FAITH-GOD IN

For His part, God forgives our sins, reveals His glory, rescues us from our heart of disbelief with its life of disobedience, and brings us back to Himself again and again so that we might learn to live by faith in His promises. For our part, Abraham, as the "father" of the faithful (Rom. 4:16-17), is the beginning of a people who respond by learning over a lifetime to look to God alone to meet their needs.

Scott Hafemann

The God of Promise and the Life of Faith. Crossway Books, 2001, p. 77.

Those who know God know that He is bound by his own promises and integrity, not by our wishes. Moreover, unlike us, God never finds himself in the uncomfortable situation of having made a promise He no longer wants to or is able to keep. God is never caught by surprise. God's promises are made in his infinite wisdom as part of His eternal plan and are backed by His matchless power. What God says, He does. God, because He is God, is a promise keeper.

Scott Hafemann

The God of Promise and the Life of Faith. Crossway Books, 2001, p. 94.

By repenting of our hope in the promises of this world – the greatest of which become merely rusted metal and short-lived pleasures – and trusting in God's promises, we develop a new lifestyle of growing obedience to God, rather than following the cadence of our culture. And as our hope in God increases, our obedience to his commands becomes more consistent.

Scott Hafemann

The God of Promise and the Life of Faith. Crossway Books, 2001, p. 172.

When Christians suffer, they, like Paul, can consequently take courage from the fact that their lives will mediate to others the power of the Resurrection, either through God's act of deliverance or, even more profoundly, through the testimony of their endurance. In either case we are summoned to trust God in the midst of our afflictions in the confidence that God will ultimately deliver us. By so doing, God's power will be manifest in our weakness.

Scott Hafemann

The God of Promise and the Life of Faith. Crossway Books, 2001, p. 164.

Nothing this side of Christ's return can be confused with what God ultimately promises for his people. The short-term payoffs of this world pale in comparison to the "precious and very great promises" God grants his people (2 Pet. 1:4). God's promises cannot be downsized into the idols of temporary health and wealth. The promises of God are so much greater than anything this world has to offer that, when trusted, they fill a person with hope for what is not yet a reality but will one day certainly be true.

Scott Hafemann

The God of Promise and the Life of Faith. Crossway Books, 2001, p. 111.

Trust in God's promises comes to light in obedience to his commands… It is therefore a contradiction in terms to say that we acknowledge Christ's rule in our lives if we do not submit to his word… There is no distinction in the Bible between knowing God or Jesus as our "Savior" and knowing him as our "Lord." Saving faith always expresses itself in obedience (James 2:21-24).

Scott Hafemann

The God of Promise and the Life of Faith. Crossway Books, 2001, p. 99.

My son, say thou thus in everything: 'Lord, if this be pleasing unto Thee, let it be so. Lord, if it be to Thy honor, in Thy name let this be done. Lord, if Thou seest it good, and allowest it to be profitable for me, then grant unto me that I may use this to Thine honor. But if Thou knowest it will be harmful unto me, and no profit to the health of my soul, take away any such desire from me.'

Thomas a Kempis

My child, trust firmly in the Lord, and do not fear the judgment of men when conscience tells you that you are upright and innocent. For it is good and blessed to suffer such things, and they will not weigh heavily on the humble heart that trusts in God rather than itself. Many men say many things, and therefore little faith is to be put in them. Likewise, it is impossible to satisfy all men. Although Paul tried to please all in the Lord, and became all things to all men, yet he made little of their opinions. He labored abundantly for the edification and salvation of others, as much as lay in him and as much as he could, but he could not escape being sometimes judged and despised by others. Therefore, he committed all to God who knows all things.

Thomas a Kempis

An evidence that our will has been broken is that we begin to thank God for that which once seemed so bitter, knowing that His will is good and that, in His time and in His way, He is able to make the most bitter waters sweet.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss

A Place of Quiet Rest, Moody, 2000, p. 70.

God’s people have no assurances that the dark experiences of life will be held at bay, much less that God will provide some sort of running commentary on the meaning of each day’s allotment of confusion, boredom, pain, or achievement. It is no great matter where we are, provided we see that the Lord has placed us there, and that He is with us.

John Newton

Trusting God does not mean believing that He will do all that you want, but rather believing that He will do everything He knows is good.

Ken Sande

Reprinted from The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict, Ken Sande, Baker Books, 3d ed., 2004, p. 72. Peacemaker^® Ministries. www.Peacemaker.net. Used by Permission.

It is the nature of faith to believe God upon His bare word… It will not be, saith sense; it cannot be, saith reason; it both can and will be, saith faith, for I have a promise for it.

John Trapp

A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 103.

Our heavenly King is pleased with all our graces: hot zeal and cool patience pleaseth Him; cheerful thankfulness and weeping repentance pleaseth Him; but none of them are welcome to Him without faith, as nothing can please Him without Christ.

Thomas Adams

A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 102.

God in His love always wills what is best for us. In His wisdom He always knows what is best, and in His sovereignty He has the power to bring it about.

Author Unknown

It is never a question with any of us of faith or no faith; the question is always in what or whom do we put our faith.

Author Unknown

Faith is always tied to a promise of God.

Author Unknown

It is neither the quantity nor the quality of faith, but rather the object of your God given faith.

Author Unknown

I ask You neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that You may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for Your glory… You alone know what is expedient for me; You are the sovereign master, do with me according to Your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to Yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow You, and bad to offend You. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of Your providence, which I adore, but so not seek to fathom.

Blaise Pascal

Our Physician makes these outward blisters in our bodies, to draw out the poisonous corruption that is in our souls: and therefore let us endure what He imposes with patience, and never murmur against Him for effecting His cure; knowing that it is but childish folly to abhor the medicine more than the disease.

George Downame

A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 205.

The crux of the human problem, according to Israel's faith, is not the fact of suffering but the character of man's relationship to God. Outside the relationship for which man was created, suffering drives men to despair or to the easy solutions of popular religion. Within the relationship of faith, suffering may be faced in the confidence that man's times are in God's hands and that “in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

Bernard Anderson

That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”

George MacDonald

[God] is at work in all the circumstances of your life to bring out the good for you, even if you had never heard of Romans 8:28. His work is not dependent upon your faith. But the comfort and joy that statement is intended to give you is dependent upon your believing it, upon your trusting in Him who is at work, even though you cannot see the outcome of that work.

Jerry Bridges

I acknowledge it often seems more difficult to trust God than to obey Him. The moral will of God given to us in the Bible is rational and reasonable. The circumstances in which we must trust God often appear irrational and inexplicable….Obeying God is worked out within well-defined boundaries of God’s revealed will. Trusting God is worked out in an arena that has no boundaries. We do not know the extent, the duration, or the frequency of the painful, adverse circumstances in which we must frequently trust God. We are always coping with the unknown.

Jerry Bridges

It is just as important to trust God as it is to obey Him. When we disobey God we defy His authority and despise His holiness. But when we fail to trust God we doubt His sovereignty and question His goodness. In both cases we cast aspersions upon His majesty and His character. God views our distrust of Him as seriously as He views our disobedience.

Jerry Bridges

In order to trust God, we must always view our adverse circumstances through the eyes of faith, not of sense. And just as the faith of salvation comes through hearing the message of the gospel (Romans 10:17), so the faith to trust God in adversity comes through the Word of God alone. It is only in the Scriptures that we find an adequate view of God’s relationship to and involvement in our painful circumstances. It is only from the Scriptures, applied to our hearts by the Holy Spirit, that we receive the grace to trust God in adversity.

Jerry Bridges

God’s plan and His ways of working out His plan are frequently beyond our ability to fathom and understand. We must learn to trust when we don’t understand.

Jerry Bridges

No detail of your life is too insignificant for your heavenly Father’s attention; no circumstance is so big that He cannot control it.

Jerry Bridges

If God is not sovereign in the decisions and actions of other people as they affect us, then there is a whole major area of our lives where we cannot trust God; where we are left, so to speak, to fend for ourselves.

Jerry Bridges

God is sovereign over people. He will move their hearts to cause them to do His will, or He will restrain them from doing anything contrary to His will. But it is His will, His agenda for our lives, that God will guard, protect, and advance. We must learn to live by His agenda if we are to trust Him.

Jerry Bridges

But though we should never ask a demanding “why?” we may and should ask God to enable us to understand what He may be teaching us through a particular experience. But even here we must be careful that we are not seeking to satisfy our souls by finding some spiritual “good” in the adversity. Rather we must trust God that He is working in the experience for our good, even when we see no beneficial results. We must learn to trust God when He doesn’t tell us why, when we don’t understand what He is doing.

Jerry Bridges

God is able to work with or without human means. Though He most often uses them, He is not dependent upon them. Furthermore, He will frequently use some means altogether different from that which we would have expected. Sometimes our prayers for deliverance from some particular strait are accompanied by faith to the extent we can foresee some predictable means of deliverance. But God is not dependent upon means that we can foresee. In fact, it seems from experience that God delights to surprise us by His ways of deliverance to remind us that our trust must be in Him and Him alone.

Jerry Bridges

The use of means ought not to lessen our faith in God, and our faith in God ought not to hinder our using whatever means He has given us for the accomplishment of His own purposes.

Hudson Taylor

Many Christians estimate difficulties in the light of their own resources, and thus attempt little and often fail in the little they attempt. All God’s giants have been weak men who did great things for God because they reckoned on His power and presence with them.

Hudson Taylor

God loves with a great love the man whose heart is bursting with a passion for the impossible.

William Booth

Trusting God involves the loss of our agenda...so that we die to our inclination to live a lie. It requires forfeiting our rigid, self-protective, God-dishonoring ways of relating in order to embrace life as it is meant to be lived; in humble dependence on God and passionate involvement with others.

Dan Allender

Trusting God doesn’t give us an excuse to idly sit back, doing nothing. Praying to God and asking Him to help doesn’t allow us to be lazy. We need to trust God and do our part in the strength and guidance He provides.

Karl Graustein

Excerpted from: Growing Up Christian, P&R, 2005, p. 162. Used by Permission.

As God can protect His people under the greatest despotism, so the utmost civil liberty is no safety to them without the immediate protection of His Almighty arm. I fear that Christians in this country have too great a confidence in political institutions… [rather] than of the government of God.

Alexander Carson

Confidence in God in Times of Danger, p. 41.

We may not demand of a sovereign Creator that He explain Himself to His creatures… God had good and sufficient reasons for His actions; we trust His sovereign wisdom and love.

Margaret Clarkson

Destined for Glory, p. 19.

God is wonderful in His design and excellent in His working. Believer, God overrules all things for your good. The needs-be for all that you have suffered, has been most accurately determined by God. Your course is all mapped out by your Lord. Nothing will take Him by surprise. There will be no novelties to Him. There will be no occurrences which He did not foresee, and for which, therefore, He has not provided. He has arranged all, and you have but to patiently wait, and you shall sing a song of deliverance. Your life has been arranged on the best possible principles, so that if you had been gifted with unerring wisdom, you would have arranged a life for yourselves exactly similar to the one through which you have passed. Let us trust God where we cannot trace Him.

C.H. Spurgeon
A Feast for Faith, Isaiah. 28:29.

I find myself frequently depressed – perhaps more so than any other person here. And I find no better cure for that depression than to trust in the Lord with all my heart, and seek to realize afresh the power of the peace-speaking blood of Jesus, and His infinite love in dying upon the cross to put away all my transgressions.

C.H. Spurgeon

God has great things in store for His people; they ought to have large expectations.

C.H. Spurgeon
Treasury of David, Psalm 130:7.

There is no saint here who can out-believe God. God never out-promised Himself yet.

C.H. Spurgeon

We cannot always trace God’s hand, but we can always trust God's heart.

C.H. Spurgeon

There is only one creature that God has made that ever doubts Him. The sparrows doubt not. They sweetly sing at night as they go to their roosts, though they know not where tomorrow’s meal shall be found. The very cattle trust Him, and even in days of drought, you have seen them when they pant for thirst, how they expect the water. The angels never doubt Him, nor the devils. Devils believe and tremble (James 2:19). But it was left for man, the most favored of all creatures to mistrust his God.

C.H. Spurgeon

There is no more blessed way of living, than the life of faith based upon a covenant-keeping God – to know that we have no care, for He cares for us; that we need have no fear, except to fear Him; that we need have no troubles, because we have cast our burdens upon the Lord, and are conscience that He will sustain us.

C.H. Spurgeon

I believe that the happiest of all Christians and the truest of Christians are those who never dare to doubt God, but take His Word simply as it stands, and believe it, and ask no questions, just feeling assured that if God has said it, it will be so.

C.H. Spurgeon

Sermon, A Defense of Calvinism.

What is “resting in God,” but the instinctive movement and upward glance of the spirit to Him; the confiding all one’s griefs and fears to Him, and feeling strengthened, patient, hopeful in the act of doing so! It implies a willingness that He should choose for us, a conviction that the ordering of all that concerns us is safer in His hands than in our own.

James Burns

Quoted in the Treasury of David by C.H. Spurgeon, v. 1, p. 184.

Just like Adam, you must individually receive your mate as God's provision for your need for companionship. Receiving your mate demonstrates your faith in God's integrity. Adam's focus was on God's flawless character, not Eve's performance. He knew God and knew that God could be trusted. Adam enthusiastically received Eve because he knew she was from God. Adam's faith in God enabled him to receive Eve as God's perfect provision for him.

Dennis Rainey

Preparing for Marriage, 1997, p. 94-95, Gospel Light/Regal Books, Ventura, CA 93003, Used by Permission.

If it were possible for me to alter any part of his plan, I could only spoil it.

John Newton

The Works of John Newton, v. 5, p. 624.

Faith does not operate in the realm of the possible. There is no glory for God in that which is humanly possible. Faith begins where man’s power ends.

George Muller

The Lord in His faithfulness helped us. Help was never more truly needed, nor did the help of the Lord ever come more obviously from Himself – His timing could not have been better. Praise the Lord for His goodness! Praise Him that He helped us trust in Him in this trying hour.

George Muller

The Autobiography of George Muller, 1984, p. 148. All quotations taken from books published by Whitaker House are used with permission of the publisher. Whitaker House books are available at Christian bookstores everywhere.

"Saved Alone" was the message that Horatio Spafford received from his wife after the ship sank that was taking her and their four children to England in November, 1873. After reuniting with his grieving wife at sea, the boat came near the area where his children had drowned. It is speculated that at that time he wrote the words (contained in his famous hymn) that vividly described his own grief and faith: “When sorrows like sea billows roll – Whatever my lot Thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul.”

Phyllis LePeau

How to Rejoice in any Situation, Zondervan, 1991, p. 11.

Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One who is leading.

Oswald Chambers

Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell you. God does not tell you what He is going to do He reveals to you who He is. Do you believe in a miracle working God, and will you "go out" in complete surrender to Him until you are not surprised one iota by anything He does?

Oswald Chambers

When once you are rooted in Reality, nothing can shake you. If your faith is in experiences, anything that happens is likely to upset that faith; but nothing can ever upset God or the almighty Reality of Redemption; base your faith on that and you are as eternally secure as God. When once you get into personal contact with Jesus Christ, you will never be moved again.

Oswald Chambers

My Utmost for His Highest, 1935, December 3 Reading.

True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections of the One who cannot lie. It is enough that God has said it.

A.W. Tozer

Trust the past to God’s mercy, the present to God’s love and the future to God’s providence.

Augustine

It should fill us with joy, that infinite wisdom guides the affairs of the world. Many of its events are shrouded in darkness and mystery, and inextricable confusion sometimes seems to reign. Often wickedness prevails, and God seems to have forgotten the creatures that he has made. Our own path through life is dark and devious, and beset with difficulties and dangers. How full of consolation is the doctrine, that infinite wisdom directs every event, brings order out of confusion, and light out of darkness, and, to those who love God, causes all things, whatever be their present aspect and apparent tendency, to work together for good.

J.L. Dagg

Manual of Theology, Gano Books, 1982 edition of original 1857 edition published by The Southern Baptist Publication Society, p. 86-87.

Real satisfaction comes not in understanding God's motives, but in understanding His character, in trusting in His promises, and in leaning on Him and resting in Him as the Sovereign who knows what He is doing and does all things well.

Joni Eareckson Tada

Is God Really in Control, Joni and Friends, 1987, p. 9, Used by Permission, www.joniandfriends.org.

This, then, is the sense in which people are totally depraved: we have all treated God in the most insulting way by registering again and again a vote of no confidence in His promises.

Daniel Fuller

The Unity of the Bible, Zondervan, 1994, p. 193.

When…people learn to rely not on their own power and wisdom, but to depend on God, there is no limit to their usefulness in God’s service.

Oswald Sanders

Spiritual Leadership, Moody Publishers, 1967, p. 145.

We must be careful that our trust in God is not simply [an excuse for] irresponsible behavior.

Sam Storms
Birth Control, November 6, 2006, www.enjoyinggodministries.com. Used by Permission.

To the world at large this was a sad waste of five young lives. But God has His plan and purpose in all things… The prayers of the widows themselves are for the Aucas. We look forward to the day when these savages will join us in Christian praise. Plans were promptly formulated for continuing the work of the martyrs.

Elisabeth Elliot

Through Gates of Splendor, Tyndale, 1981, 252-254.

When God gives a promise, He always tries our faith. Just as the roots of trees take firmer hold when they are contending with the wind, so faith takes a firmer hold when it struggles with adverse appearances.

Robert Murray McCheyne

Comfort in Sorrow, Christian Focus, 2002, p. 40, Used by Permission.

Having faith is trusting in the revelation of God. In other words, if I know that something is consistent with God’s mind, if I know it is consistent with His will, if I know it is consistent with His purpose, if I know it is consistent with His desire, then I believe that and I can see that come to pass. It is faith in God as God is and God as God has revealed Himself to be. And how is that appropriated?... by prayer.... As we ask consistent with God's revelation of Himself, consistent with the name of Jesus Christ and His purpose, consistent in an unselfish way to the glory of God, we can know we'll receive it.

John MacArthur

The Way of the Fig Tree: Promise Without Performance. The article originally appeared (www.gty.org/Resources/Sermons/2352) at www.gty.org. © 1969-2008. Grace to You. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

God’s most striking victories arise out of the graves of apparent defeat.

Author Unknown