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We receive all the benefits of Christ's life, death and resurrection through faith alone. This begs the
question, what is faith? Faith is not some strange or mysterious religious feeling or experience. To have
faith is to believe someone or something; faith always has an object that it believes.
We live by faith every day. We express faith every time we open a bottle to enjoy our favorite drink, or
open a can of our favorite soup, or take medicine that claims to be helpful for our colds. Do you really know
what is in that bottle, can or medicine? No! You simply trust that the manufacturer wants to help and not
harm you. You believe the manufacturer's words to be true.
In a similar way, saving faith believes God, trusting Him to fulfill all that He has promised. God has
promised all the benefits of Christ's redeeming work to be graciously applied to the sinner through faith
alone. True faith believes that God is able and willing to do that which He promises: granting us the
forgiveness of sins, counting us to be perfectly righteous, and giving us eternal life only because of
Christ's perfect life and death in our place (Romans 4:19-25). Jesus is God's Son in whom He is well pleased. Through
His redeeming work, Christ has reconciled sinners to His Father, making them adopted children in whom God is
well pleased. We receive all these promises by faith alone!
But where do we get such a faith? How can we who have been nothing but faithless toward God ever find a
faith that trusts Him to do that which He has promised? Amazingly, out of the richness of His love, God
supplies everything we need to be saved, including the faith to believe Him for our salvation (Ephesians 2:8-9, Philippians 1:29).
One of the wonders of God's love is that He provides faith through the power of the Holy Spirit in the
hearing of the gospel to open our hearts to respond to the teachings of the Scriptures concerning salvation
(Galatians 3:2-3, Acts 16:14).
Faith comes from hearing and hearing from the word of God (Romans 10:17). God loves sinners so much that He leaves none of our
salvation to chance. He provides all that we need to be saved by grace alone through faith alone.
The gospel is God saves sinners. It is not others' opinions, nor is it what we think of ourselves that
matters. What matters is our standing before God. The Bible says that because of Christ's meritorious work,
those who are truly redeemed can freely and boldly enter into God's presence, never again to fear His
condemnation (Romans 8:1, Hebrews 4:16). Christ's perfect redeeming work guarantees our free access
to God, and our heavenly Father will never forsake us. In this life, the true believer remains a sinner; yet,
even now he or she stands in the presence of God's glory with great joy, holy, blameless and beyond reproach
because of Christ alone (Jude 24).
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