Faith tends to lead us, and elude us, at times. The church has been inundated by all kinds of thoughts and ideas about faith. Faith has been defined and re-defined and re-defined again. And so I just like to keep the record straight. To me, whatever we say about faith, it better line up with this book. It doesn’t line up with the book. I’m not interested in it.
And I believe there’s a lot of scripture in this book that counters some of the ideas that people have about faith. And I’m not going to belabour that point. And so I want to begin by saying this to you, that faith is a gift from God. We know that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. I actually preached about this topic somewhere around the year 2000 or 2001 to the General Assembly of the PAOC, they invited me to speak. And I gave my explanation of that verse. ’Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God.‘
So the question I asked, the general conference, that’s all the pastors in Canada. Faith comes. Stop. Faith comes from where? Faith comes by hearing. But where’s its coming from and where its coming to? So it is my, I’m convinced of this totally, that when I gave my heart to Jesus, the Holy Spirit came into my heart and my life at that very moment. And when He came into my heart and my life, He brought all the ingredients necessary for me to live a successful Christian walk and life in Him. Everything arrived then.
And then the follow through of that is that since the Holy Spirit is residing within me, and He brings all the ingredients for me to walk with Him, the gifts of this Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, it’s all been deposited through the person, the Holy Spirit, Jesus said, out of your innermost being will flow rivers of living water. So out of your innermost being, there’s an answer to where things flow. So there’s an inflow when I gave my heart to Jesus.
