THE DEVIL’S BOOBYTRAPS – AW Tozer
“Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you are disqualified.” (2 Corinthians 13:5)
The faith of the Apostle Paul was a revolutionary thing. It upset the whole life of the individual and made him into another person altogether. It laid hold on the life and brought it under obedience to Christ. It had a finality about it. It snapped shut on a man’s heart like a trap. It realigned all life’s actions and brought them into accord with the will of God.
To us now, faith means no more than passive moral acceptance on the Word of God and the cross of Jesus. To exercise it we have only to rest on one knee and nod our heads in agreement with the instructions of the spiritual worker intent upon saving our soul. Such a faith as this does not disturb people. It comforts them. Their ego is washed, and their self-confidence is rescued from discouragement.
People must be told that the Christian faith is not something to flirt with. The only man who can be sure he has the true Bible faith is the one who has put himself in a position where he cannot go back to his old life.
In the divine scheme of salvation, the doctrine of faith is central. Every benefit flowing from the atonement of Christ comes to an individual through the gateway of faith. We dare not take anything for granted concerning it.
For a few years my heart has been troubled over the doctrine of faith as received and taught amongst evangelical Christians today. My fear is that the modern understanding of faith is not the Biblical one. Faith is not believing a statement we know to be true. Faith based on reason is a type of faith, but it is not the character of Bible faith, for it infallibly rests on evidence and has nothing of a moral or spiritual nature in it. True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfection of the One who cannot lie. It is enough that God said it.
Faith as the Bible knows it is confidence in God and His Son Jesus Christ; it is the response of the soul to the divine character as revealed in the Scriptures; and even this response is impossible apart from the prior inworking of the Holy Spirit. Faith is a gift of God to a repentant soul and has nothing whatsoever to do with the senses and the data they provide. Faith is a miracle; it is the ability God gives a person to trust His Son, and anything that does not result in action according to God’s will, is not faith but something else that falls short of it.
Faith and morals are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, the very essence of faith is moral. Any professed faith in Christ as personal Saviour that does not cause complete obedience to Christ as Lord is inadequate and will eventually betray its victim. The man that believes God, will obey. God gives faith to the obedient heart only. Where real repentance is, there is obedience.
To escape the error of salvation by works we have fallen into the opposite error of salvation without obedience. A whole new generation of Christians believe that it is possible to “accept” Christ without forsaking the world. To accept Christ, it is necessary that we reject everything that is contrary to Him. We accept His friends as our friends, His enemies as our enemies, His cross as our cross, His life as our life, and His future as our future.
The whole world has been booby-trapped by the devil. One field where harmless but deadly traps appear in great profusion is in the field of prayer. Yes, our God answers prayer, but to say that He answers just any prayer is a false notion. When we go to God with a request, there are two conditions we must meet: (1) We must pray in the will of God, and (2) we must be living lives pleasing to God. When we become too slick in prayer, we are most certainly talking to ourselves.
Christian faith is continuation of a major miracle, the new birth. It is a unique work of God in the human nature. It is not reasoning yourself into a position, but something happening that you cannot explain. In that great and terrible day there will be those that are white with shock when they find out that they depended upon a mental agreement to Christianity instead of upon a miracle of new birth. “Instant Christianity” – the kind found almost everywhere in gospel circles – fails to understand the true nature of the Christian life, which is not static but dynamic and expanding. It overlooks the fact that a new Christian is a living organism as certainly as a new baby is and must have nourishment and exercise to assure normal growth.
A Christian can be retarded, stunted, undernourished, or injured very much like any other organism. Lack of proper instructions (discipling), for instance, will stunt Christian growth. We must beware that our Christianity does not simply refine our sins without removing them. The big danger is that we assume that we have been delivered from our sins when we have only exchanged one kind of sin for another. We may appear more respectable but no nearer to a true heart than we were before. Pride may be refined to self-esteem. Deep self-love, which God hates, can be disguised as a smart use of Bible terms. A spiritual counsellor may be nothing else than a gossiper and meddler. All of these is Satan’s most effective way to make the church weak, backsliding and divided. The will of God is that sin should be removed, not merely refined.
Real faith always produces holiness of heart and righteousness of life. Without faith it is impossible to please God. Faith is not something you can plug into at will, and it will cause pessimism, fear, defeat, and failure to disappear. Faith is also not something that guarantees optimism, confidence, personal mastery, and unfailing success in war, love, sports, business, and politics. Faith is only good when it engages truth. When it is made to rest on falsehood it can and does lead to eternal tragedy. It is not enough that we believe, we must believe the right thing about the true God.
True faith requires that we believe everything God has said about Himself, but also that we believe everything He has said about us. Until we believe that we are as bad as God says we are, we can never believe that He will do for us what He says He will do. To believe in Jesus Christ for salvation is to believe all He has said about Himself and all that the prophets and apostles have said about Him. Let us beware that the Jesus we “accept” is not the one we have created out of our imagination and formed after our own likeness. True faith commits us to obedience.
From: The Root of the Righteous. AW Tozer