30th Mar 26 | 13:54
Studies by Book
Luke 11 5-13 Persistent prayer Persistent prayer 5
📖 Luke 11:5-13
*Faith is the basis for our righteousness* _Luke 11:5-13_
God is God of justice. He favours the poor and needy. He hears their cry and avenges them _Luke 18:7-8/Psalm 113:5-9._ Nevertheless, our Lord’s concern when He looks at us is, will He find faith on the earth?
Faith is the basis of our righteousness. Righteousness has been imputed to us by God, when we came to Him, believing. When we cried out to Him, repenting of our sin, asking Him to forgive us and cleanse us. When we surrendered to Him, to be the Lord of our lives and when we invited Him to come in and take over our lives. Today, we live because He lives in us and we are considered righteous before God, because of our faith in Him _Philippians 3:9._
Since we have been made righteous before God, does that give us a license to live by the flesh? No, not at all, for we cannot go back to the old nature because the old man has been crucified with Christ and we are now alive in the new man, in Christ, by faith _Romans 6:1-14._
We must now continue and persist in our life of faith in Christ. This is the everyday exercise of the disciple of Christ. We need to encourage and exhort one another, in the body of Christ, to press on in our faith walk with God.
Jesus taught us through the parable of the sower and the seed, warning us of the danger of the second type soil that can be manifested in us, as His disciples _Mark 4:16-17._ What is the problem of the second type of soil, where the seed of God’s word is not able to germinate and bear fruit? The second type of soil is the stony ground and this represents an evil heart of unbelief. Unbelief is evil, in the eyes of God _Hebrews 3:12-13._
The resultant behaviour, when we have a stony soil in our hearts is that we will not able to stand, when faced with tribulation or persecution but will stumble and become fruitless. We persist with God to fix the problems of our life but we are not persisting with God to teach us faith to trust in Him in midst of our crisis.
This, very sadly, is the popular, erroneous, teaching of today. This is a teaching that encourages people to come and persist with God to take away the challenges of life and make life comfortable and secure. We are even told to prescribe to God, asking Him for what we think will make life comfortable for us.
God wants us to persist in growing in faith in Him. We need to learn to be content in whatever state we are in, persisting with God to increase our faith in Him _Philippians 4:11-13._ He is our comfort and our security.
*Thought to ponder*
```Hebrews 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.```