"Why Faith?"
Part 6 - "Life"
Why faith? Because we are not truly alive apart from this God-ordained capacity to trust His heart and believe His Word.
"The just shall live by faith" (Romans 1:17).
When we initially trust the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, we enter into life as defined by God - eternal life. "He that hath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life" (I John 5:12). "To live is Christ" echoes the Apostle Paul, and thus we must view life in terms of He who declared, "I am… the life" ( Philippians 1:21; John 14:6). This constitutes faith as the primary function of our existence since we both enter and experience genuine life by trusting response to God's truth and trustworthiness. We are spiritually hardwired to believe - "The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart, that is, the word of faith which we preach, that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" (Romans 10:8-9).
Sin, of course, plunged the human race into the darkness of distrust. Woven into the heart of unbelievers, and remaining in the flesh of Christians is the tendency to believe anything and everyone other than God. This tendency to disbelief condemns the lost - "If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins" (John 8:24). It also tempts the believer to not believe, and thus, to not truly experience the Divine life that indwells and empowers us. It was to Christians that the Apostle Paul wrote, "To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace" (Romans 8:6). We must therefore make it our business to increasingly discover what it means to "live by faith," and how trusting God can more and more serve as "the way which leadeth unto life" (Matthew 7:14).
Why faith? Because apart from it, we merely exist. By faith we live, that is, we know and experience the Life of our lives and His dynamic presence, involvement, and working. "He is thy life" declared Moses (Deuteronomy 30:20). Nothing else is, or can be. Moreover, nothing else opens our eyes to the Christ who spiritually enlivened us when we believed, and who works in us by His Spirit that we may know the vibrancy of His living presence as we "walk by faith, not by sight" (II Corinthians 5:7). This day and this moment offers the life whereby we truly live, the life of Christ as known by faith.
"Fight the good fight of faith. Lay hold on eternal life."
(I Timothy 6:12)
Weekly Memory Verse
"In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world."
(John 16:33)
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