Thursday, April 10, 2014

Lenten Devotional – Day 32

Q. 86. What is faith in Jesus Christ?

A. Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, whereby we receive and rest upon him alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the gospel.

“But we are not among those who shrink back and so are lost, but among those who have faith and so are saved.” (Heb. 10:39)

Faith comes not from intellectual conviction, but from an open, trusting "yes" to God’s invitation to loving unity. Of course, without intellectual conviction, the mind will not instruct the will to say yes. Even so, faith opens one to realms that the mind cannot know. - Nuggets from the Stream of Life from "Caring for the Self, Caring for the Soul," by Philip St. Romain.

  Practice is the best evidence of faith. Because Abraham had faith in God, he left his own country. Because Moses had faith in God, he refused to stay in the luxury of Pharaoh's palace, choosing instead to suffer with God's people (Hebrews 11:25-26). Because others had faith in God, they were stoned, sawn in two, executed by the sword, mocked and tortured, thrown in prison, and forced to wander about in animal skins, poverty and torment (Hebrews 11:32-38). — Gerald R. McDermott, Seeing God: Twelve Reliable Signs of True Spirituality (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 221.

hebrews-10-39  A businessman was asked to tell what his personal faith meant to him. He reached back to his boyhood experience. He recalled walking with his father one day, having to reach up to hold on to his hand. After a while he said, "I can't hold on any longer, and you'll have to hold on to me for a while." And he remembered the moment when he felt his father's hand take over. That, he said, was the way it felt to him to have faith in God. And that was precisely an act of grace.

  It is important that Christians not let grace become a universal principle or ideology. It is the grace of God of which the Bible speaks. Not the grace of some abstract principle of justice or love or acceptance. As God's grace, and not some principle of grace, God is the one who determines what it will be and where it will go. "God ... called us with a holy calling, not according to our work, but according to his own purpose and grace" (2 Tim. 1:9 NRSV). "But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ's gift" (Eph.4:7 NRSV).

  Faithful action must always begin with faithful questions. - Carol Richardson, Sojourners, January-February 1997, 13.

  Having faith is central to our life as a disciple of Christ that we must think carefully about it, but faith is so complicated that it will always remain a mystery. Of some eighty chapters in John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion the longest is devoted to explaining faith, indicating the importance and complexity of this subject for the disciple.

  We understand faith to be a gift of God and not simply human effort. Many individuals misunderstand faith because we have a serious “me” problem. We tend to accept our own reality more readily and easily than we do the reality of God. We think faith begins with ourselves, not God.

  Paul in Ephesians tells us “by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God – not because of works, lest any man should boast.” (Eph. 2:8-9) Thus, faith is defined as the gift that is an expression of God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ, established at God’s initiative by the special work of the Holy Spirit who joins us to Jesus Christ, and involving our trust in God’s gift rather than confidence in our choices. Therefore the credit for faith belongs to God and not us. Faith is not a work we produce by our own effort.

  It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason. - Pascal

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
  Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
  Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
  Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
  Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness. - Reinhold Niebuhr

Today’s Lectionary Readings
Morning Psalm: 60, 148
Evening Psalm: 85, 100
Jeremiah 26:1-24
Romans 11:1-12
John 10:19-42

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