In His Grip!

Really to believe that Christ has accepted you, knowing what you know about yourself… How difficult that is for some people! Really to believe that your faith is of no worth or consequence if you do not live faithfully before the Lord… How difficult that is for some people! The Devil has two great lies and they are so much easier to believe than the truth of God. The first lie, the lie he told to Adam and Eve in the garden is "You surely shall not die!" Your sins are not that serious, you have nothing to fear from them, there is no need to take God and his word so seriously!

But, if he is unable finally to convince a person of that, he uses his second big lie: that, while Christ might save some people, he certainly will not help you; not a person as bad, as ungrateful, as unable to surmount your sins, as unworthy of his love and favor as you. It is this second lie that got him his infamous nickname: "The Accuser of the Brethren."

Sometimes we must with great difficulty GRIP onto one hand - God's hand. "Grip" is the idea; laying hold for oneself; holding on to for dear life; refusing to let go. Let a person believe in Christ that way and he will find faith, even faith as a grain of mustard seed, lifting him up from this benighted world all the way to the heavenly country. "Do you believe the promises of God?" Isaac Watts was asked on his deathbed. "I believe them enough to venture an eternity on them." [Toplady, Works, 487]

Oh, no. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that faith is a small thing, an easy thing, a lighter thing than works. Faith is the weightiest thing in the world. I’ll let my hero, Alexander Whyte, have the last word.

"Give me a passionate man, a hot-headed man, and one that is headstrong and unmanageable; and with faith as a grain of mustard seed, I will, by degrees, make that man as quiet as a lamb. Then give me a covetous man, and avaricious man, a miserly man; and with a little faith working like leaven in his heart, I will yet make him a perfect spendthrift for the church of Christ and for the poor. Then give me one who is mortally afraid of pain; and one who all his days is in bondage through fear of death; and let the spirit of faith once enter and take its seat in his heart and in his imagination, and he shall in a short time, despise all your crosses and flames…. Then show me a man with an unclean heart and I will undertake, by his faith in Christ, to make him whiter than snow, till he will not know himself to be the same man." [Bunyan Characters, iv, 109-11]

And why is that? Because faith is the rope that ties us to Jesus Christ, the chain that binds us to him, the current through which his power and grace are transferred to our hearts and lives, the hand by which we walk hand in hand with him through this world.