There is a difference between having faith in someone and having trust in someone. Faith is simply the conviction or belief that something is true. The word faith is the word “pistes” in the Greek. We can have faith in anything. We can even have faith in a lie. Remembering that “faith” isn’t faith until it shows itself in action, I can believe that an old rickety chair will hold my weight only to sit on it and fall to the floor. Just because I believe it, doesn’t make it true. No matter how vehemently I believe.
Ultimately the object of the faith will determine whether our faith is credible or unwarranted. That’s why the object of our faith must always be the truth of Jesus Christ. Our personal faith in Jesus Christ is the only thing that can save us from our sin nature, death, hell and the grave – all in one swoop. Our personal faith in the person of Jesus Christ, that He is God, that He is the son of God, and that He died on the cross for our sins because of His great love for us – that faith saves us, heals us, delivers, makes us free and gives us the victory, forever.
But just because we have faith in Christ as our Savior, doesn’t mean that we trust Him with our today and our tomorrow. The word trust is the greek word “batach”. It means security and denotes the idea that “you won’t have the rug pulled out from underneath you.” Here is the problem. We can have faith in Jesus Christ to the point that we have moved from the darkness into the light – we have been truly transformed into a spiritual child of God, but still not trust Jesus with our life’s situations. The problem is that we can’t understand God. His ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts. He just doesn’t do things the way we would. He waits too long, for us. He uses the wrong people, for us. He is just unpredictable in the process of life. We can see that over and over again in the Holy Scriptures. We want Him to go left and not only does He go right, He goes incredibly, totally right – and then some. And because of this, we find that we have faith enough to get saved and trust Jesus for our eternity, but we refuse to trust Him for our tomorrow. Let me prove it.
In the fifth chapter of Galatians beginning at verse twenty-two the Holy Bible (NASB) reads “But the fruit of The Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…” This in essence means that once we surrender our selves to Jesus Christ and ask Him to be our Lord, when we instantly receive the presence of The Holy Spirit authenticating that our faith in Jesus Christ is true – we immediately have “The Fruit of The Spirit”. In The Spirit we are given the ability to do all these things as Christ did them, as He modeled them for us. If that is true, and it is, why don’t we see more believers living a holy life as is outlined in Galatians 5:22-23? The obvious answer is that we don’t trust God to handle these situations according to His Word. And as a result, so few people are modeling holiness that it is viewed as a strange thing, even in the church. All because we choose not to trust God. We don’t know what He will do. I might not like what He does or how He does it. I may agree intellectually that His word is true, but I am not willing to trust Him with my life’s choices. So we see that I have the victory spiritually, but I am not able to reveal it in the natural. I have abundance and prosperity, spiritually first and then in every other way, but I can’t walk in it – because I won’t trust Jesus with my right now. Faith gives me access to it in the spirit. Trust brings the promises and the power of the word into my life’s situations. God wants to bless you in an incredibly public way financially, but I won’t trust Jesus to tithe. Christ wants to bless my marriage abundantly, but I won’t trust God to love my wife the way that Christ loves the church, or submit to my husband the way the church submits to Christ. Is anyone willing to trust His word and receive a supernatural blessing?
As a result of the above we have watered down the holiness of God and made almost anything permissible in our lives and in the church. All we do is excuse it away. We are no longer validated by God’s word and the movement of The Holy Spirit, but now we are validated by men, tradition, and a world corporation spirit in the church. We sing our songs and play our music and preach our messages and we call it worship. But how can it be worship if it’s not HOLY? We have been lied to and believed the lie. We have allowed an Ishmael spirit to rise up in us and in the church. It looks like the real thing – it sounds like the real thing – but it has no promise, and thus no power. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not just words, but power. If our actions don’t validate the scriptures then our actions are null and void. Where is our spiritual power? We have excused it away. Instead of saying that our actions are null and void we have said that the scriptures are null and void. Where is our holiness that honors Jesus Christ and draws the world? We have sold it for our large facilities and a comfortable pension. Who is modeling Christ?
One of the main reasons that Jesus Christ came was to model the truth that we can do all things through Christ that gives us strength. That doesn’t mean that we have to be perfect. What it does mean is that we are legitimately trying to be perfect. Grace will fill in the gap. The reason that Christ modeled holiness is to show us that it could be done. His disciples went forth from among Him and did their best to model holiness. And they didn’t do it perfectly, but they did it well enough to change the world. Christ is looking for someone to model holiness so that the people that we come in contact with can know that it can be done, that Jesus is real, and that His word is true. You won’t do it perfectly, but if you give it your best effort, it will most certainly change the world around you. Isn’t it time you moved from faith to trust?
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