Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who
promised is faithful. (Hebrews 10:23 NIV)
Faith is going to determine which of two things
is going to characterize us. This is the real point. It is either going to be
that we are living under a terrible paralysis, as altogether petrified through
confusion, perplexity, inability to understand, being unable to disentangle, to
sort things out, to see straight and see clearly, to know what is meant by
happenings. That means utter paralysis, simply standing with our hands on our
hips, helpless and hopeless. That is the effect of the absence of a positive
faith. The only way of Life and deliverance from such a paralysis is a
deliberate faith in God which causes us to take the attitude that we are going
on with God, understanding or not understanding, explaining or not explaining,
having light or having no light; we are going right on with God on the basis of
what God has done in us, made real in us, of what God Himself is to us by what
He has effected in us. We are going on!
We, beloved, shall come there and may come
there more than once in the course of our life; we shall come to the place where
we realise we are going right out into outer darkness and despair and paralysis,
to be ruled completely out of any effectiveness, fruitfulness, or value
whatever, unless we pull ourselves together and say to ourselves, 'The whole
thing is an inexplicable, bewildering confusion, tangle from our standpoint or
the standpoint of man; but God is, God is faithful. That is what He Himself says
He is'. Thus without questioning God we go on believing God. We have even to
believe God to the point of putting over on to Him the responsibility for
failures, for mistakes, in so far as we have really and honestly put our lives
at His disposal and have become utter for God and are free from personal
interests and worldly interests and are here only for God. We have to make over
to the Lord's account things which may have been mistakes or failures, and trust
Him with these and go on.