Monday, April 16, 2007

Postcards from Karl #3

What does it mean to "have faith"?


Faith...is faith in Jesus Christ. It is thus the recognition and confirmation that God's word was already in effect even before we believed and quite apart from our believing. Faith particularly...lives by the power which is power before faith and without faith. It lives by the power which gives faith itself its object.

Church Dogmatics I/1, 154.

Faith is all about the one you have faith IN, not about how much faith you yourself have or do not have. Faith relies on something external, not on something internally within us. So next time someone says "you don't have enough faith", give 'em the forks and tell them where to get off, 'cause they're sending you on an unfair guilt trip; the only way you can not have enough faith is to not trust in Jesus. If you go searching within your own soul for some deep well of faith which will rocket you into the spiritual stratosphere then think again...methinks you're searching for something which is quite aside from Christian spirituality, something possibly idolatrous. This is why you only need faith the size of a mustard seed (Luke 17.6), cause its the size of the one you have faith IN which matters.

15 Points for the location of this painted ceiling. Points still on offer for the first Postcard from Karl.

6 comments:

Jonathan said...

I remember that ceiling... is it at the Greenwich Hospital?

byron smith said...

Somewhere royal in England (note the Order of the Garter insignia).

Jonathan said...

There is also the Naval Ensign, and a couple of William & Mary ciphers. It isn't the main ceiling of the Painted Hall at Greenwich, but I think it might be the vestibule. If they hadn't been filming a movie in there last time I went, I might have been sure.

Martin Kemp said...

Well done Jono, that's two in a row: Sheffield and yes, it's the vestibule of the painted hall at Greenwich.

Philip Britton said...

"...faith is God's work within the human being through the gospel. It represents the new creation which is called into existence by the Word of God alone... It arises not from any human cleverness or wisdom, but from the proclamation of God's saving work in Christ. For this reason it rests upon the power of God, and not upon any human wisdom... The believing reception of the Gospel is nothing other than the Word of God doing its work."
- Seifrid, M.A. Christ our Righteousness. pp131-132.

Indeed.

Alistair said...

[Off topic]
Further to a previous discussion on internet communication (blogging), there's a good blog entry just on that here: http://christhacks.blogspot.com/
And this is a good blog to bookmark in itself, made up of a group of Christians from ARPC Singapore, it looks like.