Biblical faith looks outside of itself to the God who made the promises. It rests solely on the character of God and the covenant oath that He has sworn. Faith is the committing of one’s whole person—past, present, and future—to the faithfulness of God, knowing that He cannot deny Himself. Faith is totally absorbed with its object, the God of covenant; the believer’s faith is as sure as the faithfulness of the One he or she rests in.
We live in a world filled with definitions of faith given to us by advocates of self-help, positive thinking, New Age, and witchcraft. Many of these definitions have found their way into the Christian media and greatly affect the way Christians understand what faith is. Sincere believers caught in this deception seek to bring to pass the promise of God with a pseudo faith born of the flesh that is both futile and wreaks havoc in the believer’s walk with God.
Let us quickly look at what biblical faith is not.
Faith is not an energy that resides within the believer. It is not a power that, when built up and focused, the believer has the ability to use to make things happen, even to the point of forcing God’s hand. Faith is not a work, a struggle to arrive at a state of mind where the hoped-for blessing can be seen or felt as being possessed.
There are thousands of believers who look upon the acquisition of faith as a mental struggle, the intense focusing of thoughts on a desired object or promise in order to bring it into being. This is a work of the flesh arising from the creature mind and has nothing to do with the faith the Bible speaks of, which is a rest in God.
Others understand faith as being in the words of a promise found in Scripture. The words of the promise are repeated, as if their continual repetition will draw the desired blessing into physical existence. This reduces the holy words of Scripture to the level of a magic spell in which God is being manipulated into doing what He has said.
The Christian understanding of faith radically parts company with witchcraft, New Age, positive thinking, and self-help. All of these have in common the using of words as a formula for gaining a desired end. The faith of the Christian has nothing to do with formulas or spells but is rooted in the relationship with God that has been established by covenant. Faith is not directed at the words of a promise but rests in the One who made the promise.
Biblical faith is not found within us, either as a natural energy or as a labor, but in beholding and responding to His faithfulness to His covenant oath. We trust in His character that what He has spoken, He will do.
Faith is to be likened to the eye of the spirit. The physical eye is not aware of itself unless there is something wrong. The eye functions by seeing and recording an object. If it becomes self-conscious and is ever looking at itself to see how good an eye it is, then it ceases to function as an eye. Likewise, faith is not self-conscious, morbidly checking on itself to gauge its strength, but is continually looking at its object, God revealed in the Lord Jesus.
Faith comes from a revelation of the love and faithfulness of God specifically revealed in Jesus, who is the covenant. He is the author and finisher of our faith. (Hebrews 12:2.)
So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Romans 10:17
The Word of God is more than the words written on the pages of our Bible. The Word of God ultimately is Jesus, the Son of God who became flesh and lived among us. (John 1:1-14.) He is the final out-speaking of God to us.
Faith is a relationship with Him, a submission and obedience to Him, and so we read of “the obedience of faith.” Faith is not a mental marathon with the goal of bringing to pass our agenda using a formula fashioned out of the words of Scripture. Faith never forces the hand of God but submits to Him, responding to His covenant words knowing that He who promised is faithful to perform them. Faith is trust in God, who He is, and what He has done. From that trust arises our belief that He will be faithful and do as He has said.
When God made covenant with Abraham it is said that And he believed in the Lord, and He accounted it to him for righteousness (Genesis 15:6). First of all, he believed the Lord, and then he believed the words of the promise made by the One he counted faithful.
We speak much of Abraham’s faith in the birth of Isaac, but what about Sarah? It was her ancient body that was renewed to bear a child! This was not by gritting her teeth to make it happen but by faith in His faithfulness:
By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised.
Hebrews 11:11
The fact that the Gospel contained in the covenant is based solely on the oath of God separates Christianity from every other religion on earth. Until we see this, our Gospel will not in fact be Good News but a distortion of the truth, jagged rocks on which the believer sooner or later wrecks his or her life.
The Christian life is not approached with gritted teeth, summoning determination and willpower to obey God and show Him our love for Him. The sincere folk who try to do so are found dedicating their lives to God on a regular basis in an effort to summon the ultimate strength from their flesh to live the life of Jesus. They make promises they can never keep and sooner or later burn out, walking away from the church in despair of ever being good enough. They see the Christian life based on their oath, instead of resting in the oath of God.
Nor is the Christian life a shared effort between God and the believer. Thousands set out to live the Christian life with promises and dedications, while calling on God to help them. God does not lend a hand to help our efforts to achieve the impossible. We are utterly helpless, and the life described in the covenant is brought to pass by God alone on the basis of His oath.
There are others who plainly do not expect to live the Christian life! Such persons would actually describe the Christian life in terms of wallowing in their guilt and shame and their impotency to live it! They call to God for mercy like a beggar asking for a quarter. They continually cry to God for His help and salvation without any genuine expectancy of receiving it, for they know nothing of the oath of God in which He has committed Himself to answer our cry. Some of them would be shocked and offended if God did answer, for they would feel deprived of the miserable cry for mercy that they call their Christian life!
It is in the oath of God that we discover the uniqueness of the Gospel. The key words of the Gospel are not “struggle,” “try,” and “try harder” but “surrender to,” “yield to,” “rest in,” and “believe on the Lord Jesus,” who is the covenant. All these words indicate that we have come to the end of our struggles and failing attempts to live a godly life and have come to stake our hope on who He is, what He has promised and achieved.
My Discovery of the Faithfulness of God
From the beginning of my Christian life, I lived in a continual struggle to be a victorious Christian. As a young man, I had knelt in my kitchen and asked Jesus to come into my life and save me and do with me as He wanted. Soon after that, I became part of a local church. They knew the power of the Spirit but knew little or nothing of the grace of God or His initiative of love in being the prime mover in salvation. Certainly, they knew nothing of His covenant oath to save us. A life of holiness, as they understood it, was a matter of keeping God’s rules and the rules of the church and a strict regime of Bible reading, prayer, and witnessing to those outside the church.
Our salvation seemed to hinge on the Sunday evening service; we all knew what was coming and braced ourselves. With amazing insight, the pastor would expose all the sins of the congregation committed during the previous week and assure us of the impending judgment of God. At the end of the service, we fearfully trooped forward to ask God to forgive us, trying to explain to Him that we had not meant to act so sinfully in the past week. The tone of our voices was somewhere between a whine and a wail as becomes those trying to convince deity that they are sorry. We would then promise that we would read our Bible, pray, and win the lost in this new week. By the time we would go
back to our seats for the closing hymn, our mood was optimistic and we were enthused, ready to become saints by the next Sunday.
Monday was always a day of victory. With my dedication of the previous evening clear in my mind, I would be awake by five and out of bed to read my Bible, pray, and set my schedule to win my school to Christ. I went to school ready to attack any unsuspecting soul with a question concerning their eternal salvation. On Tuesday, it was harder to get out of bed; the Bible reading was through half-closed eyes, and the prayer rambling and fuzzy. The plan to win the class to Christ was seen as a halfwits dream. Invariably by Wednesday I would sleep late and rush from the house without prayer, Bible reading, or plans to witness. I remember the feelings of shame that swept over me throughout the day. I had stood God up on a date! I could not face Him and did my best to avoid thinking about Him, certain that He was mad at me. All my resolutions to overcome temptation came crashing down, and by Thursday there was no attempt to pray and the Bible sat on the shelf. I managed by Friday to forget what I had promised the last Sunday! What was the point? I was certain that God was disgusted with me, and the best I could do was to forget about Him. Saturday came with the nagging reminder that Sunday was only hours away. With Sunday would come the inevitable Sunday night. Once more, I would join the other teens that slunk shamefully to the front of the church auditorium to explain to God that we didn’t mean to live as we had done in the last week but this week would be different.
Week after week we would rededicate our rededications! No one seemed perturbed by this continual restarting of our Christian life. In fact, the pastor seemed pleased that so many responded to his message indicating that they wanted to live for God. He seemed to have forgotten it was the same people every week that populated the front of the church. The older members of the congregation did not join us but beamed at us from their pews as if something wonderful was happening in our lives. I often wondered why they didn’t join us—now I wonder if it was because they had given up on the whole thing as a lost cause and were indulging the enthusiasm of the youth.
One day I was reading my Bible—it must have been early in the week! I was in Jeremiah 31 reading the terms of the new covenant. Now, believe me, I did not know what a covenant was or that the Gospel was the announcement of the new covenant. I didn’t even know that there was an old one!
I found myself reading the words with interest even though they were in the King James Version, which was an awkward read for me at the time. They reached out to me and drew me into them.
“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
Jeremiah 31:33,34
I read the words over and over. “I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts.” I realized that my concept of the law of God was something outside of me, an imposition that interfered with my way of life. The very idea that this verse promised that the law would no longer be outside of me, demanding of me a life I could not live and condemning me when I inevitably failed, excited me as nothing in the Bible ever had before.
I read on: “I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” To be able to know Him as my God and for Him to include me as being part of the company who uniquely belonged to Him brought an unspeakable yearning in my heart. I realized I had never thought of Him as my God and certainly never thought of myself as belonging in a special way to Him.
“No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
Jeremiah 31:34
As I read these words, it dawned on me that in the short time I had been a Christian I had not really known Him; I had known about Him and the behaviors I was supposed to adopt as a believer. There rose in me a longing to have a firsthand relationship with Him instead of the rules to live by that I had come to associate with being a Christian.
It was the last phrase that arrested my attention: “For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” I could hardly believe what I read. God would not remember my sins anymore! My experience of Christianity in weekly church attendance meant that we continually remembered and mourned over our sins. Every week we were reminded in great detail of our sins—that is what going to church seemed to be about. We were preached upon week after week about the standard we must uphold in order for God to accept us. Consequently, many of us wallowed in our sense of shame and guilt, thus making us feel as if God was constantly angry at us because of our sin.
What life was this Scripture talking about? A life where there was no sense of guilt and shame before the God who knew every thought that passed through my mind, every word on my tongue, and every act I did.
These were incredible words. I had never heard of such a life, and in that early dawn kneeling in my bedroom I wanted it more than anything I had ever wanted before.
How did one get it? What did I have to do? I had been drilled since becoming a Christian that there was a price to pay, a dedication to make, in order to get something from God. What was the price tag here? What did I have to do receive such a life? I read the passage over and over again, searching for what I was convinced must be an enormous price tag.
Nothing! Instead, what stood out to me was the reiteration of “I will” throughout the passage. The two verses plainly stated that it was God’s intention to do these things and there was no price tag for me to pay. In that moment, I saw for the first time the nature of faith. Faith did not originate in my making promises with ever-increasing intensity and determination, promises that I had no hope of keeping. Nor was it my vowed intentions to be a better Christian for Him. Rather, it was in my simply saying thank You for the promises He had made, submitting to His intention for me.
This was radical, turning everything I had understood of the Gospel on its head. My starting point was no longer me but Him, and my part was not to say “I promise to try harder” but to respond to Him and say “Yes! Do in me even as You have said.”
A great joy swept through my being. For the first time I was excited about the Gospel, and I went to school as if I were walking on air. All week long I reveled in my newfound God, who had made the promises and was responsible for keeping them. I knew life in Christ that I had never dreamed possible. No longer did I get up to pray to somehow win God’s favor, but to know this incredible God who made promises to a teenager like me!
Sunday night rolled around, and I sat smiling through the pastor’s tirade. I joined the regular trek to the front and fell on my knees with the others. Instead of my usual burying my face in my hands, I lifted my face and prayed, “I promise You that I will never make another promise to You! You made the promises, You keep them, and I thank You for it! Amen.” I stood to my feet, leaving my brothers and sisters wailing on the floor, and went back to my seat, smiling with the joy of God in my heart.
After that week, I had many ups and downs, falls, and failures in my walk with God, but what I had seen never left me. Sometimes I would wander confused, but I remembered what I had seen and knew that was the key to life. Like a strike of lightning on a pitch-black night, for a moment everything had been clearly seen and could not be forgotten. It was many years later that I realized I had been led by the Spirit to rest my life on the covenant oath of God.
Living in Reliance Upon His Oath
This is the first step in living the Christian life. It is also the energy behind every step; we never graduate from that state of helpless dependence upon Him. We will never b
e able (and God never intended that we would be able) to achieve the promises of the covenant in our own strength or willpower. We are utterly helpless to bring them to pass, to make them happen by resolve, dedication, or twelve-step programs. We invoke the God who has made covenant, swearing by Himself, to achieve all of this in our lives. We thank Him for His mercy in giving us the covenant but now call upon His faithfulness to keep it.
So we do not attempt to cleanse ourselves but lay before Him the case of our sins and weaknesses, our idols and filthiness, and call on Him to do what we never can achieve by our promises: wash us and cleanse us from it all.
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
1 John 1:9
I remember when this verse first made its impact on me. I was puzzled by the word “faithful”; I did not associate it with someone forgiving another. I thought of other words that would fit much better, such as “kind,” “compassionate,” or “loving”; but “faithful” did not fit. To whom or what was He being faithful when He forgave us? When I discovered that faithfulness is one of the great covenant words of Scripture, it made perfect sense. In forgiving us, He is being faithful to the covenant, to Jesus the covenant representative, to whom He swore He would remember our sins and iniquities no more.
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 13