My great aunt Ada would not use the brakes. She was an intelligent woman, a schoolteacher who could solve word puzzles most people could not even read, and she had worked out that if she used the brakes, she might not have them when she really needed them. So she coasted to a stop instead.
She bumped into trees. Once she went straight through the back wall of her own garage. The garage was a wreck, but the brakes were still there, saved for an emergency. It is a funny story about an old woman and a ’37 Plymouth, but it also describes a great many Christians, myself included for longer than I care to admit. We have been given power, but we are afraid to use it. We bump into things we have been equipped to stop. As Paul put it, we can have a form of religion while being strangers to its power.
The reason is usually the same. We think the power has to be earned, and we know we have not earned it.
What Did You Actually Get When You Were Saved?
More than forgiveness. That is one of the things many of us miss, and missing it can produce a lifetime of timid praying. When Jesus rose from the dead, He met the disciples on a mountain in Galilee and told them that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to Him. Then, in the same breath, He sent them out under that authority.
He did not keep it to Himself. He delegated it. A lawyer sitting in one of E. W. Kenyon’s meetings interrupted him to ask whether Jesus had really given the church the power of attorney. Then he answered his own question: if language means anything, He had.
Think about a teenager who has just received a driver’s license. He does not stand in the kitchen saying, Oh, Father, I am so undeserving. Perhaps one day, if my faith is sufficient, you will let me drive.
He says, Move over, Dad. He has the keys. He did not earn them by behaving perfectly, and he does not lose them every time he does something wrong. He has them because of whose son he is.
That is the heart of the argument, and the blood of Jesus Christ is what makes it true. Sonship was purchased. The keys came with it.
→ Freedom From Wishy-Washy Faith is Aunt Ada’s story in full, and what it costs to leave the brakes alone.
Is Faith a Feeling, or a Decision?
Abram was told to leave, and he left. That part was relatively easy. He was young, his wife was beautiful, and the promise of descendants beyond counting probably looked like something that would work itself out in time.
Then twenty-five years passed. Sarai remained barren. God renewed the promise, comparing Abram’s descendants to the dust of the earth and the stars of the sky, but nothing seemed to change except their ages. At some point along the way, Abram had to make a decision that had very little to do with how he felt. He decided to believe God in spite of what the circumstances were telling him.
Faith is easy when you can see no reason why something should not happen. It is different when you cannot see any possible way it can happen and you choose to believe God anyway. That is an act of the will.
Feelings may come afterward, or they may not. We cannot make feelings the foundation of faith, because feelings change too easily. We have to be willing to believe God before we can see the answer.
→ The Call of Abraham follows the whole account, including the parts where he got it wrong.
Why Did Jesus Rebuke the Disciples in the Storm?
Jesus had spent the day teaching the disciples about the Word of God — how it goes in like seed, how the enemy tries to take it away, and how the Word will accomplish what it was sent to do.
Then He got into the boat and went to sleep. The squall came down through the gullies the way storms can come on Galilee, seemingly without warning. The disciples woke Him, and He stilled the storm with a sentence.
Then He turned to them.
Why are you so fearful? How is it that you have no faith?
If we read that only as a question about their courage, it sounds harsh. But look at what He had just spent the day teaching them. The Word had already been given to them. They had heard it. It was in them.
So perhaps Jesus was asking why they had awakened Him at all. They had been given the Word. They could have spoken to the storm themselves.
→ The Lord of Life’s Storms takes both halves of that account — the comfort and the rebuke.
What Does It Cost to Trust God With Something You Cannot Replace?
I was sitting in my living room working on a sermon when I was suddenly overcome by the distinct sense that I had been caught with my hand in a cash register. We had five children and a small salary, with nothing left over to tithe. I tithed after that, and none of us ever forgot the Sunday morning when the children opened the front door and found an envelope containing ten hundred-dollar bills.
Then the lesson went further. I was recording meetings and selling the tapes, and the money was helping pay for petrol and groceries. I wanted God to bless the work, so I gave it to Him. And then I discovered that God actually took me seriously.
I heard myself telling people they could have the tapes free. Then I told God that if the tapes were going out for nothing, the equipment bills were His problem now. They were paid off faster than I had been paying them.
Then there was magic. I was good at it — good enough to double my income in my spare time — and I was president of my local ring of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. God asked me whether I intended to be a pastor or a magician.
I drove to Omaha, gave the whole lot to a friend in the trade, and asked God to take the love of magic away because I could not do it myself. On the drive home, it was gone.
Then came the pastorate itself.
Leave now, or you never will.
We stayed in the same town because our eldest daughter had settled it with God that we were supposed to stay. Eventually we ended up in a house that had not been our choice. Months later, we took over a tape library containing four thousand masters and fifty thousand lending tapes.
It turned out that ours was the only house available with enough room to hold it. I will not tell you that trusting God made everything easy. I remember laying the bills out on the sofa and kneeling there without any sense of peace at all, while the money I needed was already in the mail.
→ The Impossible Trust is that account in full, and how this library came to exist.
Is It Faith If Nothing Has Happened Yet?
Standing is the part nobody writes many songs about. You have done what you were told to do. You have said what you believe. And then you wait, while the ground underneath you seems to say nothing back.
This is where many people quit. Usually they do not quit because the work itself is too difficult. They quit because nothing seems to be happening. The instruction is to have done all and to stand. Not to manufacture a feeling. Not to convince yourself that everything is fine. Not even to feel certain every minute of the day.
Simply to remain where God told you to stand while the evidence still seems to be against you.
→ The Joy of Standing argues that what carries you through it is not grit.
What Are You Actually Expecting?
Debbie was sixteen and learning to drive. A car passed her, and she edged over to the right. The front tire dropped off the pavement into a rut. When she over-corrected, the car shot across a driveway straight toward an electric pole about ten feet away.
Her mother and sister were in the car with her. Everything about the situation looked as though it was headed toward a serious accident. It did not happen. The reason it did not happen is the subject of the article below.
Expectancy is not simply optimism. It is the settled assumption that God is who He says He is and that He will do what He says He will do. I have watched expectancy make a difference in people’s lives. I have seen the difference between someone who expects God to work and someone who is only hoping that He might.
→ It’s Time We Started Acting Like God! tells what happened to the car. Expectancy and the Glory of God is the teaching underneath it.
Where Does Faith Come From?
Not from trying harder. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. That is a very simple answer, but it has enormous consequences. If faith comes through the Word, then the amount of the Word we put into ourselves is not just a devotional nicety. It is the supply line.
I adopted a rule years ago: if it is not in the Bible, I will not believe it. A great deal of what exhausts Christians is inherited teaching — the idea that God sometimes says yes, sometimes says no, sometimes says not yet, or sometimes allows something because He is trying to teach us a lesson.
Look for those things in Scripture. You will not find them stated that way. If we pray while holding beliefs that contradict the Word of God, then we are praying from the wrong foundation, no matter how sincere we are.
Is There Something Here You Can Work Through Yourself?
There is. The Foundation for Faith is a series I taught, and the outline I taught from is available for you to download. It is not an essay, and it was never intended to read like one. It is a working outline — eight parts, 136 Scripture references, and very little material between them because you are meant to have your Bible open beside it.
Part One asks what the foundation of Christian faith actually is. It answers with the picture of a building under construction, using Jude 20, Colossians 2:7, 1 Corinthians 3:9–11, and the four steps of building on the rock from Matthew 16.
The seven parts that follow deal with the Word of God: how we build on that foundation by hearing and doing, where the Word’s authority comes from, how it works for healing, how it applies to victory over sin and Satan, how it brings cleansing, and how it serves as both mirror and judge.
Work through it at your own pace, or follow the audio series of the same name along with it.
→ Download the outline for The Foundation for Faith — free, and designed to go with the recordings in the library.
Faith is not a mood you work yourself into. It rests on the character of a God who does not lie, who has set His Word above His own name, and who demonstrated at the cross what He was willing to spend on us.
Everything else I have written here is detail. He raised Jesus from the dead. He has not weakened since.
More in this series: Great Expectations: What My Ministry Will Be Like · Heart Vitamins: Exercises to Build Heart Faith
Still to come in this series: The Truth Shall Make You Free · Walkin’ and Stumblin’. Each will be linked here as it publishes.
