The Response of Faith

*notes prepared for Bible Study, March 14- *

My dad once asked me, with full annoyance, "What IS FAITH, anyway?!" I immediately replied, "It is putting into practice what you believe. Specifically, biblical faith is trusting God based upon the evidence of His character and all that He has done."

Ephesians 2:8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.
Translation: By the magnanimous will of God (grace), faith is a sufficient qualification for salvation...and this faith in which we stand, is in itself a gift of God.
To respond in faith to God's atoning sacrifice, to claim the redemption provided in Christ's death and resurrection, is to agree with God that He is true, and every man a liar (Romans 3:4). To trust God, (Proverbs 3:5-6) is to let your heart reflect His own worthiness...it is testifying to your agreement with God.

Resist the Devil -
James 4:7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
This verse is like a perfectly balanced equation: To submit to God = resist the devil. Something else to take from this verse - when the devil knows you are on God's side, he gets scared off. If he and God were equal in their opposition, he would not be compelled to flee. But, in fact, when one made in the image of God submits to God's will, for life, for the day, for the moment, that is an unassailable position, a hill that cannot be taken.

I Peter 5:8 Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour.
Intimidation, guerrilla tactics, foul play in the form of rumors and smarting egos and the temptation to keep a record of wrongs...any move of the devil that distracts us from our focus on God, can turn this Christian walk into a limp or a crawl.
The devil never gives up, and neither must we. When we hear the roar, we must respond with this faith fact: 'Greater is He that is in me, than he that is in the world.' (I John 4:4)

Unbelief Limits God -
Psalm 78:41 Yea, they turned back and tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel.
Our unbelief does not lessen God's power, but it constricts the faith pipeline through which He can work in us. To distrust God's good intention is to convince yourself that God is less than sovereign, less than just, less than righteous...and our faith store shrivels commensurately.
If I believe God, I will see God's hand and His glory. If I do not believe, I will not be able to see. And that makes even a miracle ineffective. (Matthew 13:54 and Mark 6:5-6 recount Jesus visiting a town in which the people's hearts were so hardened, in general, and unbelief was so widespread, that "he could do no miracle there"...the people would not have seen a miracle for what it was.)

Deuteronomy 7:15-18 And the LORD will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee; but will lay them upon all them that hate thee. And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee. If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I; how can I dispossess them? Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto all Egypt.

This is from the section of Moses' instructions that is about promises and warnings. Here are some other relevant highlights -
3:22 Do not fear [the other kingdoms]: for the LORD your God shall fight for you. The response of faith is fearlessness.

5:6-21 [the Ten Commandments, on which hang all the law] The response of faith is to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness (Psalm 29:2).

6:4-5 Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God is one LORD: ([He is the ONLY LORD]) And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. The response of faith is love, total, consummate love.
It takes me to I John 4:8, which says, "There is no fear in love; but perfect ([flawless]) love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love."

To make life, or a situation, about who I am, and to view it through the lens of my obvious limitations, is to imply and then to subtly convince myself, that this is MY task - when it isn't! "The battle belongs to the LORD!"
To love God with all my might is what defends me from the devil's attacks, and opens my spiritual eyes and ears to what God is doing and achieving. To love God wholeheartedly, enables my faith to grow, solidifying the experiential basis of my trust in Him, and this leads to a sure hope in God's love for me...and then I am back at loving God with all my might again. Watch that progression again: Love --> Faith/Trust --> Hope --> Love

Not in Vain - I Labored More Abundantly -
I Cor. 15:9-10 For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was in me.

This is a wonderful snapshot of Paul, a self-portrait showing a self-possession we should all emulate. First, there is humility: "I am the least of the apostles." This humility is founded on the testimony of his own conscience: "I persecuted the church of God."
Many of us might make a grave error, then see the error, and ever after spend our days trying to pay back what we owe, to assuage the guilt.
But Paul understands, that he is a new creature in Christ Jesus. Saul persecuted the church; Paul submits to God, and in his total dependence on Christ, he becomes more abundantly effective in the ministry of the gospel, and growth of the church, than all the other apostles put together. Better yet, he assesses, "[it was] the grace of God [working] in me [more abundantly than through all of them]."
An abundance, an extra-fruitfulness, in our laboring, is not the fruit of our own effort...but it is the fruit of being yielded to, and filled by, God's holy Spirit.
Paul had to unlearn so much...he had been a prodigy, under the tutelage of Gamaliel. A life of scholarship certainly equipped him to become all things to all men, in order to save some wherever he went, but he had to leave the pride of his scholarship behind. The time between his conversion and his setting out on the missionary journeys, by his own account, Paul spent sequestered in the desert of Arabia, and then in Syria. This was a time of sabbatical for Paul, spent getting to know how God's word written in the flesh had demonstrated what was written formerly only in the books. I can imagine that the substance of Saul's education remained; but Paul had to imbibe a whole new attitude, a new way of relating to a personal God.

Galatians 2:16 Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.

Paul's mission in this epistle to the Galatians is to convince them of the efficacy of the new way (faith), as opposed to the insufficiency of the old way (works of the law). It is both ironic, as a Pharisee of Pharisees, and fitting, as a Pharisee touched by God, that this is his message.

How We Respond to Truth -
Acts 9:5 And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

As one who received Christ on the brink of adulthood, I can identify with Saul's dilemma. He had perfected his system for righteousness, and the more he saw other people deviating from that system, the harder he compensated by insisting on his manmade way. If you are desperate to preserve your convictions, the most obvious thing is to remove the threat to your conviction.
Thus, Saul became a chief oppressor of the Church. Yet all during his reign of terror, the church grew and his victims went about quietly, calmly, faithfully, lovingly, being caught at nothing more subversive than prayer, in worship, invoking God with a familiarity that Saul had never earned, in his heart of hearts, for all his labor in the law.
Doubt pricked Saul's heart, and pride told him to ignore such nonsense. Of course, Saul couldn't ignore the birthing of conscience, and he admitted this by addressing the light and voice that arrested him on the Damascus road, "Who art thou, Lord?"
Jehovah sought and rescued his people in the Old Testament. He rescued them from destruction just as Yehoshua, Jesus, rescues us, from sin and from the struggle against sin. Psalm 119, located (providentially?) at the heart of God's printed word, ends the narration of a man zealous for God, with the humble capitulation, "I have gone astray like a lost sheep." So much for keeping all the laws, judgements, precepts and commandments. Then, the psalmist ends where every journey of faith begins: "seek thy servant," in other words, "rescue me!" "I do not forget thy commandments." (Indeed, they are always there to reflect my failures.)

It is only Jesus, the God of the Bible, who seeks, and He does so with the intent to save. When we respond in faith, it is He, the Lord of heaven and earth, who hears. (There is no Buddha, no Krishna, no Allah, no demigod or exalted saint who can answer you. Not one of these ever sought man's soul, not one of these figments has ever loved a human soul, and not one of these imposters has ever dared to defeat death by dying.)
The response of faith is the throwing off of what seems real but is transitory, to grasp what is real, though it be unseen, and eternal. Forsaking All, I Trust Him.

Acts 2:37 Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?
Empowered by the Holy Spirit, Peter opened the scriptures to the pilgrims in Jerusalem for Pentecost, proving from the scriptures that Jesus was God. The truth sank in - "they were pricked in their heart," and they responded with the faith they could muster, "what shall we do?" This corporate response reminds me of one parent who came to Jesus, desperate for healing for his child, and admitted that his faith only went so far, "Lord, I believe. Help thou mine unbelief." (Mark, 9:24) All God wants is your open heart, and he will supply what is lacking. Whether it be one man or 3,000 men, God is in the business of increasing faith where faith is wanted.

How comforting, reading further on in the story (Acts 2), to find that when we respond to God's pricking/prodding with the measure of faith we have, God also responds to our faith - He gave direction, "Repent...be baptized...and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." God is about fulfilling his own word: "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways ackowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths." (Proverbs 3:5-6)

Acts 7:55-60 (This is the account of Stephen's martyrdom, and a vastly different response to truth) But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, and cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man's feet, whose name was Saul. And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.
In stark constrast to the Pentecost sermon, which netted 3,000 new believers, Stephen's sermon is greeted by a response of animosity and resentment. Those who are dead in their sins, cast the stones to kill him.

The faithless response is one of violence and strengthens hatred, shrinking the heart. The faith-filled response strengthens and enlarges the spiritual heart by softening it.

One might protest, that not all who reject the gospel do so in physical violence, as Stephen's killers did. And that is true, on the surface. Yet, violence has been committed, at Calvary, and this on behalf of all humanity. If you will not respond in faith to the invitation to join God's adoptive family, then the violence of the cross, and not its mercy, will be accounted to you.