It is called the supernatural, and it is populated by spiritual beings that cannot be seen with the physical eye. There are powers and forces at work there. Whenever human beings put their faith in that power and operation, results come in their lives.
The whole realm of parapsychology and the occult demonstrates this. We need to get our heads out of the sand, brothers and sisters. These things work.
In this country, by comparison with other parts of the world, we have not been as overrun by this whole thing as other cultures have been. But it is becoming more and more a reality here too: Satan worship, occult practices, and parapsychology. It has even been brought into the church.
There have been those who parade themselves as followers of God who have been involved in nothing but parapsychology. We have this whole thing of channeling going on today. We need to understand that it works, but it is not God.
There is a realm of functioning beyond the human, beyond the natural, that can have an impact on human experience. Yet it comes from a realm beyond the natural.
We might categorize another realm of faith as the psychological realm. When God created man, He created him with a tremendous capacity. Adam had the innate ability to name all the animals. I cannot even pronounce some of those words, yet when an animal came up to Adam, he had the innate ability to give it a name.
There was an innate power within him to do marvelous things. When we look around this world in which we live, we see that man is able to accomplish fantastic feats—the bridges that have been built, the buildings. Who has been up on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan? One hundred and ten stories. It is really something.
Some people have learned how to focus on some of this innate power. Professional athletes, for instance, may spend a day psyching themselves up before a major game. What they are really saying is, “I have an ability to go beyond what is normally thought possible in human experience.”
They focus on themselves and their abilities. The process brings about a release of power within them that enables them to go beyond the normal and engage in activity that causes them to do things other people cannot do without going through that process.
Have you ever heard of the power of positive thinking? Does it work? Does it work, brothers and sisters? It works. But the question is, is it Christian? Does it have an origin in God, or does it have an origin someplace else? It has its origin in man.
We do not see our Lord Jesus functioning on the basis of the power of positive thinking. Yet all of this has found its way into the Christian church. We put Christian dress on it and present it in such a way that many people accept it as part of the gospel.
But if you look at it closely, you discover that the focus of psychological faith is in man himself and not in God. People who do not know God can carry out these kinds of things.
I think one of the greatest threats to the Christian faith is humanism—Christian humanism, not pagan humanism. This whole so-called faith movement, “name it and claim it,” “blab it and grab it,” whatever they call it, is Christian humanism.
If you look at it, it really has its focus on your ability to put your faith in your faith, and on your faith in the gospel to do the impossible.
We have the natural realm, where we experience results when we exercise faith. We have the supernatural realm. We also have the psychological realm. But then we come to the spiritual realm: biblical faith.
If we want results from God, if we want to experience life from God, if we want to come to know God in fellowship with Him, then the only faith we can put into practice that brings those kinds of results is spiritual faith.
When we look in the Word of God, this faith has its origin in God Himself. Look with me at Romans 12.
For through the grace given to me I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.
Where did our faith come from? Were you born with it? Did you produce it? Or was it given to you as a gift from God?
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.
You will notice in that verse: “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves.” What is it that is not of yourselves? The faith. We know grace is not of ourselves, and we know salvation is not of ourselves. The faith is a gift from God.
In other words, the capacity to receive and bring God’s grace into our experience was given to us as a gift from God. This ought to be good news to us, because somehow we have put in our thinking that faith is something we have to manufacture, something we have to be born with, or something we have to get from someplace. But it is actually an expression of God’s grace as well.
The whole thing is grace. God has to be the Author of the faith that we use to take His grace. I hope we see this circle, this cycle: it is really the whole matter of God at work in this process.
The faith God requires of us has to be an activity of God on God’s part. You will remember also Romans 10:17: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.”
I do not know what your experience was, how you were brought to the place where you had faith to believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins. But I want to tell you how it happened to me, as an illustration of God bringing about faith in our lives.
I had grown up and, to the best of my knowledge, had never had a Bible in my hands. I had gone to Sunday school one time in my life, did not like it, and vowed never to go back again. I was on a fast downhill plunge, making my life a big mess.
I ended up in this little church in Pensacola, Florida. For the first time in my life, I heard the gospel being preached. As I sat there and heard the Word of God, the gospel came into my heart. Something began to happen inside my heart: I found myself with an ability, a capacity, to believe what the man was saying.
The wonderful thing for me was that I finally came to the place where I had the faith necessary to believe what the man said. I took what was created inside of me and believed what the man said, and a wonderful thing took place. I received the Lord Jesus Christ. I was forgiven of my sins. I was born again.
But it was brought about through the working of His Word, which created in me a faith to believe what God was saying about His Son. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.
We also discover in 1 Corinthians 12 that faith is one of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Along with the other manifestations, faith is something the Holy Spirit takes as part of the very life of God and transmits and deposits in the heart of certain people in the body of Christ.
There may be a situation where an assembly of the Lord’s people is faced with something and needs faith beyond the normal. They need to rise to an occasion they do not normally experience. As they pray and seek the Lord, somebody in their midst may have, as a gift from God, an ability to believe God to do that thing.
They vocalize it, everybody else says amen, and we see the results. But it was the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we put a star beside that person’s name and give him a lot of credit, but in reality it was the Holy Spirit who was doing it.
I do not know whether that takes the sweat out of it for you, but it takes the sweat out of it for me to realize that I do not have to manufacture the faith necessary to believe God. Even faith is a gift from Him.
That does not give us liberty to be lazy in the use of our faith. It is very clear in the passage concerning Abraham in Romans 4 that Abraham was faced with a situation. God told him that he would have a son and that his descendants would be greater than the stars of heaven and the sands of the seashore.
But here he was, a hundred years old, and his wife was in her nineties. Naturally speaking, there was no way they could have children. If Abraham had stopped and merely taken stock of the situation, analyzed it, and stood in the face of the promise of God, he might have yielded to unbelief.
But faith is an inward response from the deepest part of our being, our spirit, responding to the promise of God and standing in the face of all appearances, believing God to come through.
Our faith becomes strong when we do not allow it to be weakened or cave in under pressure because of what things look like on the outside, in the natural. There is this matter of learning to take the faith God has already wrought in our hearts, standing firm with it, believing God to come through, and watching Him do it.
We do not have to manufacture that kind of faith. It is simply being true—that is, exercising what we already have. Once God puts faith into our lives, the way it becomes strong is by using it.
When Abraham came to the situation where God promised that he would be the father of many nations, that was not the first time he was asked to believe God. The first time was back at Ur of the Chaldees.
Had Abraham stayed back in Ur of the Chaldees and not gone out looking for the land and the city, chances are he would not have been able to trust God in the later situation. There is something to be said for going ahead and moving on the level of faith we have at any given point.
Romans 12 tells us not to think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think, but as God has allotted to every man a measure of faith. If we operate on that level, the exercise of faith at that level enables us, next time, to move up to another level. That is why it is from faith to faith to faith.
In the Gospel accounts, we see a progression of faith in various people. When people came to the Lord Jesus, there were different faith responses from different people.
In regard to the source of our faith, let us understand that it comes from God. It needs to be used and exercised. It needs to be something in which we are always living.
That is why He said, “The righteous man shall live by faith.” Living is not something you do in spurts. Living is something you do all the time. If every once in a while you died, came back to life, died again, and came back again, that would not be living. Living is continuous.
The righteous man shall live by faith. There ought to be this attitude and faith response from the heart of every child of God toward God, bringing the reality of His grace into our experience on an ongoing basis.
Let us think for a few moments about where our faith is focused.
In Mark 11, the Lord Jesus had been trying to teach His disciples various lessons. He wanted to communicate something concerning the nation of Israel and their lack of response to Him.
They came to a fig tree and did not find any figs on it. The Lord Jesus cursed that fig tree and said that no one would ever pick figs from it again. Less than twenty-four hours later, the Lord Jesus and the disciples walked past that same fig tree, and Peter said, “Look, this tree is withered. It is dried up from the roots to the top in less than twenty-four hours.”
The Lord spoke to it and cursed the tree. Within twenty-four hours, the tree had withered and died. It was an indictment against the nation of Israel because of its lack of faith response to Him as Messiah.
But the interesting thing is that when Peter pointed this out to the Lord Jesus, the Lord said to Simon Peter and the rest of the disciples, “Have faith in God.” That is a striking response.
He went on to explain that whatever you believe in your heart and say with your mouth will become yours. When He had spoken to that fig tree and cursed it, He did it in faith, believing that God would bring about the result.
He did not come that night and cut the roots off the tree or pour herbicide on it to kill it. He believed God to do what He said, and He did.
The Lord Jesus said that if you say to this mountain, “Be taken up and cast into the sea,” and do not doubt in your heart but believe that what you say is going to happen, it will happen.
The only way we can do that is not by having faith in our faith, or even faith in what we are saying, but by having faith in the God Who will do it according to what He says.
We are not going to get God by the arm and twist Him, forcing Him to do something for us. Sometimes this whole matter of faith is taught as though we can force God to do something for us. God is not going to get into that.
Faith, first of all, has to be acted upon on the basis of truth—revealed truth. It cannot be merely some arbitrary thing you and I decide we want done, then say it, and God has to do it.
Take Matthew 18: “If two of you shall agree on earth concerning anything.” Does God put Himself in a position where, if you and I agree to do something, God has to do it? That is not what the passage says.
If you look at it carefully, it says, “If two of you shall agree on earth.” Agree with Whom? Agree with Him. If we find our hearts harmonized with His and in harmony with one another, then we can expect results.
But do you think God is going to put into our hands the ability to say anything we want, simply by getting another person to agree with us? You see it happening everywhere: “Will you agree with me in prayer about this matter?”
I want to, but I cannot until, first of all, God causes my heart to agree with His heart. That is what He wants. If we ask Him anything according to His will, certainly. But we cannot force God. Faith is not forcing God to do what we want Him to do.
I think it must offend God, at times, for us to communicate to Him that we want things done right more than He does. It is almost as though God looked at a situation and was not concerned, had no compassion, and we had to convince Him to become compassionate.
That is not the problem, brothers and sisters. The problem is that we need to understand God’s heart and mind about a given situation.
Take, for example, John 5. The Lord Jesus went to a pool called the Pool of Bethesda. At this pool, apparently there was an activity going on where an angel would come and stir the water periodically. The first person into the water after it had been stirred would be healed.
Now get the picture. All around this pool were people with mangled bodies, all kinds of diseases, and every sort of condition. There was a man lying there who had been there for thirty-eight years.
The Lord Jesus walked into the scene, addressed this one man, and asked what might be considered a foolish question: “Do you want to be made whole?”
The man said, “Sure I do, but every time the water gets stirred, somebody else gets into the water before I do.” The Lord Jesus spoke to him and said, “Take up your bed and walk.” He did not have to get into the water.
But the interesting thing is, brothers and sisters, that we could accuse our Lord Jesus of a lack of compassion. He healed that one man, walked out, and healed nobody else. Why? Because that is what His Father told Him to do.
I cannot explain it. I know that is what He did. As charismatics, we would have set up our tent right there and still be there praying. Do not misunderstand: God completely cares about people. He cares about their condition.
But we cannot accuse God of lacking compassion and concern for people because of the kind of action that we might take. If our Lord Jesus said, “I only do what I see My Father doing,” then it seems to me that we need to follow in His footsteps and learn how to do the same.
If the Lord tells us to set up our camp, then we set up our camp. But if He does not, we do not take it upon ourselves.
Jesus said very clearly, “Have faith in God.” That is what will bring the results. You can put your faith in the occult realm and get results. You can put faith in yourself and get results. You can put faith in natural things around you and get results.
But if we are looking for spiritual results, there is only one place on which we can focus our attention: God Himself. The Lord Jesus said in John 14, “You believe in God, believe also in Me.”
We need, brothers and sisters, to learn how, in a sense, to put blinders on our spiritual eyes so that we focus on the Lord.
We have to be careful about this in our prayer times too. Sometimes we can get to the place where we have more confidence in the prayers we have offered than we do in the God Who is supposed to hear our prayers.
We can be taken up by the beauty and symmetry of the words of our prayers rather than really touching the heart of God and knowing that our focus is on Him.
Let us be careful that when we come to pray, we are not praying to sound good to one another. Hopefully, we are not praying to impress one another. We are praying so as to touch the very heart of God and look to Him for the results.
I remember quite a few years ago someone telling a little story that illustrates the point. An area of the country had been without rain for a few months, and the situation was getting very desperate.
They announced a prayer meeting at the local church. As people were starting off for the meeting, a young girl, about eighteen or nineteen years old, walked out of the house carrying an umbrella.
Someone asked, “Why are you taking an umbrella? We are going to pray.”
She said, “I am going to ask the Lord for rain.”
Everybody else walked out without an umbrella, but she took hers because she expected a result. She did not just go there to go through the religious motions of prayer. She expected a result.
That is what I am trying to point out: we need to learn how to focus our faith in God Himself.
There is a verse in Ephesians 3 that ought to bring us back again and again to the right focus:
Now unto Him Who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.
Now unto Him. We focus our prayer and faith upon One Who is able.
There is an interesting verse of Scripture in Hebrews 11 that may put another dimension on this matter of faith.
Hebrews 11:1 says:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Brother Darby, in his translation from Greek into English, comes much closer, I think, to the sense of what the writer was saying. His translation says, “Now faith is the substantiating of things hoped for.”
What does it mean to substantiate something? That becomes an important question. Hopefully, this will help us understand the dynamic involved when someone in this realm puts faith in the reality of something in another realm.
When we are praying, for instance, we are praying to One Who is in another realm. God is Spirit. We are praying to the Spirit Who is God, the Creator God.
Here we are in a realm of temporal things, praying to One outside this realm. As we pray, our faith ought to be operating so as to substantiate what is a reality there in our experience in this realm.
Let me try to illustrate this. In 1958, in a little church in Pensacola, Florida, I stumbled into that church on a Sunday morning. Actually, it was thirty years ago on February 19 of this year.
As I mentioned earlier, a man was preaching from the Scriptures about Jesus. As he preached and the Word of God came into my heart, it created a capacity in me. I did not understand what it was then, but I had this capacity worked into me to believe in the One of Whom he was talking.
This was February 19, 1958. When I put my faith to work on that occasion, how was it possible that I could be forgiven of my sin? Did Jesus die again that day for Ernie Hile? No.
The finished work of Calvary—all that God accomplished there—was taken up into the heavenly realm and placed there. On that occasion, when I put my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, I substantiated what was already mine there.
When Jesus said on the cross, “It is finished,” it meant that He died for Ernie Hile whether Ernie Hile ever accepted it or not. It was still his. But on that occasion, I substantiated what He wrought for me on Calvary. How did I do it? I did it by faith.
Please understand: that is what God is after. The Scripture speaks about our being seated with Christ in heavenly places. Do you always feel that you are seated with Christ in heavenly places? Is that always your experience? I do not. Maybe you do, but I do not. I find myself with my feet very much on the ground.
But the Scripture says that I am seated with Him, that I have been raised with Him. How does this become mine in experience? By the exercise of faith on the basis of the revelation the Holy Spirit gives. It becomes mine.
I heard recently about a man who had a little sign on his desk that said, “Look down.” Most of us would say, “Look up.” But he said, “Look down.” Someone asked him about it, and he said, “Well, it depends where you are. If you are up there, look down. If you are down here, look up.”
It depends where your heart is and where the response of your heart is in terms of faith. Faith is this matter of bringing into my experience that which has already been wrought for me in Christ Jesus.
It is not a matter that when God sees me putting my faith to work, He suddenly gets busy and does something. No, my faith can only be a reality on the basis of what He has already done.
When I saw that Jesus died for my sins, I could know the reality of that in experience by putting my faith to work. That is why James says, “Faith without works is dead.”
There has been a running controversy among commentators who say that Paul contradicts James and James contradicts Paul. Paul says that Abraham was justified by faith, and James says that Abraham was justified by works.
I refuse that. It is both. James is bringing into fruition and finality what Paul says. Unless I put my faith to work, unless my faith acts in some way, it is like James said: even the demons believe that God is one, and they tremble.
Unless our faith is active, alive, and somehow worked out, James says it is useless. Just as the physical body without the spirit is dead, faith without works is dead.
We have to learn experientially how to put our faith to work in any given situation in order to substantiate in our daily experience that which is already a reality in God.
That is what we find in the Person of our Lord Jesus. When you read the Gospel accounts, they are a record of the Lord Jesus Himself substantiating in His experience what was already a reality in God.
Let us take a few moments to consider the way faith and works complement one another.
One of the things that was very helpful to me a number of years ago, which I discovered primarily through the ministry of a man named John Bailey, was the importance of what is called a paradox.
If you go to Webster’s Dictionary, you will find that a paradox is defined as an apparent contradiction. The importance is on the word apparent. Where is the contradiction? Not in reality, but in our thinking.
Take the greatest of all paradoxes: Jesus is God or man—which is He? He is both. That is a paradox because in our minds we cannot allow Him to be both one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man at the same time.
The human mind does not know how to allow that. Men have felt they had to go through the process of reconciling the paradox. Every time they have sought to do so, it has resulted in heresy, without exception.
We are not satisfied to allow it to remain a paradox. We feel we have to solve it. We have to solve this so-called riddle so we will not allow God to be embarrassed.
In the first century, a group came into the church called the Gnostics. The word Gnostic meant knowledge. They claimed to be in the know. If you had any questions, you could ask them; they thought they knew everything about everything.
This was the Greek mentality. The Greeks were very much into wisdom and knowledge. They loved to pursue everything, know everything about everything, put everything in neat little pigeonholes, and explain everything in a neat way.
Within the Gnostics was a group called the Docetic Gnostics. They were called Docetic because the Greek word means, “it seems like.” They were Christians who would not allow Jesus to be man. They would say He was God, but they could not allow Him to be man.
Their explanation of Jesus was that He only seemed to be a man. He was a phantom. When He walked, they said He left no footprints on the ground. That was the first challenge to the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ in Christian experience, because they could not allow Him to be both God and man simultaneously.
When you read the Word of God, you find again and again what appears to be a contradiction. Our flesh, other people’s flesh, and the enemy will want to push you into a state where you have to decide: Is He God or is He man? He cannot be both.
But you have a decision to make: which one are you going to let Him be, or are you going to allow Him to be both?
The same is true in the situation with James and Paul. The commentators say you have to take a stand on one side or the other. You either have to believe in faith without works or works without faith. But there is no contradiction here. James is complementing Paul.
The whole thing comes into proper focus when you see it for what it really is. Faith and works are partners. They are in this thing together.
James uses two examples, beginning with Abraham. He says Abraham was justified by works when he offered Isaac. Paul says Abraham was justified when he believed God. Both of them are correct.
Abraham put his faith to work by taking his son. Please understand that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son came at the end of his life, at the end of his knowing God, not at the beginning.
When he was in Ur, God did not tell him to take Isaac because, first of all, he did not have a son. Secondly, Abraham would not have been able to handle that one. It was enough for Abraham to leave his own home and go out looking for a city when he did not know where it was.
But he acted upon it, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. James says that Abraham’s faith was at work when he took his only son, Isaac—the heir, the one through whom all the nations were to be blessed, the one through whom all the descendants were to come—and took him up onto a mountain to sacrifice him.
Did he do it? He did. God responded to Abraham’s faith and intervened. God was testing Abraham, not tempting him, but testing whether or not he would continue to live like that and believe God to do what He said He would do.
These are not contradictions. Faith and works are partners in this whole matter.
Beyond the initial experience of being saved, all of us ought to be clear that we are saved by faith. It was by faith that you and I came into an experience of knowing the life of God within us, becoming a child of God, and being introduced into the family of God.
How you actually implemented that in your own experience may differ from how others did it, but you did something. You either confessed something with your mouth, had some kind of response from your heart, or simply said, “I believe.” There was some way in which you acted out your faith.
One way in which we ought to act it out is through water baptism, because that is a way in which we put our faith to work and demonstrate what we believe God has done for us and to us in Jesus Christ.
However we did it, the result was that something wonderful happened in our lives. God saved us. God caused us to be born again. He brought us into His family and made us members of the body of Christ.
In Romans 6, after Paul has dealt with the whole issue of justification in chapter 4, he comes to address another issue. In chapter 5, he has been talking about the grace of God—the “much more” of God.
He realizes that some people may misunderstand him. They might say, “If this matter of God’s grace is so wonderful, should I sin so that the grace of God may abound?” Remember, he said in Romans 5 that where sin abounds, grace superabounds.
Paul responds, “May it never be. How can we who are dead to sin continue to live in it?” Then he gives a wonderful explanation of how God has made it possible for His children to be free from the power of sin operating in their lives.
He points out, first of all, that we have been crucified with Christ and buried with Christ. His conclusion is that dead men and women—those who have been crucified and buried—cannot sin.
How has this event occurred? Romans 6 tells us that our old self was crucified with Christ. When the Lord Jesus was on the cross being crucified, the Word of God tells us that we were in Him, being crucified with Him.
Now listen to me, brothers: this is just as much a part of the gospel as John 3:16.
The only way we can know the reality of Romans 6 in experience is to put our faith to work.
Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin;
for he who has died is freed from sin.
Brothers and sisters, dead men and women do not sin. How do we bring that into our experience?
In the next twenty-four hours, a situation may occur in your life where you have an opportunity to engage your old man and involve yourself in an activity God would consider sin. What are you going to do about that situation? How are you going to overcome it? How are you going to keep from giving in to that old Adamic nature and allowing it to run your life?
Romans 6:11 tells us what to do:
Even so reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God in Christ Jesus.
That is faith. The word reckon is a mathematical word. It describes the process that a CPA or accountant goes through in totaling various numbers, coming to the bottom line, and filling in the figure.
Here is Paul’s reasoning: when Christ was crucified, God put you in Christ. When Christ was buried, God put you in Christ. Therefore, you were crucified with Christ and buried with Christ.
When sin tempts you to engage yourself, how do you handle it? Paul says, “You reckon.” If I was put in Christ and crucified, and if I was put in Christ and buried, then when sin is offered to me, I cannot respond because I am dead.
This is not a mind game Paul is playing. He is talking about the reality of what God wrought in the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It is not enough for you and me merely to see that when our Lord Jesus died on that cross at Calvary, He died for us. We need to see that when He died, we died with Him—our old Adamic nature.
The experience of many of us as Christians is that we are still trying to take the old man and make him a Christian. We are still trying to get him to act like a Christian. It is impossible. That is not God’s solution. It will not work.
Do you know what God’s solution is? Co-crucifixion.
If the truth of this can penetrate our hearts, becoming just as real to us as Jesus having died for us, then it can become ours in experience when we reckon it. Dead men do not sin. Therefore, I do not respond. I am no longer a slave to sin.
A number of years ago, we were having a Bible study in our home in New York. There was a little Catholic lady who came to the Bible study. She really loved the Lord and was trying to come through on some things.
One day she came, and it was evident she was nervous about something throughout the whole time we were sharing. At the end, she said, “Ernie, I have been fighting as to whether I should tell you this, but something happened and I have to share it with you.”
She said, “I had a dream about you last night. I dreamed that you died. I came to the wake. As it is in dreams, I walked down this little narrow stone stairway. I looked over to the left, and there was this cold stone slab. You were lying on the stone slab, and even though you were dead, you were still moving.”
I said, “That is me. That is me.” Because that is what it is for us in experience. Even though we have been crucified and are dead, we still move around. We still do our thing because we do not reckon ourselves to be dead.
The enemy will come to us many times and challenge the reality of Jesus dying on the cross for us: “Are your sins really forgiven?” But the challenge comes again and again on a daily basis as to whether we will live in the good of Romans 6:6 and Romans 6:11.
Are you going to reckon yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus? That is faith. That is sanctifying faith.
Sanctification, very simply, brothers and sisters, is getting rid of more and more of our old man and incorporating more and more of Christ in our lives. The more we reckon ourselves dead to the old man and alive to God, the more there is an increase of the life of Christ.
But if you do not reckon, you do not get the results. You become a victim through sin. The old man comes in, takes over, runs the show, and the result is that you end up disobeying and living out here.
Faith goes ahead on the basis of what has been revealed. It is simply speaking or acting in some way and seeing the results.
Let me mention one other example from the Scriptures. There is a passage in Luke 8 with which I am sure you are familiar. It concerns the woman who had an issue of blood. She had gone to doctors for twelve years, spent all her money, and was not getting better; she was getting worse.
The Scripture does not tell us exactly what had happened to her immediately beforehand. But on this occasion, the Lord Jesus was in a crowd of people, apparently healing people and doing various things.
Something inside of her said, “If I can just touch the hem of His garment, I will be made whole.” I do not think we can attribute that to anything other than the mercy of God creating faith in this dear woman.
She may have witnessed the Lord Jesus healing someone else. But, in her heart, she believed that if she could somehow get there and reach out enough to touch that little fringe at the bottom of His garment, she would be healed.
Look at the situation, brothers and sisters. She had been sick for twelve years. I hope I am not overstating it, but she was not very strong. She had a lot of things against her: the crowds surrounding the Lord Jesus, her own weakened condition, and all her failed attempts to find help.
Why should she try one more? But we are told that she did.
We are not sure how she got through the crowd. I am convinced it was her sharp elbows that got her through the crowd. She had lost a lot of weight; she had sharp elbows.
But she made her way through the crowd and touched the hem of His garment.
When the Lord Jesus said, “Who touched Me?” the disciples said, “What do You mean, ‘Who touched You?’ Everybody around here is pushing and shoving on You. You are asking who touched You?”
He said, “Power came out of Me.” So He stopped the crowd and asked, “Who touched Me?” The little woman came up and admitted that it was her.
She knew the moment she touched Him that she was healed inside, immediately. Do you know what the Lord Jesus said to her? He did not say, “It is the mighty power of God that has healed you,” although that was true. He said, “Your faith has made you whole.”
She could have stood on the outside of that crowd and given a hundred reasons not to try. She could have philosophized about it and had all kinds of theological arguments. But somehow that was not the issue.
The issue was that she had to put into action what she felt in her heart. She felt that, in order to be healed, she had to touch the hem of His garment.
God could have spoken from heaven. She did not have to make her way through that crowd. God was able. But her faith—her courageous faith—that caused her to press through the crowd, get there, and lay hold of that garment, was the means through which the healing became her experience.
There was the power of God. Healing virtue came out of Him. But He said to her, “Your faith has done it.”
We need to see that faith is not merely some passive, neat, nice little thing that we have. It is something alive inside us, and it needs to be expressed in a variety of different ways.
We can go through the Gospel records themselves and see examples. How about Simon Peter when he walked on the water? Do you realize what that took, brothers and sisters? Can you imagine what those other men in the boat must have been thinking? “Hey, dummy, get back in the boat!”
There are example after example of people who responded and put their faith to work. Certainly, something was in their hearts, but there was a way by which they put that faith into action. God responded, heard their cry, and the results were evident.
In this matter of God’s grace, there has to be a faith response. If there is not a faith response, it is not that God has gone out of business. It is a matter that we are not responding in the way we need to respond.
There is a verse in Galatians that is quoted again and again for different reasons, and rightfully so. It is Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.
That, to me, sums up this matter of faith. The reality we have, brothers and sisters, is the life of the Lord Jesus inside of us—Christ Himself indwelling us.
It is His faith, even though it is faith in Him. It is His faith being worked into our hearts, so that we can trust God, believe God, act out our trust and confidence in Him, and live that out in our everyday situations.
That is why I believe the Word of God encourages us that the righteous man shall live by faith. We cannot take a vacation from this matter. We cannot just shut it down for a year. It is something we need to live by because it brings the reality of God’s life into our experience.
It brings the power of God, all that there is of God, into where we are, so that God is a part of what we are going through. Even though He is there, the reality of Him—His Person and His power—becomes part of us as we put our faith to work.
So it means we need to go from faith to faith, to faith to faith. Let us get this erroneous idea out of our thinking that there can come a point when we can forget about believing and forget about putting our faith to work.
That is almost like saying, in the natural, “Forget about breathing.” Faith is to our spiritual life what breathing is to the natural life.
We need, brothers and sisters, to understand this and begin to put it into practice in our daily lives. We do not have to manufacture what will bring the results about.
So may we be those who, having been justified by faith, will set our faith to work.