Faith Moves From God to Our Hearts (Defining Faith Pt 2)

Last time, I tried to illustrate the concept the word "faith" carries with it. To sum up what I said: Faith has two aspects, a future hope and a present reality in our lives. For example, think of a chair. Faith looks at that chair, has a future hope in it that it will provide rest and will not fold under its weight, and then flowing out of that hope, produces the action of sitting in it. Faith will not only mentally acknowledge the worthiness of a chair. Faith also has the present element of sitting in the chair. But you won't rest in it until you hope in it.

But Christianity is not about sitting in chairs. What then is faith for the Christian? One way to define something is to describe what it does. To see what faith does, we'll look at how it moves, that is where it is coming from, and where it is going.

First, faith is coming from God to our hearts. Paul connects a raising of the dead that happens in the moment of salvation with faith. In Ephesians 2:4-5, 8 Paul says that when we were dead in trespasses, God made us alive with Christ, by grace through faith. This salvation by grace through faith is none of our doing, but a gift from God. Paul uses this illustration of life from death in the case of Abraham's faith in Romans 4:17, 19. In these verses, when Paul says God is one who "gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist" he is making a reference to the birth of Isaac. Isaac was a walking impossibility. But Abraham believed the promise of God, who is able to do these impossible things in light of what we know about Him as Creator. Isaac is a picture of every believer (Gal 4:28, 31). In other words, just like God, acting on his own, was able to create something out of nothing, just like he created light out of nothing, just like he gave Isaac life out of death, so it is with all God's people, the "children of the free woman." Paul makes this clear in 2 Cor 4:5-6. When talking about the message he preaches, (which is the same message he believes, 2 Cor 4:13) he says the reason he preaches Christ as Lord and not himself, but himself as a servant is because "God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. "

I highlighted the "gifts" and the "gives" so that you could see the main point running through all those verses. Faith has moved in the form of a gift from God to the people to which he gives it. Where did this faith arise from? God created it out of nothing. And he has put it in our hearts, that is, he has made it real to us. Or as Paul says in 2 Cor 4:6, he has given us "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." Remember we said faith was a present grasp of some reality. Here that grasp has been created by God. And the reality is the glory of God. Notice how we know the glory of God: through the face of Jesus Christ.

What are some of the implications of this? First this emphasizes what I said in the very first post "The Fight for Faith." Faith is created by and comes from God. Therefore to get faith we should go nowhere else but straight to God. There is no creating faith on your own. We cannot raise the dead. We cannot create something out of nothing. Only the Creator can do that. We must go to him for faith.

Second, it highlights how Jesus should be seen. He is not merely a historical figure to the believer. He is a present reality, and through His face as we see it in the gospel, we see the glory of God. Or to put it more simply: Christians love Jesus. Paul calls the believers at Ephesus those who "love our Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph 6:24). Jesus says that if we are of God we will love him (Jn 8:42). That's what it means to have this light shine in your heart. The heart responds with desire and emotion. There is no such thing as an emotionless Christian. A Christian is someone who is enraptured by the glory of God. Take Psalm 47:6-8 as an example of a normal Christian response to God. There are hundreds more, and I can't list them all here.

This response comes from the faith, so it too must be given by God. Ask him for it. If you don't have that joy in Christ and love for Him, ask God for it. If you do have it, ask Him to keep you in it and to give you more.

There may be some who are thinking, "But Christianity is not all emotion." And if you are thinking that, you are right. It's not all emotion. This look at faith is incomplete. So I'll talk about where faith goes from our hearts in a later post. And hopefully that will help clear up things. But some of what was said here should give you a good idea of where it's heading.