by Dr. Walter L. Wilson
THE LIFE OF FAITH
O NE OF the most blessed messages to be found in the entire Word of God is, “The just shall live by faith.” This occurs in Habakkuk 2:4, Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, and Hebrews 10:38. Have you ever stopped to realize how much we all live by faith? When ever I sit down in a chair I do it by faith. I do not examine the legs to see if they will hold me up. I eat my meals by faith. I trust the one who prepares my food to make it for my good. I never examine the plate with a microscope to see if it has any poison in it. Whenever I ride on an airplane it is by faith. I believe that the pilot knows what he is doing and that he can find that little narrow landing strip a thousand miles away even though it is in the middle of the night. We live by faith in everything we do, except religion. Isn’t it strange ? Abraham was more sure of God than of anything else in the world. But what kind of belief is acceptable to the Lord? Belief in God about na ture does not make one a Christian. Belief in God about history does not make one a Christian. Not until you believe what God says about His Son, and accept Him as your Saviour do you become a Christian. Abraham was more sure of God than anything else. When the Lord told him to do something, he went and did it. James tells us, “Was not Abraham our f a t h e r justified by works, when he had offered up Isaac his son upon the altar?” (James 2: 21). That is a strange expression. Would you say that a man who went out to kill his own boy was doing a good thing? Ask any religious person who teaches that men are saved by works how this is possible. He took the knife in his hand, bound the boy and put him on the altar. He was justified by that act. God said to him,
“You are a righteous man because you believed Me.” What he did there proved that he believed God. When we go out and give some potatoes to the poor, that does not prove that we believe anything except maybe that potatoes are good for them. You pay someone’s doctor’s bill but that does not prove you believe God. These are kind acts. All the good works we do (and there are not many of them to tell the honest truth), do not prove that we believe God. It will generally show that man is trying to buy salva tion by these good works. When God told Abraham to go out, not knowing whither he went, he went! Think, too, of the Apostle Paul. He sold himself out to Christ. Everything else became like shadows to him. That day when he met the Saviour on the way to Damascus, he gave himself over to Christ. He had been an enemy of the Lord. He was going there to kill the believers. The Saviour said, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? It is hard for you to kick against the pricks.” Paul wanted to know what the Lord would have him to do. From that moment on his whole ob ject in life was to get people to know the Saviour. We do not read how he lived. We do not read about his tak ing up offerings. Nobody got behind him and pledged their support. He just believed God. Consider David, a man full of glad ness and songs. Samuel anointed him when he was a teenager. He never referred to it later. He believed that God had called him. He was a king even when he was in the cave hiding from wicked Saul. He knew about this himself, but he did not say a word about it to anyone else. He just trust ed the Lord to give it to him in dije time. He did not kill Saul, his enemy, when he had several opportunities. He knew God would some day give him the kingdom. So he lived by faith.
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