Faith: patience, persistence, good works

New Guest: Like this one, most posts are devotional; those related to CAR BIZ can be found by searching for that title. You might start with 'Welcome,' the first post in the archives, dated November 12, 2008, where I introduce myself and the blog. Please, I encourage you to add in any reflections or comments you may have.

Blessings and best wishes,
Dr. Will

Thursday, January 21, 2010
Devotions: Ps 37; Gen 11:1-9; Heb 6:13-20; Jn 4:1-15

Don’t fret over the wicked; they are doomed to fade and disappear. Trust in YHWH and do the good works He provides for you; then you will live and prosper. Delight in Him, and YHWH will give you the desires of your heart! Commit your way to othe Lord; trust in Him, and He will do this: He will make your righteousness shine like the sun, the justice of your cause like the noonday! Set aside anger; forsake wrath and vengeance. They prosper who wait upon the Lord—patience, trust, faith! Soon, the wicked will be no more; you could stare at his spot, and he’ll not be there. It is the meek who will inherit the land. Better the little possessed by the righteous than the wealth of many wicked; for YHWH will break their arms and uphold the righteous. God watches over the days of His own; His enemies will disappear like smoke in a gale! Be generous; you cannot outgive God! I was young and now I am old, but I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread. The Lord will not forsake those He has chosen and set aside. There is a future for the man of peace; our salvation is from the Master, our Refuge in times of trouble.

As humankind populated the earth after Noah’s days, all people spoke one language, with a simple vocabulary. As the people migrated west from their point of origin, they came to a plain in Mesopotamia and settled there. They decided to build a great tower, using sun-baked bricks and bitumen mortar, with ambitions to rule the planet. God observed all this, and decided to confuse human speech. YHWH scattered the people over the face of the earth, and their ambitions and construction project languished. This place and period were named Babel [like confused], because there and then the Lord confused the language of all the earth. [The Spiritual gifts of tongues and interpretation reverse this separation and confusion.]

Faith is the assurance of things we hope for, the conviction of things we have not yet seen. Faith is the fruit and emblem, the evidence and essence, of divine approval. By faith we understand that God created the world through His words, so that what we see was made from things we cannot now perceive. Faith enabled Abel to offer God a sacrifice more acceptable than the offer of his brother Cain. God bore witness to Abel’s faith by accepting his sacrifice; and though Abel died, his faith still speaks to us! Through faith, Enoch was taken to be with God; he did not die; and before he was taken, he was attested as pleasing to God. Without faith, no one can please God; for anyone who desires to be with God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him in earnest. Noah listened to God, built the ark, and saved his household; this evidenced his faith, and condemned the faithless world; by faith, Noah became an heir of the righteousness that faith engenders. By faith Abraham immediately obeyed when God called him to leave his home and go to an unnamed place which he would receive as an inheritance. By faith, Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, though as a foreigner, living in tents like nomads, with his son Isaac and grandson Jacob, heirs with Abraham of the same covenant promise. They looked forward to the eternally-founded city whose Builder and Maker is God. By faith, Sarah accepted the power to conceive, despite her barrenness and advanced age, because she trusted Him Who made the promise. Consequently from one man as good as dead and one old infertile woman were born descendants numerous as the stars of heaven and the innumerable grains of seashore sand. All these died in their faith; they had not yet received all God promised to them; but they glimpsed it as if from far off; they acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. People who do such things make it clear that they are seeking a homeland—not the homes they left behind, because they could have gone back at any time. But they sought a better country, a heavenly home. Because of this faith, God is not ashamed to be called their God, because in truth He has prepared a city for them! God tested Abraham’s faith, and Abraham’s faith held; he was ready to offer up Isaac, his only son, as a sacrifice to YHWH—even though God had told Abraham ‘Your descendants will take their identity from Isaac.’ Abraham trusted that God was able to raise men, even from death; and figuratively, that’s what happened: Abraham received his son alive, back from death, by God’s faithfulness. By faith, Isaac invoked future blessings for Jacob and Esau. By faith, Jacob, aged and dying, bowed in worship over his staff and blessed each of the sons of Joseph. By faith, at his life’s end, Joseph described the coming exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, and gave directions concerning his burial when that event would come, four centuries later.

When the Lord Jesus knew that the Pharisees had heard that He was making and baptizing more disciples than John, He left Judea and returned to Galilee. En route, He had to pass through Samaria. In the Samaritan city of Sychar, He paused at the city well, near a field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph centuries earlier. The well was Jacob’s well. Tired from His journey, Jesus sat beside the well and rested, about noon. A woman of Samaria appeared to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give Me a drink.’ He was alone, for His disciples had gone into the city to buy food, and no others were drawing water at that hour. The Samaritan woman replied, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’ (For Jews generally have no dealings with Samaritans.) Jesus replied, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and if you knew Who says to you, “Give Me a drink,” you would ask, and He would have given you living water!’ The woman said, ‘Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. Where would you get this living water? Are you greater than our patriarch Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his cattle?’ Jesus said, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks the water that I will give him will never thirst! The water I give will become a spring of water within him, welling up to eternal life.’ The woman said, ‘Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor be obliged to come here to draw water again.’