©2000 Larry Huntsperger
Peninsula Bible Fellowship
6/18/00 FAITH 101
Happy Father's day to all of you dads.
If you were with us last week
you know that our topic for this morning
is suppose to be Phase 2 of the wrath of
God.
We are studying the first of four major sections in
the New Testament book of Romans.
The section we're studying begins with Romans
1:18 and continues through 2:20,
a passage that has a great deal to say
about the wrath of God -
what it is,
how it impacts the human race,
and when and why God has chosen to pour it
out on His creation.
I, perhaps unwisely, announced my intention
to speak on the wrath of God last week,
and I was interested to notice
that our attendance dropped
by at least 30 or 40 percent.
That might have been
just one of those summer Sunday coincidences,
but I really don't think so.
And we are suppose to continue on with the
remainder of the passage this morning,
but we're not going to do that.
Any proper presentation of the Biblical teaching on
the wrath of God
can only be correctly understood
when seen within the context
of the grace, and compassion, and
kindness of God
as revealed to us through Jesus Christ.
Our Creator is not
and never has been out to get us
because of our sin.
From before the first day of creation
He has been out to redeem us
and reclaim us for Himself
in spite of our sin.
The few of you who were courageous enough to
come last week
discovered that even as our God
pours out the first phase of His wrath on the
earth,
He has done so
in a way that is designed by Him to call us
back to Himself.
The very consequences of our sins
are designed to wake us up to the reality
of our desperate need for our God
and His Lordship in our lives.
It is no act of kindness
to hide from the patient
the diagnosis of cancer
when there is still time to remove the
disease
that will otherwise bring about death.
But this morning
we are going to pull back from our study of
Romans
just long enough to spend a little more time
with a question that came up
during our discussion time last
week.
The question grew out of a reference I'd made
to Paul's statement in Romans 5:1
where he says,
Therefore having been justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ...
In our discussion time
Darrell asked why,
if we really do have peace with God,
there seem to be so few Christians who
experience the reality of that peace?
I think that's a great question.
Though at first glance it may not seem like it,
it is a actually a question we have wrestled with
in different forms
repeatedly in our times together.
You see, the broader question,
and the one that pops up nearly every time we
read a passage of Scripture is,
"Why does there seem to be such a huge gap
between what we hear God saying
and what we end up experiencing in our daily
lives?"
Let me give you some other examples
of this same question
as we've seen it in other areas.
Q. If God says I am His holy one (and He does),
then why do I so often feel like a fumbling little
sinful wretch?
Q. If God says I have been freed from sin (and He
does),
then why do I still sometimes experience
a tremendous sense of bondage to old sin
patterns in my life?
Q. If God says He has already made me adequate as
a servant of His new covenant (and He does),
then why do I frequently feel totally inadequate
for the life I believe He has called me to live?
Q. And of course,
If God says that now, having been justified by
faith, I have peace with God through my Lord Jesus
Christ,
then why do I sometimes feel anything but peace
with God?
Why is that?
In response to those questions,
and especially in response to the one about not
experiencing peace with God,
I want to share with you something this
morning
that is going to require some major
rethinking for most of us here.
I want to begin helping us
to restructure our understanding
of what it means for us to have faith in God.
Now, we started to lay the groundwork for this
just a little bit
with a question I raised two weeks ago
but at the time didn't even begin to
answer.
I used the illustration of a teacher
who told his students
he was offering them two possible ways
of getting an 'A' in his class.
They could either pursue an 'A'
through doing all of the class work perfectly
or they could get an 'A'
by having faith in him.
In that context
every student in that class
would be demanding more information
about what it means to have faith in the teacher.
And my point in the illustration, of course,
was that we have been so bombarded with faith
talk in the Christian world
that we have ceased to relate to faith
as a word that has any meaning at all.
Our God says to us,
(Heb. 10:38) But My righteous one shall
live by faith...
Such a statement should cause us
to want to know
just exactly what that means.
Unfortunately, if we relate to it as having any real
meaning at all,
the best we can do
is to assume it means we should just
trust God to give us the strength
to get through the hard stuff in life.
Now that is all well and good,
and in fact I do that on a daily basis,
but if that is where our understanding of this faith
thing stops,
it will leave us with a tragically limited and
deficient understanding
of what's going on in this whole faith
relationship between us and our Creator.
We are going to return to that
peace-with-God question in a few minutes,
but we cannot deal with it correctly
until we first make some progress
in our understanding of faith.
And let me offer you
a concise statement
of what I believe to be the most common
error we make
in our understanding of faith,
and then I'll give you 4 points
that I hope will explain the statement.
And first of all, here is the statement:
The heart of all true Biblical faith
is not choosing to believe
that God will do something we want
Him to do,
it is choosing to trust
what He has already done
and what He has already said .
And I think I can explain this best
buy offering you a series of 4 points.
#1. As Christians
we do not automatically experience what is
true in our relationship with God,
but rather,we experience what we BELIEVE is true.
If what I believe about God
is consistent with who He really is
then what I experience will also be consistent
with truth.
But if I am believing a lie,
I will experience the results of that lie in my life
as if it were true,
even though that lie has no basis in fact.
Some examples will help.
EX. God tells us clearly,
repeatedly that now, having been justified
by faith, we have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ...
However,
if I still believe God is angry with me,
if I believe He is irritated with me,
if I believe He is still demanding from me
things I cannot deliver,
then I will feel rejection,
and find myself trying to hide from Him.
If I believe the battle is still raging,
even though an eternal peace has already been
established by God Himself,
I will continue to live in warfare.
EX. God tells us clearly, specifically, that
(Titus 3:5) He saved us, not on the basis
of deeds which we have done in
righteousness, but according to His mercy,
by the washing of regeneration and
renewing by the Holy Spirit...
However, if I still believe my standing with God
is directly linked to my performance for God,
then I will experience all of the things
that grow out of that belief system.
I will experience a sense of pride and security when
my performance is where I think it should be.
I will experience a sense of condemnation,
and alienation from God
when my performance falls short.
I will view God primarily as my Judge,
the great Righteous Evaluator of my life,
checking each day, each hour, each minute,
to see how I'm measuring up.
I will have no trouble viewing Him as all-powerful,
and absolutely righteous,
but I will have little if any awareness of His deep,
personal love for me as His child.
Here and now,
in this life on this earth,
it is not what is true that determines what I
end up experiencing in my walk with God,
it is what I believe is true.
#2. Everything God tells us in His Word
is absolute, pure, perfect truth.
Truth is the only thing He CAN tell us.
1 John 1:5 ¶ And this is the message we
have heard from Him and announce to you,
that God is light, and in Him there is no
darkness at all.
Which means that
every time we encounter a statement in
Scripture
that differs from what we are experiencing,
we know we have discovered evidence
of a lie in our personal belief system.
Which brings us to what I want us to see
as the first great step toward the true life of faith.
#3.Living by faith
is the ongoing, daily process
of actively seeking to replace our lies
with the truth revealed to us by our God.
And then finally, I want to add one more statement
here
to help complete the picture.
#4. We will know that we are believing the truth
when what we experience at the spirit level
is consistent with what God says is true.
You see, the life of faith
has very little to do with believing God can or
will do anything.
The life of faith is most of all
accepting as true
the things our God has already told us
about ourselves,
about our world,
about our past, our present, and
our future,
and about our relationship
with Him through Christ.
Now let me try to apply this to just a few areas
so that hopefully you can better relate to what
I'm saying.
We'll start with the question from last week:
Why, if we really do have peace with God
through the work of Christ for us,
why do so few Christians seem to
experience the reality of that peace?
The answer to that question
is that so few Christians seem to experience
peace with God
because so few Christians
believe God is telling them the truth
when He says they have peace with Him.
And the most common reason
for Christians not to believe
that they have peace with God
is because they do not believe
two other things God has said to them.
#1. They do not believe the death of Christ
was literally a full, complete, and eternal
payment for all their sin.
Col. 2:13 And when you were dead in your
transgressions and the uncircumcision of
your flesh, He made you alive together
with Him, having forgiven us all our
transgressions,
Col. 2:14 having canceled out the
certificate of debt consisting of decrees
against us and which was hostile to us;
and He has taken it out of the way, having
nailed it to the cross.
2. And they do not believe
they have been freed forever
from a law-based union with God.
They do not believe they have been freed from the
law.
Rom. 7:6 But now we have been released
from the Law, having died to that by
which we were bound, so that we serve in
newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of
the letter.
And if we do not believe either of those,
we will continue to live out an approach to God
in which we assume we must generate a
certain level of good deeds and good living
in order to achieve and maintain peace
with God.
You see, it isn't that we don't have peace with God,
it's that we don't believe we have peace.
It isn't that Christ's death
wasn't full payment for all our sin,
it's that we don't really believe it was full
payment.
It isn't that the measuring stick of the law
has not been removed from our lives forever,
it's that we don't believe it has been
removed.
And because we do not believe it,
we do not experience the benefits
and the reality of it in our lives.
What I'm trying to say right here
is not nearly as complicated
as I may be making it sound.
What I'm trying to say
is that we have only one perfect,
infallible resource
for understanding the true nature of our
God.
That resource is the record of Himself
and His dealings with us
that He has given us through His Word.
To the degree I choose to accept the truth of that
resource,
to that degree I will experience the reality of
that truth in my life.
And just a warning here -
our strong tendency
will be to understand our God
on the basis of our circumstances.
But the heart of faith
realizes that our true calling
is to understand our circumstances
on the basis of our God.
We live our lives immersed in a world of evil.
If I look at my circumstances
and then attempt to understand my God through
them
my relationship with God will ultimately
collapse
under a weight of confusion,
and doubts,
and questions,
and fears.
I'll drive down the road
and hit a bump
while drinking a cup of coffee
and then wonder what kind of God
would allow me to slop a big stain
on my nice clean shirt.
Or I'll see a close friend
fighting a difficult battle with cancer
and question the integrity of my Creator.
Only when I begin with my God,
and understand who He is
on the basis His revelation of Himself
through His Word,
and through Jesus Christ
can I begin to find solid footing
both with Him
and with my circumstances.
And when I look at my God
and at His revelation of Himself through Christ,
this one thing I understand -
my God is absolutely
and eternally GOOD,
and His every action toward me
grows out of that absolute goodness.
And when I begin there,
when I begin in faith,
choosing to believe what my God has
already said to me about Himself,
and about how He relates to me in Christ,
two things about my circumstances
then become clear.
First, my God will go with me
through everything I encounter in life,
and I will find His presence
more than sufficient to sustain me.
And second, He will not only bring me through
those circumstances,
He will also reshape them
into good in my life.
There was a statement in the Romans passage we
were studying last week,
a statement it pained me greatly
to have to skip over.
It was that statement in Romans 1:21
in which Paul reveals to us
the heart of humanity's great offense against
God.
Paul's says, Rom. 1:21 For even though they
knew God, they did not honor Him as
God, or give thanks; but they became
futile in their speculations, and their
foolish heart was darkened.
We did not honor Him as God
or give thanks...
Our great offense against our Creator
is in no way complicated.
He simply asks us to affirm
the two pillars of truth
upon which everything else exists -
God is there,
and He is GOOD.
The beginning of all true faith
is not in hoping God will do something good to
me now,
it is in affirming He is,
and always has been,
and always will be
absolutely and eternally good
in His every thought and action towards us.
Heb. 11:6 And without faith it is
impossible to please Him, for he who
comes to God must believe that He is, and
that He is a rewarder of those who seek
Him.