Posts Tagged ‘ Faithfulness ’
But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.
2 Thessalonians 3:3, ESV
Christ’s faithfulness and strength is what sustains and empowers us by the Holy Spirit to the glory of the Father. Trust in Him, not your own ability to be faithful. (But endeavor to be faithful!)
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
1 John 1:9, ESV
There is no forgiveness without confession and repentance.
Give your sin to God, and find peace.
If it helps, tell a trusted Christian brother or sister.
Cast your burden on the Lord , and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.
Psalm 55:22, ESV
God will help you believe and remain faithful.
Ultimately, He will bring you to His side, beside the immovable, immutable One.
Because of Christ.
And he believed the Lord , and he counted it to him as righteousness.
Genesis 15:6, ESV
The most important thing the Lord requires of us is faith and obedience. Without faith, we cannot be fully obedient. Without obedience, we show our lack of faith.
looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:2, ESV
What is faith? Jesus is the source. Without the cross and resurrection, we have no basis for faith.
Christ’s faithfulness gives us faith.
I did not do the silly high five at the end of this video! Am I a horrible person? (Theologically speaking, technically yes … apart from Christ …)
But it is addressing that tantalizing question: What is faith?
Many people do not really understand faith.
In a recent book, “A Manual for Creating Atheists”, philosopher Peter Boghossian defined faith as belief without evidence, pretending to know things you don’t really know.
But is this right?
In a word: no.
How does the Bible explain faith?
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1, ESV
Another way of explaining faith is putting your beliefs into action. If you believe something to be true, prove it! Prove you are faithful to those beliefs by acting on them.
The most used example of what faith is is a chair. You can say you believe a chair will hold you up, but faith is proving it by sitting on the chair. Typically, you are acting on evidence. (In this case, you have been told chairs are for sitting on, and you may have seen other people sit in chairs.)
As Christians, we do not have a blind faith. The Bible is our evidence for God and Jesus.
The Bible has several prophecies about the coming Messiah who would take away our sins, and Jesus claimed He was the fulfillment of those prophecies. He made many claims to His deity, as well, and He said that He would prove it all by dying and rising again.
The Apostles and early disciples did not just write about things they heard. They claimed to have heard these things and seen the crucified and risen Jesus with their own eyes.
And the Bible is the most reliable ancient set of documents we have from antiquity, by far. Few experts contest this. (Maybe the actual events, but not that at least the New Testament is reliably from people from the First Century.)
Everyone.
It is not only Christians and the overtly religious. My evidence for this?
How about evolutionary theory: How is it claimed life began? Several chemicals somehow combined in the right amounts at the right time to create the building blocks for RNA and DNA, creating the first living cells.
How do we know it happened this way?
We don’t. No one was there to see it, and no one as recreated it in the lab to test this hypothesis. People simply believe it is true.
This is more like blind faith than Christianity!
As said before, everyone lives by some form of faith in someone or something throughout their days and lives. Faith is putting beliefs into action.
What do you think? Am I way too far off the mark? (I think most others are.)
How about we talk about, either in the comments (on this blog post or on the YouTube channel) or through the e-mail: Together@asimplemanofgod.com, or even at the Facebook page: a simple man of God.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13, ESV
Hope springs from faith.
Faith springs from love.
Love springs from dedication and choice.
Choose love. Always.
