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appreciation
www.jesuscentral.com/14494
July 21, 2007
Faith allowed power to flow from Jesus even without his initiative. What is faith?1- It is the substance of things hoped for. Faith and hope go together; and the same things that are the object of our hope are the object of our faith. It is a firm persuasion and expectation that God will perform all that he has promised to us in Christ;
Substance: And this persuasion is so strong that it gives the soul a kind of possession and present fruition of those things, gives them a subsistence in the soul, by the first-fruits and foretastes of them: so that believers in the exercise of faith are filled with joy unspeakable and full of glory. Christ dwells in the soul by faith, and the soul is filled with the fullness of God, as far as his present measure will admit; he experiences a substantial reality in the objects of faith.
2- It is the evidence of things not seen. Faith demonstrates to the eye of the mind the reality of those things that cannot be discerned by the eye of the body. Faith is the firm assent of the soul to the divine revelation and every part of it, and sets to its seal that God is true. It is a full approbation of all that God has revealed as holy, just, and good; it helps the soul to make application of all to itself with suitable affections and endeavors; and so it is designed to serve the believer instead of sight, and to be to the soul all that the senses are to the body. That faith is but opinion or fancy which does not realize invisible things to the soul, and excite the soul to act agreeably to the nature and importance of them.
It`s believing something that you know with your mind isn`t true. It`s some kind of overdrive that you push in with a button of some kind in your mind or your emotions or somewhere as they say down in your heart, to get you to accept something that you know with your intellect could not possibly be true. And so many of us, I think, in this world today are sceptical of the whole idea of faith, because we think of it as something not connected with the ordinary processes of the mind at all and actually opposed to the convictions of the intellect. And so many of us who have been through some kind of education and especially some kind of scientific education get the idea that to have faith you have to in some way close up your mind, or in some way put your intellect to sleep, or in some way ignore the conclusions of science and conclusions of research.
That`s absolutely ridiculous. Faith is not that kind of an irrational thing at all. Faith, in fact, is something that you and I exercise every day in our lives. And we`ve exercised it from the very moment we were born. I suppose it`s true that your mother even encouraged you to feel that we could trust her when we lay in her arms. And we learned day by day that that was true that she would not drop us, that she was reliable, and that we could put our faith in her arms.
And so as we grew up and came to the age of two or three or four years old and our Mom would ask us to jump from one chair into her arms, we would jump, because we would feel, Yes, we can put our faith in her because she has never let us fall before. And every time we have observed her, every time we have experienced the stability and the safety of her arms we have not been disappointed, and so we learned to put our faith in her.
It was the same when we began to ride on a bicycle. We started to find out that the bicycle would carry our weight. Then as our Dad taught us to ride the two-wheeled bicycle and to balance we found that it was possible, amazing though it was, to push the bicycle along on the ground in such a way that we could stay up even though it had only two wheels. And we began to put our faith in the bicycle and in our ability to ride it and to stay up all the time.
And so in all of our lives we have gradually come to put our faith in all kinds of things. If I ask you, Would you put your faith in that chair that is sitting opposite you in your office or in your home" You will probably reply to me, That chair"
Yes, yes I would put my faith in that. That is, I would gladly go over and sit on that chair, because I have observed it holding other people. It has held me myself on many occasions, and sure I`m prepared to bet my life on the strength of that chair. |
 By: lucy gachanja - July 21, 2007 - Public
Category: A Dead Girl and a Sick Woman
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