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Wednesday November 25, 2020
Faith is a leap
“We began our faith-leap believing in our hearts and confessing with our mouths that we are crucified with Christ. Now we complete it by saying just as definitely the middle section of Paul’s Galatians 2:20, ‘Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.’
I say it. Is that all? Yes, it basically is all; for faith, as we have already said, is thought–thought expressed by word. As a condition of faith, something must be both available and desirable; I’ll do no more than think about it until it plainly is both of these. Now to get specific: Nothing could be more desirable to me than that Christ living in me as me should be a realized fact. And I’ve already seen in God’s Word that it is available. So it is available and desirable–my mind and heart have those two facts settled. So then what do I do? What I do always when I act by faith. I speak the word, which Paul calls the ‘word of faith.’ I say to God, and to myself, that I am now what Paul says he and we are…in this great statement of his.
I say it, whether inwardly in my spirit or vocally in words. But then, like Pilate, ‘What I have said, I have said.’ That is a solemn verbal affirmation. Probably we do well to say it by confession to another, by making a date in our Bible, or whatever, It is like the purpose behind a public wedding: to make the marriage contract legally irrevocable in the sight of all men. So now this is our leap of faith. We have declared as fact what we have read of with our eyes, what has registered in our minds as plain and intelligible, and what we now choose in our heart to affirm–with no proof beyond those outer responses of my eyes, mind, emotions. That is why faith is a leap–into the yet unprovable. Available, desirable, but not yet reliable. But this is the necessary leap I personally must take. It is the one and only basic obedience of the believer–that ‘obedience of faith’: not of works or some outer activities; no, of faith–which simply means inwardly committing myself to something (Someone) whom I now take to be total reality to me.”
Taken from: Yes, I Am
By Norman Grub
Pages 124-125
