Years ago, shortly after Christ had laid hold of me, I found myself having faith in faith, and having faith for things that God had never said. In one instance I believed God for about three and a half years for something he had never even promised me! I don't need to tell you, then, that I was painfully disappointed and totally confused. This was during a time where I began to listen to a lot of 'prophetic' type teaching without being grounded in knowing God's voice for myself, and I had yet to learn what it meant to build firmly upon the word of God.
Today's blog post is taken from a classic devotional, Springs in the Valley (1939, 1968) by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman. It is so rich that I wanted to share it here. I would entitle this 'True Faith' if one was needed and as you read it, you will also see why the devotional lesson resonates with me big time.
God is to be trusted for what He is, and not for what He is not. We may confidently expect Him to act according to His nature, but never contrary to it. To dream that God will do this and that because we wish that He would is not faith, but fanaticism. Faith can only stand upon truth. We may be sure that God will so act as to honor His own justice, mercy, wisdom, power - in a word, so as to be Himself. Beyond all doubt He will fulfill His promises; and when faith grasps a promise she is on sure ground. To believe that God will give us what He has never promised to give is mere dreaming. Faith without a promise revealed or implied is folly. Yea, though our trust should cry itself hoarse in prayer, it should be none the less a vain dotard if it had no word of God to warrant it. Happily, the promises and unveilings of Scripture are ample for every real emergency; but when unrestrained credence catches at every whim of its own crazy imagination and thinks to see it realized, the disappointment is not to be wondered at.
It is ours to believe the sure things of God's revelation, but we are not to waste a grain of precious reliance upon anything outside of that circle.
- Rev. C. H. Spurgeon
"Faith does not mean that we are trying to believe something that is not so; it just means that we are taking God at His word."
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