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The Nature of Faith
Faith in theory so to speak, what is faith in practice?
What is faith?
What does it look like?
What are the characteristics of faith?
Let me put it this way, first, what Paul says about faith is not only true for justification but also for living!
What Paul says is true about faith for living, for battling, for fighting temptation, for dealing with doubt, for surmounting obstacles and failures.
Faith is not merely that which saves but keeps saving.
In other words, here we see the Elements of Faith.
(We can call this the Nature of Faith).
What did Abraham’s Faith enable him to do?
I. His Faith enabled Abraham to believe God’s Word
It enabled him to believe God’s word of promise.
What was the promise God made to Abraham?
It’s right here in our text.
“According to what had been spoken So will your descendants be.”
What did that promise mean?
It meant that Abraham would have an incredibly large and numerous progeny.
What did God use to demonstrate how many Abraham’s descendents would be?
Sand on the seashore and stars in the heavens.
Faith enabled Abraham to believe God’s word of promise.
That is incredible promise especially for someone at Abraham’s age and with a wife in the condition of Sarah!
Promise Not merely to natural descendants
But that’s not all to that word So.
The Holman doesn’t accurately, and the ESV doesn’t make it clear enough.
The Holman has descendants in the plural.
The Word is is actually σπέρμα and it’s in the singular.
The ESV gives offspring, which in the English could be singular or plural.
The word is seed in the singular.
And this really gets to what God’s promise really is.
σπέρμα
Galatians 3:16
The promise was not to merely Abraham’s natural seed and progeny, but to One — the Lord Jesus Christ.
Our Lord tells the Jews, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day: and he saw it and was glad.”
It’s a serious misunderstanding of God’s promise to Abraham to confine it to his natural seed, and to the land of Israel.
2 Corithians 1:20
This involved the Gentiles coming into this salvation.
“So that he became the father of many nations.”
Matthew
How does this include the Gentiles?
Because they are Abraham’s children — By Faith, not by blood.
How could a Jew be the Father of many nations, many ethnic groups?
He couldn’t.
It is only that he is their father in the Faith.
So, the first thing Faith enables Abraham to do is believe God’s word of Promise.
II.
His faith enabled him to believe God’s Word alone — and nothing else.
He had nothing to go on except the mere word of God.
Here’s Abraham looking at all that sand and all those stars and he looks at himself and Sarah and he can see his utter deadness and her deadness.
There is nothing to go on except God’s Word.
III.
His faith enabled him to believe God’s Word alone — in spite of all appearances to the contrary.
“He believed, hoping against hope.”
What that means is that by all appearances, by every natural sense, by every opinion and evidence to the contrary — there is absolutely no way this comes to pass, naturally and ordinarily speaking.
What conceivable hope was there that Sarah would bare a child?
What are the odds?
There is not even a glimmer of hope.
He had nothing whatsoever to go on — except God’s Word.
And not only that — everything was against the promise.
And yet this is the triumph and achievement of faith.
IV.
His Faith enabled him to believe God’s Word alone — fully convinced.
Look at verse 21.
He was fully convinced, fully persuaded that God was able to do what He promised to do.
We need to understand that faith, true faith, always has in it this element of assurance, or certainty, and of confidence — regardless of circumstances, or inabilities.
Faith is not mere hopefulness — faith is fully persuaded, assured, and certain.
Faith isn’t whistling in the dark to keep up your courage.
Faith is “Fully Convinced.”
Faith is like a title-deed.
There is certainty with a title-deed.
In other words faith is not something vague and uncertain, indefinite or nebulous.
Faith is that which substantiates.
Same thing is repeated in .
Fully Convinced that God was able to make good on what He promised.
Hebrews 11:
It’s all resting on God and His nature and His Word.
V. His faith enabled him to believe God’s Word alone — to live in it.
And what I mean by live in it is to do it.
In light of everything Abraham acted upon what he believed.
He believed God’s Word and acted on it.
You may not have ever realized this, but God changes Abram and Sarai’s names.
Genesis 17
Abram means “high father” and Abraham means “the father of many nations.”
From that point on, Abraham walked and lived as Abraham and not Abram.
What’s your name?
Abraham.
Those are the elements of Faith.
That brings us to:
How does Faith enable us to have such certainty and not stagger?
The answer is Faith makes a man strong.
A better translation would be “he was made strong by faith.”
Look at the way Paul puts it.
First in the Negative
“without weakening in the faith.”
Now I want you to notice something here, and it’s absolutely important when it comes to living in faith.
The phrase “without weakening in the faith” is living in faith even though — and look at the first part of verse 19:
“He considered his own body to be already dead (since he was about 100 years old) and also considered the deadness of Sarah’s womb!”
This brings out the glorious aspect of true faith.
Because faith is from God and completely and utterly on God’s Word and because God’s Word is eternal and will be fulfilled — then true faith can stand up against the reality of life.
Let me demonstrate this in a very odd way.
Did you notice the difference?
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