When you understand what faith really is

"Have you ever noticed that most of the things that happen in your life as a Believer are just normal, boring, dull, day-to-day stuff? It's pretty much that way in life, but what you've been convinced of is that to really serve and worship God you've got to have these exciting, jolting, revolutionary, over-the-top experiences," says Richard Jordan.

"All of that is flesh. It's called religion. You see a bunch of it in John 3, by the way. That's what had taken over Israel and had made it the 'Jews' religion.'

"I got a note the other day from a guy who said he's enjoying grace but he's worried about whether he's enjoying grace. You ever meet anybody like that? People who are too legalistic about being non-legalistic?

"When you think about faith, Romans 10:10 says 'with the heart man believes.' You need to keep that in your mind. 

"It takes absolute, complete, total, personal privacy to have faith. The reason we don't do the walk-the- aisle-and-come-down-to-the-altar kind of stuff is what that gets into, when you understand what faith is, that's a psychological technique based on bad doctrine.

"They use Matthew 10:32: [32] Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. [33] But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.

"If you confess, that's good kingdom doctrine about the tribulation period, but it's got nothing to do with getting saved in the dispensation of grace.

"If you're going to believe in your heart, you have to have privacy; you can't be induced into doing something external so people can see it. God looks on your heart, not on the outward appearance. To have faith, it's something that has to take place in the mentality of your inner man.

"You'll hear me say, 'You don't have to go anywhere, move a muscle, shake a preacher's hand and pray. You don't even have to tell anybody. In the quiet and stillness of your own heart you talk to God.' I use that terminology on purpose and have for 40 years because that's where you believe.

"I actually had someone in Michigan, a lady who'd been in the church for decades and was still unsaved. She told me, 'Last year, when you were here and said I didn't have to tell anybody but the Lord, I got saved that night.' She said, 'I'd never been able to get saved because I just could not walk down that aisle. All the preachers said you had to come walk the aisle, and if you were afraid to walk the aisle you didn't have faith.'

"This woman didn't even tell her husband until three weeks later when she asked her husband, who was reading his Bible at the time, 'Do you think you could get me one of those study Bibles?' He said, 'Well, yeah, has something happened?' She said, 'Yeah, I got saved.'

"They say the greatest fear people have is the fear of public speaking. Have you ever had a paralyzing fear that you just absolutely couldn't get beyond? Well, that's the way that lady was. You see, God knows that.

"The other side of that is, and this is far more common, people walk an aisle and think the act of doing that was faith. In the Methodist denomination I was raised in, they convinced me that working was believing and that believing was working. So I thought when I worked that's what believing was, not realizing that believing was not doing anything but just trusting what God said.

"If you’re going to proclaim the gospel, and you’re going to defend the faith, it's going to start with you preaching the gospel to yourself and defending the gospel to yourself--standing in who God's made you in His Son, not the world, the flesh or the devil, and refusing to be moved away from it.

*****

"I recently talked with a man my age who was raised in the same Methodist religion I was raised in and taught the same way I was taught that 'what you do is you grow into it.' He was old enough to have heard about Aldersgate.

"John Wesley came to Savannah, Georgia (in 1735) and was a missionary to the Indians for eight years as an Anglican priest—a lost man. The church called him back home, he got on a boat and was going back to England when a great storm came.

"In fact, when he came to America by boat there was a great storm. There were some Moravian missionaries aboard.

"Wesley is scared to death he’s going to be blown away and destroyed and the Moravians are just having a good time, praying to the Lord and not worried at all, just happy. And he couldn’t understand how he as a priest, with all the sanction of the church, could be so miserable and scared and there were a bunch of dudes with no religion at all (perceivably) and yet they were just rejoicing.

"He couldn’t understand that. He spent eight years on the mission field. He went home troubled by that. And he didn’t get an answer until one night he went down to the little Moravian mission in London on a little street called Aldersgate and went in and there was a Moravian preacher standing there and he was reading the preface to the Book of Romans written by Martin Luther.

"And if you’ve ever read it, there’s a tremendous passage in it about salvation being Luther’s experience of learning that it’s 'by justification alone.' It’s by faith alone in Christ that justification comes. And Wesley’s testimony is that ‘that night my heart was strangely warmed.’

"All through Methodist history that expression has wafted down. That was Wesley’s way of saying, 'That night I trusted Jesus Christ personally as my Savior and all the fear and all the doubt and all the confusion was gone.' You don’t grow into it, folks; it comes when you trust Jesus Christ."

(new article tomorrow)