This special Easter post is from one of my husband’s friend in the Philippines. His name is Brother Louie and he’s the pastor of a church in the village of Bombongan in the province of Rizal. He’s a passionate preacher of the word of God and a writer too. He sent this piece through email to my husband to share it on this blog. So, without further ado, I’ll leave you with this written piece entitled ‘The Faith Of Faith’…

“Have you ever spent some time contemplating Christ on the cross? I mean, really going over in your mind all of the details of His time in that arena. Every little detail. Of every single person He met during His walk for us. There have been many stories about how He walked over into a situation and invariably, the Believer will hear “Amen” and know that God did answer that prayer.

But I’ve always had a question in my mind when remembering such an event and that question is this: how can we truly know that He did answer that prayer? Think about it. He walked up to the cross with a reputation as a persona and He was crucified for our sins. He had been scourge over all of our lives. He had been the subject of many death threats. He had been the subject of much contempt and ridicule in the past.

And prior to His death, He’d already been their High Priest and He’d already performed the most important task that any of us could ever accomplish.

He saved us!

Now, back to that question, can we really know that He saved us? Do you believe in the tradition that we are saved by grace alone or by faith alone? Or perhaps you don’t have any faith in that either. Well, then it really does become lots easier when we discover something very cool…

The Facts of our Faith

Our lives don’t all have the same dimensions, but what they have in common is this thing called Faith. In other words, our Faith is both external and internal. A person who doesn’t have any faith, is actually living below the life condition and there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just not living. Our Faith on the other hand is life. It’s the assurance that we will receive our desire. It’s the Faith that there will be victory over whatever we’re facing. It’s the Faith that even, when we don’t see it, all is working out in our favor.

Let’s use an example:

So let’s use the above mentioned example of someone who is facing a problem and things just aren’t looking too promising for the moment. In this situation, we can appreciate the fact that despite the fact that it’s still pretty tough, there isEveryominusfooting going on. So we can see that faith is not something we can just hold onto because we know for certain that God will bring our needs to our surrender at the moment we ask, it has to be maintained.

Faith is something that is applied to our situation and maintained by one of two methods:

Methods 1 & 2

Methods 1 and 2 are really what are known as conditional and unconditional faith, and basically it goes like this:

This is the method we talked about previously as “dying to self”. But that’s not all, what happens in this process is that you have to drop all notion of yourself as a finite being who is limited to a chapter of the bible or a limited time in your life. And what happens is that you have to begin to see yourself as this:

So the first conditional faith is that we as humans “do” something which takes us within the defined boundaries of us and the bible.

The second conditional faith is that we as humans “believe” in this process and our ability to accomplish what we say we want, within the defined boundaries of us and the bible.

By the way, the preface to the book of Ecclesiastes, known as the book of wisdom, begins with these words

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…”

This is another quote by Jesus, representative of the conditional faith, which we know as salvation.

In the very beginning of our lives, we were presented with the big dilemma of life. Life is the school of God’s learning to which we graduate to his be in his awesome presence.”

Brother Louie