TRUE FAITH BRINGS COMMITTAL

By A. W. Tozer

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked:
who can know it?                                               -   -   Jeremiah 17:9

   To many Christians Christ, is little more than an idea, or at best an ideal;
He is not a fact.  Millions of professed believers talk as if He were real and act
as if He were not.   And always our actual position is to be discovered by the
way we act, not by the way we talk.  We can prove our faith by our committal
to it, and in no other way.  Any belief that does not command the one who
holds it is not a real belief; it is a pseudo belief only.  And it might shock
some of us profoundly if we were brought suddenly face to face with our
beliefs and forced to test them in the fires of practical living.

 Many of us Christians have become extremely skillful in arranging our
lives so as to admit the truth of Christianity without being embarrassed by its
implications.  We arrange things so that we can get on well enough without
divine aid, while at the same time ostensibly seeking it.  We boast in the Lord
but watch carefully that we never get caught depending on Him."The heart
is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?"

 Pseudo faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails it.
Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of
any second way or makeshift substitutes.  For true faith, it is either God or
total collapse.  And not since Adam first stood up on the earth has God
failed a single man or woman who trusted Him.

 The man of pseudo faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly
to allow himself to get into a predicament where his future must depend
upon that creed being true.  He always provides himself with secondary
ways of escape so he will have a way out if the roof caves in.

 What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who
are prepared to trust God as completely now as they know they must do at
the last day.  For each of us the time is surely coming when we shall have
nothing but God.  Health and wealth and friends and hiding places will all
be swept away and we shall have only God. To the man of pseudo faith
that is a terrifying thought, but to real faith it is one of the most comforting
thoughts the heart can entertain.

 It would be a tragedy indeed to come to the place where we have no
other, but God, and find that we had not really been trusting God during
the days of our earthly sojourn.  It would be better to invite God now to
remove every false trust, to disengage our hearts from all secret hiding
places and to bring us out into the open where we can discover for
ourselves whether or not we actually trust Him. That is a harsh cure for
our troubles, but it is a sure one.  Gentler cures may be too weak to do
the work.  And time is running out on us.

"Heaven can be entered only through the narrow gate!
The highway to hell is broad, and its gate is wide enough
for all the multitudes who choose its easy way.

But the Gateway to Life is small, and the road is narrow,
and only a few ever find it.                     -  -   Matthew 7:13-14

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Yours in Christ,
Paul N. F.