The Good Fight of Faith
What is the fight of faith? Faith is trust. Whom do you trust? The one you know. So if you learn to know someone who is trustworthy, you will have faith. To know God results in trusting Him. When you get to know someone who is absolutely trustworthy, you can’t help trusting him. Faith, therefore, is never worked up; it comes as a result of knowing God. And faith comes not to those who seek it, but to those who seek it not, who seek only Jesus.
When we seek Jesus we learn to trust him naturally, and when we learn to trust Him, this allows Him to do the work in battling the enemy that so many of us have tried with ill success. The fight of faith is nothing more that the effort required to come, every day, into close contact and personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
The fight of faith involves your daily devotional life. The fight involves momentary, hourly, contact with Jesus. And if we will fight the fight of faith, He has promised that He will fight the fight of sin. For a long time some of us became so involved in the fight of sin we had no time or energy left for the fight of faith. Have you ever been in that trap? One of the reasons that the Christian life is so deplorably hard is because we get involved in the wrong fight, the wrong battle, and we fight the battle where the battle isn’t instead of where it is. The christian life, and salvation, is summed up in relationship only, if relationship is properly defined and understood.
The premise of salvation through faith in Christ alone is that Christ is our total savior. Faith in Jesus is how we are saved, and our works are the result, never the cause, of our salvation. So God invites us to fight the right fight. How long has it been, my friend. since you sat down and exercised your mind in meditating, in grappling with the things of salvation? Or how long has it been since you watched four hours of TV and never knew where the time went? Whatever we contemplate, whatever we meditate on, is going to be exactly what we are in the end.
If the eye is kept fixed upon Christ, the work of the Spirit ceases not until the soul is conformed to His image.
