CBC Update
Dear friends,
I’m one week into a 30-day study on faith. It’s a word or concept that we are all familiar with, but what does faith really mean?
The Cambridge Dictionary describes faith as: ‘great trust or confidence in something or someone.’
According to this definition, we actually operate out of faith or put our faith in things every day. Did you sit in a chair today? Every time we sit in a chair, we are exercising faith in the chair that it will hold us up. We all have an everyday faith that we exercise every day.
Faith in the Bible goes beyond the everyday kind of faith that we need to get through each day. Hebrews 11:6 reminds us that ‘without faith, it is impossible to please God…’
The word ‘impossible’ in Hebrews 11 carries the idea of powerlessness. The Bible isn’t suggesting that pleasing God is difficult or challenging, but rather stating emphatically that we are powerless to do so. The faith we need to please God, or to be pleasing to God, is not faith in ourselves, but faith in Jesus and his saving (pleasing) work on our behalf—his death on the cross and resurrection from the grave.
As we read through the New Testament, we find that the word for ‘faith’ is used in two ways: as both a verb and as a noun. Faith is described as something we have or possess, but more fully and more often in the New Testament, faith is described as something we do. Faith is lived out; it requires, or should result in, action. This is what James 2:17 tells us: ‘…faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.’
Faith in Jesus should cause us to live and act differently. Faith should produce things in our lives that weren’t there before—things like the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). Of all that faith can and does produce in our lives, two stand out to me: freedom and confidence. Faith frees me from the impossible task of trying to please God. I can live out of the truth that God is already pleased with me, so when the devil or anyone else says to me, ‘You will never please God,’ I can say that is true, but my confidence is not in what I can do; it is in what Jesus has done for me.
Because of faith in Jesus, we can live confidently, just like the faith we have when we sit in a chair. Just believing it will hold us up, we can have absolute confidence that our faith in Jesus will never fail us. He will forever hold us up, keep us from falling, and only Jesus can present us to God as pleasing and acceptable.
Have a great week.
Pastor Ian