Totally Sufficient

That’s mostly what we’re going to be looking at this evening. The precious faith God gives us.

Faith

First, what is faith? It is trust. It is trusting in something. When I sit down on this chair, I trust that it will support me. But if I take away the chair and try to sit where it was, all the trust, all the faith in my ability to sit, won’t keep me from falling down. Faith isn’t a feeling, or a matter of willpower. Faith, trust is grounded in something, real, tangible and true.

We put our trust in God-Father, Son and Holy Spirit because He has proved that He is real, tangible and true. Now, many atheists would, at this point, object. But the scriptures are a reliable and believable witness to the reality of God. Furthermore, we can see the evidence of God, in the world, and in ourselves. We can see that we’re created in God’s image, this is why we worship, this is why we can think and can reason, and this is why we create and explore and learn.

Not only has God proven Himself, He has also made a number of promises which He has demonstrated as being true. He promises forgiveness of sins. The paralyzed man who was brought to Jesus, the first thing Jesus said was, “your sins are forgiven.” Then, so that we’d know that Christ has the authority to forgive sins, He healed the man. He promises to raise us from the dead. His friend Lazarus died. He was four days in the tomb. He was already decaying. Jesus proved that He is the resurrection and the life, by calling Lazarus from the tomb. He proved it by rising from the dead Himself. If he can bring Lazarus back to life, if He came back to life, He can bring us back to life at the end of the age.

God gives us a precious faith. This faith is precious because it is real, it is God himself. At Christmas time, we give and receive gifts. Some are good, others are great, still others are, you know.

The Greatest Gift

The greatest gift ever given is God himself. God gave himself in order to bring us to him, to forgive our sins, to make us right with him, so that we can be with him and enjoy him forever.

When loved ones are separated for a period of time, when soldiers go off to war, when business takes a spouse, a mom, a dad away for a time, then often, at times like Christmas, people who are going through it will say, “The greatest gift would be to be all together again.” The greatest gift God gives us, the most precious thing in all the world, is to be with him. Us with God, God with us.

It is one thing to know that this is the greatest gift, it is still another to appreciate it as such. Have you ever seen a child open presents, they barely look at the gift they’ve received before eagerly opening the next one. Ever see a child spend more time playing with the packaging than the toy itself? Sometimes we have a hard time appreciating what we’ve been given. This is especially true with God’s gift.

We have with us still, a sinful nature, which is never satisfied. Talk to a rich man about money. What do they need to be happy? The next dollar, when they get it, they need the next dollar. The sinful nature looks at God’s precious faith, God’s precious gift, and it looks for more. It looks around, to see if there is anything better out there.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we have to battle hard against our sinful natures. We will be enticed into thinking there is something better, more precious than what we’ve already received.

It is easy to do because we’re so aware of everything in the world, other religions, other spiritualities, other things, even unspirituality. Our minds start playing games with us, like, “How can I really know this is true? I was born into this, so what? I’ve known this all my life, it isn’t that important.

God answers all those things with the truth. Study the Bible; examine it. The claims it makes are historical. They really happened. You can trust the Bible; you can trust that God is true, far more than you can trust anything else, even the very nose on your face.

Many Gifts

Look at what else you were born into! A beautiful home, wealth, health, loving family. Would you give those up though you’ve received them by as much chance as your faith? No! And chance isn’t a factor at all. God gave you the gift of your parents, your very situation so that you can be here this morning. If something seems like it is familiar, or a chance happening, or you seem to be lucky, make no mistake. God directed this to you. “What about other people?” First, we’re not talking about other people. Who opens a present on Christmas and says, “I can’t accept this, there’s tons of other people in the world who have no presents at all.” In gratitude, we receive it, and in gratitude for what we’ve been given, we give to others, through things like operation Christmas Child.

When we see and receive this gift, knowing that it is the greatest gift of the universe, it influences how we live our daily lives. Knowing that we’ve received God himself, we see that everything else we have is a gift from God.

God gave you your parents. God gave you your children. God gave you your spouse. God gave you your girlfriend or boyfriend, your car, bike, whatever. Appreciate what you have. The sinful nature wants you to turn away and start thinking and dreaming about what you don’t have, about what could be. Don’t fall into that. Don’t start thinking, “If only my husband looked like Patrick Dempsey, was as rich as Bill Gates and loved me like some chivalrous, sweep me off my feet kind of guy.” Don’t think like that. Take those thoughts captive to Christ. Thank God for the person, the thing he’s given you and pray that God will make that person more and more like Him, so that you can be more and more like God also!

This same sinful nature attitude can poison us against Christ’s body, until we think that the people we regularly get together with are somehow less worthy of us than some other congregation or, as is increasingly popular, no congregation at all. This is what was happening in John’s church, we read in 2 John that some were abandoning the faith, abandoning the church, looking for satisfaction elsewhere, but never finding it.

Peter calls us back to the precious gift, God himself. God with us, God at work in us, producing amazement that the gift we’ve been given is far better than we could ever hope or imagine!

As Christians, as Christian parents, we remain focussed on Christ, on the precious gift given, because there is nothing greater to share with our children.

Many parents place a good priority on giving their children every opportunity to learn, experience and grow, like sports, special activities, special programs, all geared, all with the purpose of making life for their child most beneficial, most satisfying for the future.

It is important to do those things, within reason, but with more than just the future success, in a worldly manner, in view. We must have as first priority, Christian success. Proverbs says, train a child in the way he should go, then, when he is older, he will not depart from it.

How? How do we, as parents, as a church, make disciples of our children, make disciples of people from all over?

We start with faith. We start by teaching others, whether they are our children, or our friends, to put their trust in Jesus. No matter what you or they may think we put our trust in all kinds of things. If you trusted Boston to win, you faith was well placed, if Vancouver, not so much.

What we’re teaching is that Christ is totally trust worthy. Like trusting this chair to support me, it will. Sometimes, when we have special services, this chair isn’t right here, it gets moved. So if I go to where it usually is, without looking, I’ll fall. Christ never moves. He is always there, he is totally trustworthy.