From The Good News by David A. DePra
Faith in God never wavers because
it knows God never wavers.
Faith is not an
intellectual or emotional issue. It is a moral issue.
What I believe is directly
related to the conditional of my heart.
Faith, in the Bible, is
never a matter of ability to believe. It is a matter of openness to God.
I cannot believe God unless
I fully yield myself to Him.
Faith without surrender is
exactly what it means to have faith without works.
Faith must be tried or it
will be remain nothing more than assent to Truth.
God never tells me to win
the victory. He tells me to stand in the victory which Christ has already won.
The life of faith is
primarily a stand. I must stand in faith against all that would contradict the
Truth.
Never try to generate the
faith necessary to reach up to God. Rest in the fact that God has already
reached down to us in Christ.
Never trust, or doubt, in
your ability to believe God. Trust in God Himself because of what He has done
in Jesus Christ.
I cannot exercise the faith
of Jesus Christ for anything which falls outside of the will of God.
God never tells us to
surrender to a trial. He tells us to surrender to Him. The circumstances of a
trial are merely God’s tools to build faith in us.
Trials are temporal. The
faith built through them is eternal.
Boil a trial down to it’s
basic issue and you always come up with the same thing: Will I believe God and
stand in faith regardless of the cost?
There will come a day in
eternity when we will see that God was right in everything He did. Now, we must
believe without seeing.
True faith never approaches
God on our own terms. It always comes in an attitude of unconditional surrender
to Him.
Any little child can
believe, for faith does not require knowing the facts about what God is doing.
It requires only that I rest in the fact that God knows.
God is never after the thing
we surrender to Him. He is after US.
The thing we surrender is merely
a means to that end.
