A Little Story About Faith...

It could change your life.

"Fact, Faith, and Experience"

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“Three men were walking on a wall: Feeling, Faith and Fact. Feeling took an awful fall, and Faith was taken back. So close was Faith to Feeling that he stumbled and fell too. But Fact remained and pulled up Faith, and that brought Feeling too.” ~Unknown

A Promise For Those Who Seek God

"anything you ask with [this] passion, and [this] direction, He will give it to you..."  ~Paul Washer

Trust

“Christians do not say, ‘I do not understand you at all, but I trust you anyway.’ Rather, we say, ‘I do not understand you in this situation, but I understand why I trust you anyway. Therefore I can trust that you understand even though I don’t.’

If we do not know why we trust God in the beginning, then we will always need to know exactly what God is doing in order to trust him. Failing to grasp that, we may not be able to continue trusting him, for anything we do not understand may count decisively against what we are able to trust.

If, on the other hand, we do know why we trust God, we will be able to trust him in situations where we do not understand what he is doing….Faith does not know why in terms of the immediate, but it knows why it trusts God who knows why in terms of the ultimate.” ~Os Guiness

Be Not Anxious

"Anxious is a word that simply means to worry, don't worry. That is the heart and the soul of the passage (Matthew 6:25-34), the Lord is calling for us to cease from worrying...the Bible tells us that for a Christian, for a child of God, worry is a sin. Because worry is the equivalent of saying, 'God I know You mean well by what You say but I'm just not sure You can pull it off'. Worry is the sin of distrusting the promise and the providence of God, and yet we do it all the time.

William Inge said, "Worry is interest paid on trouble before it's due." Another writer said, "Worry is a thin stream of fear that trickles through the mind, if encouraged it'll cut a channel so wide that all other thoughts will be drowned in it." And one writer put it this way, "Worry is faith in the negative, trust in the unpleasant, assurance of disaster and belief in defeat." And one writer said, "Worry is wasting today's time to clutter up tomorrow's opportunities with yesterdays troubles."

~J. MacArthur  Link

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,

I yield my flickering torch to thee;

My heart restores its borrowed ray,

That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day

May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,

I dare not ask to fly from thee;

I lay in dust life’s glory dead,

And from the ground there blossoms red

Life that shall endless be.

~ George Matheson

History

"Written on the evening of Matheson’s sister’s marriage. His whole family had gone to the wedding and had left him alone, and he writes of something which had happened to him that caused immense mental anguish. There is a story of how years before, he had been engaged until his fiancé learned that he was going blind, and there was nothing the doctors could do.  She told him that she could not go through life with a blind man. He went blind while studying for the ministry, and his sister had been the one who had taken care of him all these years, but now she is gone. He had been a brilliant student.  Some say that if he hadn’t gone blind, he could have been the leader of the church of Scotland in his day. He had written a learned work on German theology and then wrote “The Growth of The Spirit of Christianity.” Louis Benson says this was a brilliant book but with some major mistakes in it. When some critics pointed out the mistakes and charged him with being an inaccurate student he was heartbroken. One of his friends wrote, “When he saw that for the purposes of scholarship his blindness was a fatal hindrance, he withdrew from the field – not without pangs, but finally.” So he turned to the pastoral ministry, and the Lord has richly blessed him, finally bringing him to a church where he regularly preached to over 1500 people each week. But he was only able to do this because of the care of his sister and now she was married and gone. Who will care for him, a blind man? Not only that, but his sister’s marriage brought a fresh reminder of his own heartbreak, over his fiancé’s refusal to “go through life with a blind man.” It is the midst of this circumstance and intense sadness that the Lord gives him this hymn – written he says in 5 minutes! Looking back over his life, he once wrote that his was “an obstructed life, a circumscribed life… but a life of quenchless hopefulness, a life which has beaten persistently against the cage of circumstance, and which even at the time of abandoned work has said not “Good night” but “Good morning.” How could he maintain quenchless hopefulness in the midst of such circumstances and trials? His hymn gives us a clue..." Link

Trust

"Each day God asks us in a new way, 'Do you trust me?'"

~ from a friend

An Inexplicable Peace

"Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.
But to him that worketh not,

but believeth on

Him that justifieth the ungodly,

his faith is counted for righteousness. Even as David also describeth the

blessedness

of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works,

Saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven , and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.

...[Abraham] Who against hope believed in hope

...and being not weak in faith

...he staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief;

but was strong in faith, giving glory to God;

And being fully persuaded that,

what He had promised, He was able also to perform.

And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness."

Romans 4:4-8, 18-22

"Knowing God's Will", by John MacArthur

 God's Will Is...

FIRST:  for us to be Saved

SECOND: Spirit-filled (which means that you be controlled by, totally influenced by the Spirit, which happens when the Word of Christ dwells in you so that you live in the consciousness of His presence.) 

THIRD:  Sanctified (set apart from sin)

"I could give you some more points but I’ll cut it at this point. It is God’s will in 1 Peter 2 that you be submissive. It is God’s will in 1 Peter 4 that you be suffering because you’re an effective evangelist. But let’s just take these three things, okay? Saved, Spirit-filled, sanctified, all right? That’s God’s will for your life. Now let me give you something that’s going to wrap this all up.

You say, “Wait a minute, you didn’t tell me anything about what I want to know. I want to know who to marry, what to do, I want to know about next semester, I want to know this, I want to know that. How can I know these details that aren’t in the Bible?”

Are you ready for this? Listen to this, this is a verse that you should really learn to love. I’m going to read it to you. Psalm 37 verse 4, listen to what it says, “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He will do it.”

Now listen to this. Delight in the Lord and He’ll give you the desires of your heart. Now let me ask you a question. If I’m saved, if I’m Spirit-controlled, and if I’m sanctified, am I delighting in the Lord? Sure...sure. And if I’m delighting in the Lord, He will give me the desires of my heart. You know what that means? That doesn’t mean He’ll give me what I want simply, it means He’ll make me want what He wants for me. Did you get that? He will give me the desires of my heart. He will give me His desires.

You say, “Where are you going with this?” Just this, if I’m saved, Spirit-filled, sanctified, do you know what God’s will is? You know what it is? Whatever you want. You say, “Wait a minute, whatever I want? Whatever I want is God’s will?” Right, because who is controlling your wants?

...if you’re not a Christian, you’re just playing a game at it, or if you’re not allowing the Spirit of God to control your life and being saturated by the Word, and you’re not living a pure and sanctified set-apart life, you don’t really have much chance to find the unknown part of God’s will.

But if your life is right, you can follow the desires of your heart cause having delighted in Him, He will give you the desires of your heart."

- message to young people by John MacArthur
Listen - 43 minutes

(Or Read)

"What an Envier Doubts"

"Why do we sinfully compare? Because we have “become conceited.” But there is another reason: we envy because we doubt God’s goodness.

We decide that (fill in the blank) is good for us. We don’t have it. Someone else does. Therefore (we conclude) God is good to them and not good to us.

We doubt His love. Oh, maybe not His love in general—we would never say “God is not loving”—but we doubt that He loves us, really.

This is unequivocally NOT TRUE! God HAS BEEN and ALWAYS WILL BE good to us.

"For the Lord is good." Ps. 100:5

"Yes, the Lord will give what is good." Ps. 85:12

"And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." Rom. 8:28

"No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly." Ps. 84:11

The proof of His goodness is at the cross. The guarantee of his goodness is in the resurrection.

"He will do us good, real good, lasting good, only good, every good. He will make us good, and this is to do us good to the highest degree” insists Charles Spurgeon (HT: Julie Kauflin).

God’s priority is to make us good—which is our best good.

So think about it: this “good” that we lack and that someone else has is not a sign God has forgotten us or doesn’t care about us—just the opposite! It is an evidence of his goodness! It is an opportunity for us to learn to trust His ways, to understand His love more deeply, to grow in Christ-likeness.

It is, because He is, good!"

~by Carolyn Mahaney (Link)