April 3

“In reality, however, faith is the simplest and plainest thing in the world, the easiest of exercises:  It is simply believing God.....Your salvation comes, not because your faith saves you, but because it links you to the Savior who saves; and your believing is really nothing but the link.”  Hannah Whitall Smith, God is Enough, 4/3

This is why we only need faith as small as a mustard seed.  God gives us the ability to believe Him by faith, but we need to quit our rebellion in order to use it.  Then we need to make sure we have a right idea of who God is and what He does.  He is love and does justice.  It’s all pretty simple....on paper.  It’s the condition I mentioned that is our hang up--WE have to quit our rebellion.  We must give Him our wills.  The only way we can do this is to totally die to our rebellious Self.  We can’t just knock it out, drug it to sleep, or pretend it’s not there.  We must lay it down and let it starve to death.  If we pick it up for any reason we are feeding it and bringing it back to life, sometimes with a vengeance.  How much better just to give it to God.  Soon it will surrender itself to the overwhelming love of God and become one with Him.  Hannah says it beautifully in a poem:  Take it, oh Father, ere my courage fail; and merge it so in thine own will, that e’en if in some desperate hour my cries prevail, and thou give back my gift, it may have been so changed, so purified, so fair have grown, so one with thee, so filled with peace divine, I may not know or feel it as mine own, but, gaining back my will, may find it thine.

“And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever.”  1 John 2:27