Faith: Part 1 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning. All this week I want to talk with you on the theme of faith. What do you think faith is?

Do you think faith is believing something that you know isn’t true?

Or maybe believing something is true. Well, that’s not faith. That’s just acknowledging the truth of something.

I can believe a chair will hold me up, but if I’m not sitting in it, it’s not faith. I can believe the train will take me into the city, but unless I catch the train, it’s not faith.

And so it is with the Christian life. What is faith? I had a lecturer in Bible college many years ago who was a translator of the Old Testament from Hebrew into English.

And I remember him taking a whole class period to talk to us about the meaning of the Hebrew word for faith. You know, sometimes there’s a word in another language and there’s no one word in English that can capture all the meaning that’s in that word in the other language, and that’s what faith in the Hebrew language is like.

So we translated faith into the English language, but there’s 4 aspects of meaning, he said in the Hebrew word for faith.

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It means to rely on God, to trust in God. To obey God and to cling to God.

All these ideas are contained in that word faith. So I want to look at a different one of those ideas each day, and today it’s rely on God.

To rely on God

That means you depend on God. This is what faith means. You depend on God. Now just think about your relationship with other human beings. Why do you rely on a particular person?

Well, probably because you know them, right? And your experience of them says to you that they are reliable. Think about your work environment, at your job. Why would you hire someone to be an accountant for you? Well, you might say, we’ll hire this person because they’re good with numbers, they’re very dependable, they have a high attention to detail.

I guarantee you would never hire me to be your accountant.

But it’s because of their skills, their abilities that you hire them. You won’t rely on your accountant to fix your car, will you? You’ll rely on a mechanic to fix your car. You might choose your mechanic also because of their track record with a friend who uses that mechanic and is very satisfied with them.

You see what I’m saying? You rely on someone because they have what it takes to do what you’re relying on them for, and you either experienced that in the past, or someone you know has experienced it, or you try them out and you find them to be reliable.

This is one of the reasons it’s so important for us to share with one another and with our kids, our experiences with God and how reliable he’s been in our lives because it helps them to see God as reliable, not just in the Bible, but in people’s lives today, people they know.

Think about your own relationship with God. Relying on Him, depending on Him, focuses on His strength, His ability, His faithfulness in the past. Listen to what the apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 8 through 10. He says, For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. Listen to this, but that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and He will deliver us. On Him we have set our hope that He will deliver us again. You see what he’s saying.

We felt we’d received the sentence of death, but we know God raises even the dead, and He’s delivered us in the past, and He will deliver us.

We can rely on Him even in this desperate situation.

You know, you can rely on Him too.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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