THE CHRISTIAN FAITH (Part 1 of 2)

THE CHRISTIAN FAITH  (Part 1 of 2)

‘Without faith it is impossible to please God’ (Heb. 11:6)

Faith is the foundation of the Christian life and is the principle that brings us to Jesus Christ. It is faith that will make all the promises of God a reality in your life. When you are young, you practice learning the ABC’s. Faith is the ABCs of Christianity that you must learn, develop and practice each day of your life. The bible exhorts Christians a lot on the importance of faith:  Hebrew 11:6 says that “without faith, it is impossible to please God”; Habakkuk 2:4 says “the just shall live by faith”; 2Corin. 13:5 advises the Christian to “examine himself, whether he is in the faith”. Jude 1:3 even exhorts us to contend for the faith.

But

Not even the giants of faith got what they wanted. Some Christians think of faith as an almost magic force: If you muster up enough of it, you’ll get rich, stay healthy and live a contented life, they say. Yet how does one ‘muster up’ faith? What is faith? What faith is not? And how can you be sure you’ve got it? What are the signs of true faith?

What faith is not?

Faith is not trying to make God do something for you. If you are trying to make God do something for you, means that you believe He has not done it. Faith begins where the will of God is known. If you don’t know God’s will in a situation then you cannot believe that God will help you. The Word of God tells us that all the promises of God belong to us through Christ. It also tells us that all things that pertain unto life and godliness have been given unto us. When did this take place? When Jesus was hanging on the cross He spoke these powerful words: IT IS FINISHED. What was finished? The plan of redemption for the human race was carried out through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Everything that Adam lost in the Garden of Eden was given back to us through Jesus!

You can only believe what God has already provided. Faith looks back at the cross and realizes all the promises that belonged to us since that time and lays claim to them in faith. Faith is not trying to get God to do something for you because God has already, through Christ, provided all things for you. Many people say that God is going to heal me “one day”, or meet my financial need “one day”, but God is not going to do it “one day”. God has already met your needs through Christ about two thousand years ago. They will never be a reality in your life unless you reach out in faith and accept them as fact.

What is faith?

We have found what faith is not, so what is faith? I looked in Hebrews 11:1 for a definition of faith, which says: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. In other words, Faith simply defined is: believing that you have something that does not exist in the physical, sensory and perceptive world that you live in.

It does exist in the realm of the spirit but it has not yet manifested in the material world. Faith reaches into the spiritual realm and takes hold of the promise of God’s Word and brings it into the realm of reality.

How to know when you are in Faith.

Hebrews 4:3 gives us the answer to this question. It tells us that those which have believed do enter into rest. You could say that those who have entered into faith do enter into rest. Rest is a type of peace. The person who believed God is the person you find in peace. They are not in worry or fear because they know that everything is okay because it has been committed to God.  see Part 2