Author: Jay Lehman

Putting Faith into Practice

That the Christian life is lived “by faith” is a prominent message in the New Testament.  But how do we do it?  It is great to understand the theology and theory, but we all want to know, “How do we put it into practice?  What does living by faith look like?”  I can measure laws and law-breakers; I can measure rule-keeping and rule-breaking; I can measure a life lived by works.  But faith?  That’s a little too nebulous; a little too out there in a world that we can’t see, smell, or touch.  But it is exactly how God intends us to live.  So how do we bring faith to our every day experience?

Think of your Christian experience as a big circle.  We start with a faith challenge.  Something in our lives that doesn’t make sense.  Some crossroads where life isn’t working.  One path available to us is to walk by sight – seeking to explain everything in terms of consequences for our past actions, or finding the victim or beneficiary in each situation, or laying blame on God, our spouse, our co-workers, etc for what is happening.  The other path is to let God’s revealed Word guide our thoughts.  And when we take this route, we are choosing to walk by faith.  We understand that no matter what it looks like on the outside, our life is defined by what God has said and promised, not by our circumstances.  We choose to live as if Christ is living His life through us.  We act according to the influence of Christ living His life through us.  We hear the voice of Jesus and we follow.  When we do this, we are walking by faith.

When we walk by faith, the crushing influence of our external circumstances begin to lessen.  We find that in the middle of our challenging situation, we experience peace and joy and the fruits of the Spirit, because we are walking in the Spirit.  We experience God’s incredible spiritual blessings.  We experience success in our spiritual walk.  In short, we begin to see and feel in our daily lives what walking by faith looks like.

In the middle of this spiritual blessing, our enemy, the devil, comes along and stirs up trouble.  He reminds us of situations, some minor and some dire, where it looks like God has given up on us.  He accuses us of some besetting sin and tells us we are never getting better.  He blames God and encourages us to do the same regarding a chronic illness or wayward child.  We are back to a faith crossroads.

And just like the last time we were here, we choose to walk by faith.  We believe by faith that God is good, despite the fact that at times the evidence suggests the opposite.  We believe by faith that we have been set free from sin’s power and by virtue of Christ living His life through us will overcome our besetting sin.  We believe by faith that God has a training program for us, His child, marked by good gifts and a good plan.  In short, we choose to walk by faith rather than by sight.

Do you see the circle we are on?

  • We face a faith challenge.
  • We make a righteous choice by God’s power inside us.
  • We choose to walk by faith.
  • We experience the fruit of the Spirit; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
  • Our faith grows stronger as we experience God’s blessing.
  • We face a faith challenge.

And the circle repeats itself.  The beauty is that as we continue to make righteous choices and exercise our faith, our faith gets stronger.  Does that mean the choices get easier as we go along?  I don’t know if easier is the right word.  The challenges become different as God, through His sovereign training program, conforms us more and more to the image of His Son.  Walking by the Spirit, walking by faith is not some distant goal for the super-spiritual saint.  It is how you and I, children of and home to the Living God, are designed to live.  And it is available to us right now.  It is our path to spiritual maturity – our sanctification.

Faith and the Three Great Promises of God

If you take a comprehensive read through the New Testament, you will find three great promises God makes to new covenant believers that are repeated over and over again.  And just like our old covenant ancestors, faith is a primary requirement to lay hold of and experience the power of these great promises.

The first promise is the most familiar.  Believe in Jesus and you will have eternal life.  Jesus introduced this promise about a hundred different ways in the gospels.  One of the most succinct is, “He who believes in the Son [Jesus] has eternal life” (Jn 3:36).  Because we can’t see the future, because people don’t generally come back from the dead and share their experience, we don’t know for sure what our after death experience will be.  God has promised that for those who believe in His Son their experience will be eternal life in His presence in heaven.  Because we haven’t been there, we believe this by faith.

When my father passed away, my mother knew that he was gone.  She knew standing next to and touching his cold body that Adrian had left the scene.  Of that, she said, there was no doubt.  But where had he gone?  To know that she had to open her Bible.  It was only on those pages that she found the answer to where he had gone.  He went to the presence of the Lord.  This we believe by faith in God’s promise of eternal life to all who embrace the gospel message of Jesus Christ.

A second great promise of God to new covenant believers is the indwelling presence of God Himself through the Holy Spirit.  In the latter chapters of John’s gospel, Jesus promised the coming of the Holy Spirit to live inside us following His departure.  Two hundred and sixteen times in his epistles, Paul writes about Jesus or God living inside us.  Let this incredible thought sink into your consciousness.  The God of the universe, the creator of all that is, lives inside you and me.

Now if you are like me, you cannot see, hear, smell, or taste the Holy Spirit inside.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that I don’t really feel the Spirit inside.  How do I know He is there?  How do I know He is influencing me?  How do I know my conscience is now controlled by the Holy Spirit?  I know all of this by faith.  By faith I believe God’s New Testament promise that His Holy Spirit is living inside me and helping me to do God’s will.

A third great promise of the New Testament is God’s deliverance, God’s rescue, God’s salvation from the power of sin in my life.  God has promised that my old sin nature was crucified with Christ on the cross.  God has promised that when I embraced the gospel message of Jesus Christ I received a new identity, a new nature, a new heart, a new disposition, a new power over sin, and much more.  All this new is indeed incredible.

Now do I always see all this new playing itself out in perfect obedience?  No.  I struggle with my sworn enemies of the flesh and the devil.  I experience the tug of sin’s power.  But by faith, I believe a constant and ongoing conflict with sin is not my destiny.  By faith, I believe that I have the indwelling and resurrection power of His Spirit to choose righteousness.  One of the great promises of God is that I now have a choice to use my “mortal members as instruments of righteousness to God, not instruments of sin” (Rom 6:13).  Because I don’t always feel this, I believe it by faith.

How do we overcome the enemies that challenge our experience of the freedom from sin’s power?  “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith” (I Jn 5:4).  Faith in the three great promises of God and the hundreds that go with them is how we live the Christian life and how we experience its abundant power.

A Better Promise (Hebrews 11)

In Hebrews chapter 11, the author develops a critical similarity between the old covenant saints and new covenant believers; the absolute need to live by faith.  For the Old Testament believers, their faith was centered around the idea that something better was coming.

“By faith Abel offered to God a better sacrifice than Cain…By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death…By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, prepared an ark…By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out…not knowing where he was going…By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise; for he was looking for a city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.  By faith even Sarah herself received ability to conceive, even beyond the proper time of life, since she considered Him faithful who had promised….All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (Heb 11:4-13).

The author continues to highlight the faith of the Old Testament saints throughout the rest of chapter 11.  By the end of the chapter he brings us, the new covenant believers, into the picture.  “And all these [Old Testament saints], having gained approval through their faith, did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for us [new covenant saints], so that apart from us they would not be made perfect” (Heb 11:39-40).  “Something better” takes us back to Hebrews 8:6, “But now Jesus has obtained a more excellent ministry, by as much as He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises” (Heb 8:6).

What are these “better promises” that apply to new covenant believers?  And what kind of faith is required for us to lay hold of these promises?  We will explore these questions next time.

A Better Offering (Hebrews 10:1-16)

Coming now to Hebrews chapter 10, the author stops to summarize his main point:  The superiority of Jesus and the new covenant that He ushered in by His complete and sufficient sacrifice for our sins.  “For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near.  Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, because the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have consciousness of sins?  But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins year by year.  For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb 10:1-4).  The Old Testament sacrifice was not a complete salvation, but only a temporary covering for their sins.

But when Christ came, the temporary sacrificial system was replaced by His permanent obedient sacrifice.  “Therefore, when Christ comes into the world, He says, ‘Sacrifice and offering You have not desired, but a body You have prepared for Me;  in whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You have taken no pleasure.  Then I said, “Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God” ‘ ” (Heb 10:5-7).

“When Christ said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will,’ He takes away the first in order to establish the second.  By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb 10:9-10).  Christ came to replace the old covenant system of sacrifice with the once-for-all obedient sacrifice of His own body.

This sacrifice has a here-and-now application as well as a once-for-all.  “For by one offering He has perfected [completed the salvation] for all time [once for all] those who are being sanctified [in the here and now]” (Heb 10:14).  Being sanctified how?  “By the Holy Spirit who testifies to us; for after saying, ‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws upon their heart, and on their mind I will write them’ ” (Heb 10:15-16).  This is a repeat of the promise of Hebrews 8:10.

How does God write His laws, His ways, on our heart and mind?  By giving us the mind of Christ Himself through the indwelling Spirit.  “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words…For who has known the mind of the Lord?…But we have the mind of Christ” (I Cor 2:12-13, 16).  Can you believe it?  You have the mind of Christ.  And the implications of this are enormous.

 

A Better Sacrifice (Hebrews 9:11-28)

“But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through his own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption” (Heb 9:11-12).  Christ’s death, the spilling of His blood, was a better sacrifice.  Christ’s blood not only obtained our “eternal redemption”, but it also empowers our Christian walk as we see in these verses ahead.

“For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling those who have been defiled, sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?  And for this reason He is the mediator of a new covenant, in order that since a death has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were committed under the first covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance” (Heb 9:13-15).

The promise of the new covenant has an eternal and a present component.  On the eternal front, our transgressions are paid in full by Christ’s blood and we have obtained an “eternal inheritance”.  On the present-day front, Christ’s blood “cleanses our conscience to serve the living God”; to live godly lives.  When Christ died, our old sin nature died with Him and we have been raised with Christ to walk in a new life, to walk in a new resurrection power (Rom 6:4).  The ramifications of this for experiencing the supernatural Christian life are the heart and soul of what Fanning the Flames is all about.  But we move on.

“For Christ did not enter a holy place made with hands, a mere copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; nor was it that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the holy place year by year with blood that is not his own…so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him” (Heb 9:24-25,28).  Christ’s first coming secured our initial salvation and our eternal destiny.  He saved us when He bore our sins on the cross.  Christ’s second coming will secure our final salvation; our ultimate rescue from this world to live forever with Him.  Even so, come Lord Jesus!