60 Seconds – Facets of Faith

Helen Keller, shortly before her sixtieth birthday, expressed pity for the real unseeing, for those who have eyes, yet do not see. Her life of physical blindness had given her a spiritual insight which enabled her to enjoy life in all its fullness. She said, “If the blind put their hand in God’s, they find their way more surely than those who see, but have not faith or purpose.”

In his book, Mighty Faith, J. Oswald Sanders lists “The Facets Of Faith.” They are:

1. Faith is not merely an act, but a series of acts. It is a maintained attitude of the heart, an unquestioned obedience.
2. Faith is the soul’s perpetual Amen to God’s everlasting Yea.
3. Faith’s chief occupation is the obtaining of the promises of God.
4. Faith is ever discovering what God is able to do in the face of all opposition and difficulties.
5. The oftener we act in faith, the easier it becomes to trust God.
6. Doubt is a symptom of soul disease. When the soul is healthy, we believe without thinking of faith.
7. The heroes of faith staked everything on God, and history proved them right.
8. Faith is willing to accept what it cannot understand.
9. Faith does not believe that God is on the side of great battalions.
10. Faith is the assent of the mind, and the consent of the heart.
11. Faith is not an emotion, although emotion may be the result.
12. To doubt any word God has spoken is to cripple faith.
13. Faith is neither encouraged, nor discouraged, by circumstances.
14. Faith is the centrifugal force in its effects – from the faith of those who preach to the faith of those who believe.
15. Faith transforms a way of thinking into a mode of living, creed into character, theory into life.
16. We read in the Scriptures that unbelief evoked the anger of God.
17. To those who are able to undergo the strain of faith, God allows all sorts of disappointments, the death of bright hopes, the removing of earthly friendships…to compel the soul to house itself in Him alone.
18. The measure of our abiding in strength will be the measure of our confiding in the truth and fidelity of God.
19. As the Christian life is begun by faith in God, so it continues by taking God at His Word, and living to prove His Word is true.
20. When faith grows exceedingly, love abounds toward each other. Men of faith are almost always, and equally, men of love. Faith works by love.
21. Faith is the affirmation and an act that bids eternal truth to be fact.