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“The
Great Faith”
a sermon by
Thomas L. Jenkins
Text: Galatians 2:15-21
“And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of
God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Dear sisters and brothers, the greatest faith that we have ever been
exposed to is the faith that Jesus Christ exhibited in God the Father.
We are continually asking questions about faith within ourselves:
Is our faith genuine
enough? Do we believe the
right way? Do we have
doubts? Is the kind of faith that we have pleasing to God? And we
experience times of doubt, where we question whether or not something is
really true? Yes, we have
many questions of faith. However,
the greatest example of faith that we have ever been shown, about what
to believe and how to behave on faith, is in Jesus Christ.
Jesus believed that if he died, by giving his life, that God the Father
would bring him back to life. Jesus’
faith was not the belief that he, Jesus, would have the power and
authority to make himself come back to life.
He trusted that God the Father would raise him from the dead.
Also, we have been blessed with the revelation that Jesus, as the Son of
God, did experience this greatest faith as a human being, a real human
being. Jesus grew in his
faith through his sufferings. He
certainly did suffer and experienced the kind of pain that we know as
people.
After Jesus had his last supper with his disciples, the very night of
his arrest, he went up the Garden of Gethsemane, and told his disciples,
“Sit here while I go over and
pray…My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death.”
And then he prayed to God the Father, “My
Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will,
but as Thou will.”
Jesus’ soul was deeply grieved. He
felt emotional pain, sadness, anxiety at the very point of experiencing
the loss of life in his soul. And
he prayed to God, whom he knows as our Father, “if it’s possible,
please take this situation out of my life: yet, Father, I know your will
is even beyond mine. I
trust you with every situation of my life.”
If there was ever a human being who had the proper kind of faith
to be seen as perfectly righteous in the eyes of God the Father, it is
Jesus Christ.
Do we not sometime wonder about our own faith, whether it really is good
enough to make us right with God? It
is not uncommon to hear testimonies from Christians who tell about being
invited to come forward at an evangelistic service to receive Christ
based on faith. And over
their lives, they may walk down a number of other times because they
question whether they had enough faith, the last time, to make
themselves right with God. Don’t
we ask ourselves similar questions? Do I have the right kind of faith to make myself right with
God?
One of the most wonderful and influential Christians in my life was a
lady named Helen. She was
never married, and when I was in college, he and another lady, who lived
in a house together, rented a spare room to me.
Every evening, in their house, before bedtime, we had a Bible
reading and a prayer time together.
Helen had retired from teaching.
She had taught 3rd grade in the Atlanta, Ga. area for
about 30 years. Now in her
life, she was member of the Presbyterian church in Montreat, NC, where I
was a member, (She and Ruth Graham, Billy Graham’s wife, who died this
past week, were good friends.) She
taught Sunday School and kept children for other parents every day in
her house. She was one of
the Godliest human beings I have ever known.
Years later, after I had finished seminary and was in ministry, I heard
that she had cancer and was now in a nursing home.
I went to she her. And
after we reconnected in our friendship, we started talking about her
situation, and out of true pain she said to me, “I wish I knew that I
had the right kind of faith and enough of the right kind of faith.”
I looked her in her eyes, and said to her, “Helen, Jesus has
enough of the right kind of faith for both of you!”
Her face totally expressed joy and peace when she heard that.
We are not saved by our faith, we are saved by the greatest faith
there is in any human being; we are saved by the faith of Jesus Christ.
We do hear this. We do say “YES” to this.
And we are filled with peace and joy, not matter where we are in
our lives, when we hear the truth that we are justified by the great
faith of Jesus Christ.
Martin Luther is considered by many as the father of the protestant
reformation. The gift that he gave to the church was a rediscovery of
“justification by faith” in the early 1500s.
At that time, the papists were teaching something different about
God’s salvation. They
taught that if a person were a sinful and unfaithful man or woman, but
still did some kind of good work in their lives, then God would owe them
grace and faith. Next, after God would bring them into the church, the
community of faith, if they subsequently were involved in more good
works, then God would owe them eternal salvation.
What Luther professed to the people of Christ, in his time, was that
faith and eternal life do not come from God because God owes it to us
based on good works that we have done; faith and eternal life are given
to us by God, through grace in Jesus Christ.
In St. Paul’s writings from this morning, “it
is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.
And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the
Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Paul is not saying that he is Christ.
And, what he is saying are his words to describe the same truth
about you and me, and each and every one of us.
We are united with Christ. The
Bible uses words like, “our
lives are hidden with Christ in God.” Before
Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane, while he was having his last
supper with his closest friends, knowing that he was giving his life for
them, and trusting that the Father would raise him from the dead, he
told them that he was going to send the Holy Spirit into their lives,
and the most profound aspect of being his disciples that they would come
to know would be that they are all united with him, Jesus, and God the
Father. We are untied with
each other as brothers and sisters.
This is our truth. Jesus
Christ is in us. We are in
him. God the Father is in us.
We are in him. The
Holy Spirit is in us. We
are in him.
Regardless of where we are in our lives, we are closer to Christ and he
is closer to us than we might feel at this time, or understand in our
thoughts at this time.
It is not we who live, but Christ who lives in us.
All our life starts with God in us, and shares in God’s life
living in us. What does it
mean to live life? It is
not we who love, first and foremost, but Christ who loves in us.
When you live out true love for another person, that love was
initiated by Christ who lives in you.
Yes, you loved them, but you joined with Jesus in his love for
them.
It is not we who believe, but Christ who believes in us.
Jesus Christ has the greatest faith in God the Father that any
human being may have. We do
not earn our salvation from God by what we do, or by how we believe.
God comes to us and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
God does not give to us because God owes us.
God has already given us new life in Jesus Christ.
That has already been accomplished.
And Jesus Christ knows it, feels it, and believes it perfectly in
his resurrected humanity. And,
in his new humanity, he lives his life in us, and gives us the gift of
times where we think, and feel, and believe as he does, with him.
Today is Father’s day. Every
day, in the life of Jesus Christ is God the Father’s day; and every
day in Jesus’ life is your day, where he is faithfully working to
bring you to know God the Father with him.
Let us pray…
Amen
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