Aug 01 2008
Faith Comes
Do you short-hand the scriptures? Most of us do, I’m sure. We begin by finding a verse that means the world and all to us, and we adopt it as our motto. We quote it often, and it brings joy or encouragement to us. It reminds us that God has spoken into our lives, and His Word is the last word on the subject, whatever situation we are in.
Someone has remarked that we’re not really “Word people“, we’re “favorite Word people.” We have our favorite scriptures that we know by heart, we quote them over and over to ourselves and to our family or friends; we know them so well, in fact, that we can repeat them without looking them up. We may even go without looking them up for so long that eventually we are no longer quoting them, we’re short-handing them. It seems to us that we are simplifying them, cutting to the chase, as it were, but in reality, we’re simply misquoting the Word.
Example: Romans 10: 17 says: “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” That’s simple enough, isn’t it? Many of us who have come up through the “Word and Faith” tradition have that verse embroidered on our pajamas. We could quote it in our sleep. It’s our mantra. But because we know it so well, we keep finding shorter ways to say it: we start with “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word.” Soon, though, it’s “Faith comes by hearing the Word.” Eventually, we get all the way down to “Faith comes by the Word.” But does it?
Even if I didn’t know by experience, I would know by looking at that verse grammatically that we’re dealing with a two-step process. Let’s look at the two steps: First, we’re told that faith comes by hearing. Then we’re told that hearing comes by the Word of God. Do you see that?
It might help to turn the verse around backward, just for study purposes. You see, faith is the end result of the process; the Word is the beginning. God’s Word, if handled correctly, will produce hearing in us. Our spiritual ears will be opened, or tuned to hear His voice, as we expose them to the Word. So the Word of God produces an acute sense of spiritual hearing, and the hearing produces faith in us. It’s a two-step process, one that “Faith comes by the Word” doesn’t do justice to.
Many years ago, I was visiting a friend’s apartment, and I noticed a magazine, opened and folded back, on the coffee table. It was laying in such a way that I could only see the right-hand page, which was just a page of text; I could tell by looking that it was the beginning of an article. Simple curiosity prompted me to pick it up and start reading. After no more than a half-dozen or so sentences, I thought to myself, This sounds like C. S. Lewis. I unfolded the magazine and looked at the opposite page, and sure enough, there was a picture of Mr Lewis; it was an article he had written years before, reprinted in this magazine.
I began reading C. S. Lewis as a teenager, and I believe I’ve read nearly everything he ever wrote on the subject of Christianity. I used to joke that if Lewis called me on the telephone, I’d recognize his voice. And indeed, here I was, glancing at a purely anonymous magazine article, and recognizing almost instantly the voice of one whose writing style and “voice” was as familiar to me as my own face in a mirror.
As we expose ourselves to God’s word, we tune our spiritual ears to His voice. Reading and re-reading the Word impresses upon us His character and nature; it familiarizes us with His “style,” if you will. Then, when the Holy Ghost speaks directly to our spirit, we can instantly recognize that this is no random thought generated by my own mind, this is the voice of God, as familiar to our spiritual ear as the voice of an old friend on the telephone. And when that happens, guess what? Faith comes!
This is the exciting part; this is the part I’ve been building up to. Faith comes! If you follow this two-step process to its natural end, faith will come. It has to; we have God’s Word on it! Faith cannot stay away when we immerse ourselves in the Word; it must come.
Here’s a technique that I picked up years ago, and I put it into practice every now and then; it never fails to produce an abundance of faith in me. I’ll choose a portion of scripture, for instance, Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, and I’ll read it through from start to finish every day for a month. You’d be surprised how much you can learn by doing this.
If you wanted to learn, say, math, you might enroll in a course at the local High School. There they would give you two things: a book
Do you want more faith? Do you want a deeper and closer relationship with the Lord? Would you like God to speak directly to your spirit, just like He did Paul, or Jeremiah, or David? Then you need to become available to Him. Set some time aside for prayer, and then put your face in the Book until the Teacher shows up. He will not disappoint you.
April, 2008
David L Henderson
David L Henderson is a career Respiratory Therapist, with some Christian preaching, teaching, and writing thrown in. To find out more about him, check out his personal web pages at http://www.intergate.com/~cyrano and while you’re there, you can download his e-booklet. It’s called The Serpent’s Tale, and it’s about the fall of Lucifer and the origin of sin.
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