True Love

"Faith is continually mixed with mercy."

GOD WILL NEVER abandon you to faith. “Well, until you find some, until you grow more in faith, until you have enough.” Meanwhile, He’s upstairs, some distance away, tapping His toe, or forgetting you, for now. We cannot teach faith, we cannot speak of faith and not show Jesus Christ. Faith is, like love and joy and peace, other fruit of the Spirit. It is an intangible substance, an emotion, if you will, which comes because you love Him and He loves you. It is not difficult to obtain. You already have the full measure of it; that measure is Jesus Christ, and you have all of Him from salvation.

“… according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.” (Romans 12:3)

Jesus never spoke of any man losing their measure of faith, but of having strong faith or weak faith or little faith. The amount was what had been exercised or was in use. Men have muscles, but those which are not exercised will not be strong. We do not speak of the love of God for us as ever being abandoned. God’s love is eternal and constant. True love comes from God, and it only does what He would do. You cannot pervert it. When it becomes something ungodly, it is not God’s love but from the flesh and the mind and the devil.

I actually am not one who likes to continually speak of blaming the devil. This is an excuse for some to do whatever they want, and for others who are not in the church, it becomes somewhat of a joke, despite the truth of it. The devil sinned first and then enticed man to sin. Sin has been condemned by Jesus Christ (Romans 8:3). However, for every good action, for every good emotion, there is one conned up by the forces of darkness. Which sounds very Star Wars-ish but isn’t. God’s love is a pure and holy love (which includes the love of a man for his wife, He created the marriage covenant). Human, worldly love both between people and for things is never settled but always aflame. It is breakable. It is always redefined. The Bible calls this love “lust” most often, but it is not seen as that in modern society.

This circles me back around to the beginning and the word “faith.” Faith is a tie between people created by trust. It is trust formed from a bond of relationship. A child trusts their parent. A dog trusts its owner. In a perfect emotion, you understand. I prefer to call it an emotion because too much teaching speaks of it like a credit card or an exercise, and until you’ve formed enough, God cannot act. This is a lie. God can and does act all the time because He loves you and He is so full of mercy. I have said this and will not stop saying it. But for the mercy of God, I would be dead. He knew what was wrong with me, and He fixed it, then He informed me. “Oh really?”

It’s like getting in your car and cranking it, then someone taps on the window and tells you you were out of gas and your tires were too bald, so they filled your tank and replaced them. Neither one being things you knew. I found out how bad off I was after being healed. God was of incredible mercy to me. Faith is mixed continually with mercy. You actually cannot separate the two. We grow in faith because we fall in love with our Father in heaven, and we realize how wonderful He is, how good He is to us. We see His kind heart and know His patience (longsuffering) and the vastness of His merciful kindness, and so when we ask for things, we are content to wait and trust His timing because, again, we know Him. That’s a much better way to think of having faith. And then patience becomes easy because we know that our frustration always means we’re not seeing His point-of-view. We release our doubts and our fears, knowing they come from the devil and not from God.

Until we have these things in order in our heart, we will keep tripping over them. Faith is belief in Him who is faithful. It is trusting in our Savior who is trustworthy. It is never, never, never separate from WHO HE IS. It comes from our hearing about WHO HE IS, and from TRUSTING IN WHO HE IS, and from KNOWING WHO HE IS. We read HIS WORD, which tells us HIS PROMISES and that HE ALWAYS KEEPS THEM, and so our faith grows. We learn who He is and in the process become just like Him, then when we ask Him for anything it is a desire He has given us, whether that’s a personal desire for a spouse or a son or a place to live or a new and better job, or whether that’s for a ministry or a manifestation of His presence (which is, again, a person – the Holy Spirit – and not a thing), or for healing or the filling of a spiritual need.

“I give up everything this world has to offer so that I might be with Christ and be recreated in Christlike character—not from my own efforts or attempts to cure myself, not by observing some code, but by true re-creation of mind, heart and character that God accomplishes when we trust him. And this trust is established by the evidence of God’s supreme trustworthiness provided by Christ.” (Philippians 3:8-9, Remedy)

The Bible says He gives us the desires of our heart (Philippians 2:13). This is the giving of the type of desire itself as well as the actual desire. If you get His desires in you, then He will give you exceeding, abundantly far over and above everything you could ask or think of your own desires as well. He made from a 100-year-old man, nations of peoples. He gave a barren couple their desire for a son and made that son the greatest of Old Covenant prophets. He set a demon possessed man completely free because He heard his cries and saw his heart, that he refused to die. He healed a man who’d been lame for 38 years though that man had non-existent faith and didn’t even know Jesus’ name.

The woman with the issue of blood had faith. She said if she could but touch His garment then she’d be made whole. But the father who came to Jesus, asking Him to heal his son, begged for help with his unbelief (Mark 9:24), and Jesus healed his son anyway. Mercy fuels love, love kindles mercy; faith is the result. Trust in God is what grows from both mercy and love. Mercy is the action of faith, or some places use the word “compassion” instead of “mercy.” But belief in Him who is able to heal, able to deliver, who came to set free all those who were oppressed of the devil (Acts 10:38), always brings an answer because love is who He is and mercy is what He longs to do.

This life isn’t an exercise in word definitions. We are not children of God sent out to “make disciples” just as cults and other false religions do. We are not handing out principles to live by nor formulas that bring certain results. We are showing people Jesus, helping them realize the love of Jesus, and in falling in love with Him, they trust Him. In trusting Him, they know Him.

“That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death;” (Philippians 3:10)

"Because of this, ever since we heard about you, we have not stopped talking to God about you and asking him to enlighten your minds with truth and with a greater knowledge of his character, methods, principles and will, thus increasing your wisdom and understanding of eternal realities." (Colossians 1:9, Remedy)

“Beloved as sojourners and exiles I appeal to you to abstain from passions of the flesh that wage war upon the soul; bear yourselves uprightly before pagans; so that, for all their slander of you as bad characters, they may come to glorify God when you are put upon your trial, by what they see of your good conduct.” (1 Peter 2:12, Moffatt)

Image by Julius H. from Pixabay


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com