The position of some would-be teachers, which insists that when you come into the kingdom of God by faith you immediately have all there is in the kingdom of God, is as deadly as cyanide. It kills all hope of spiritual advance and causes many to adopt what I call \u201cthe creed of contentment.\u201d1<\/p>\n
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Faith in God is all but gone. When the Son of Man cometh, will He find faith on the earth?<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t you be taken in by statistics\u2014those that say there is a resurgence of religion, that more people are buying books about religion and more people going to church. Faith in God actually is becoming a rarity!2<\/p>\n
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Peace of heart does not come from denying that there is trouble, but comes from rolling your trouble on God. By faith you have the right to call on One who is your brother, the Son of Man who was also the Son of God. And if He\u2019s going to look after you, why should you worry at all!3<\/p>\n
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People have faith in \u201cfaith\u201d\u2014and largely forget that our confidence is not in the power of faith but in the Person and work of the Savior, Jesus Christ.4<\/p>\n
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We have full confidence in Jesus Christ. He is the origin, source, foundation and resting place for all of our faith. In that kingdom of faith, we are dealing with Him, with God Almighty, the One whose essential nature is holiness, the One who cannot lie.<\/p>\n
Our confidence rises as the character of God becomes greater and more trustworthy to our spiritual comprehension. The One with whom we deal is the One who embodies faithfulness and truth\u2014the One who cannot lie.5<\/p>\n
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I am not insisting that human reason and faith in God are contrary to one another, but I do insist that one is above the other. When we are true believers in God\u2019s truth, we enter another world\u2014a realm that is infinitely above reason.6<\/p>\n
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Faith never goes contrary to reason\u2014faith simply ignores reason and rises above it.7<\/p>\n
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Reason cannot prove that Jesus took upon Himself the form of a man and that He died for the sins of the world, but faith knows that He did.8<\/p>\n
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Reason cannot prove that on the third day Jesus rose from the dead, but faith knows that it happened, for faith is an organ of knowledge.9<\/p>\n
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Reason cannot say, \u201cI know that Jesus will come to judge the living and the dead,\u201d but faith knows that He will come.10<\/p>\n
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Reason cannot say, \u201cMy sins are gone,\u201d but faith knows that they are forgiven and forgotten.11<\/p>\n
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Faith simply ignores reason and rises above it. The brain just comes struggling along behind like a little boy trying to keep up with his dad.12<\/p>\n
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The genuine child of God is someone who cannot be explained by human reasoning.13<\/p>\n
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Faith is the highest kind of reason after all, for faith goes straight into the presence of God.14<\/p>\n
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We may not be astronomers, but we can know the God who made the stars. We may not be physicists, but we can know the God who made mathematics. There may be many technical and local bits of knowledge that we do not have, but we can know the God of all knowledge. We can enter beyond the veil into His very presence. There we stand hushed and wide-eyed as we gaze and gaze upon the wonders of Deity.<\/p>\n
It is faith that takes us there, and reason cannot disprove anything that faith discovers and knows. Reason can never do that.15<\/p>\n
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Faith in God\u2014not in any god, not in religion\u2014but faith in the sovereign God who made heaven and earth, who judges among the gods, whose throne is justice and judgment and who will require men\u2019s deeds\u2014that\u2019s the God we must believe in, my friends.<\/p>\n
And when we believe in that kind of God, we will change our way of living, and we\u2019ll change for the better. We will repent, and we will reform and turn to God, and we will cease to do evil and begin to do good, and turn from the world.<\/p>\n
We will seek to crucify our flesh and put on the new man which is renewed in holiness.16<\/p>\n
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Whatever men may think of human reason God takes a low view of it.17<\/p>\n
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Everything was created for a purpose and I claim that there are some things that human reason cannot do, things that are beyond its capacity.<\/p>\n
Reason cannot tell us that Jesus Christ should be born of a virgin, but faith knows that He was.<\/p>\n
Reason cannot prove that Jesus took upon Him the form of a man and that He died for the sins of the world, but faith knows that He did.<\/p>\n
Reason cannot prove that on the third day Jesus arose from the dead, but faith knows that He did, for faith is an organ of knowledge.<\/p>\n
The rationalists take the position that the human brain alone is the organ of knowledge, but they either forget or overlook completely that feeling is a means of knowledge, and so is faith.18<\/p>\n
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In this relationship with Jesus Christ through the new birth, something takes place by the ministry of the Spirit of God which psychology cannot explain. This is why I must contend that faith is the highest kind of reason after all, for faith goes straight into the presence of God. Our Lord Jesus Christ has gone ahead as a forerunner for us, and engages God Almighty on our behalf. It is for this reason alone that man may reach that for which he was created, and finally communes with the source of his being, loving the fountain of his life, praying to the One who has begotten him and resting in the knowledge that God made heaven and earth.19<\/p>\n
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Not all of the scientific facts ever assembled in any university of the world can support one spiritual fact\u2014because you are dealing with two different realms. One deals with reason, and the other deals with faith in God.20<\/p>\n
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Almost all who preach or write on the subject of faith have much the same things to say concerning it. They tell us that it is believing a promise, that it is taking God at His word, that it is reckoning the Bible to be true and stepping out upon it. The rest of the book or sermon is usually taken up with stories of persons who have had their prayers answered as a result of their faith. These answers are mostly direct gifts of a practical and temporal nature such as health, money, physical protection or success in business. Or if the teacher is of a philosophic turn of mind he may take another course and lose us in a welter of metaphysics or snow us under with psychological jargon as he defines and redefines, paring the slender hair of faith thinner and thinner till it disappears in gossamer shavings at last. When he is finished we get up disappointed and go out \u201cby that same door where in we went.\u201d Surely there must be something better than this.21<\/p>\n
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Faith rests upon character. Faith must rest in confidence upon the One who made the promise.22<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The position of some would-be teachers, which insists that when you come into the kingdom of God by faith you immediately have all there is in the kingdom of God, is as deadly as cyanide. It kills all hope of spiritual advance and causes many to adopt what I call \u201cthe creed of contentment.\u201d1 \u2014\u2014 … Continue reading “FAITH\/REASON”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}