Dharius Daniels - RESET - Part 5

I want to talk to you tonight in Romans 3 and 4 about resetting your faith. Now, if you’re ready for this teaching tonight, I want you to drop fire in this chat. Go ahead and drop a fire emoji in this chat! I want you to catch this. Now, I want to talk about faith because faith is the foundation of your Christian spiritual journey. Faith is the foundation for the spiritual journey of a Christian. What does that mean? It means your spiritual experiences and your progress as a Christian will be directly tied to the reliability and stability of your faith. Faith is so consequential to the believer’s experience that we cannot even experience salvation without it. Paul says in the book of Ephesians that we are saved by grace, but it’s through faith. Listen to this: grace is when God gives you what you don’t deserve. Come on! I think all of us can look back over our lives and see seasons and circumstances where there were doors opened that we didn’t deserve, ways made that we didn’t deserve, provisions given that we did not deserve, and relationships orchestrated that we didn’t deserve. Grace did that! Every blessing that God sends is delivered through a transportation system called grace. One theologian even calls grace scandalous. He says grace is just scandalous; it doesn’t even make sense. When people look from the outside at what God is doing in and through your life, they become perplexed. They become confused and flabbergasted because they wonder how you are experiencing this degree and these dimensions of blessing, favor, and opportunity. They have no idea that you are just as confused as they are. You are just as perplexed as they are. You are wondering how you’ve been experiencing what you’ve experienced, and the answer is grace. But here’s the thing: salvation is delivered through a transportation system called grace, but it is accessed through faith. Let me give you an example. Let’s say, I don’t know, whatever your favorite food is—let’s say you’re starving—and I call you and say, «Hey, your favorite food is ready! I bought it for you, and it’s at this address.» Or I could say, «I bought you your favorite food; it’s outside your door right now.» Me giving you that food means you didn’t pay for it; there’s nothing you did to earn it. It’s just me, out of my goodwill, deciding to get you your favorite food. That’s grace, right? Grace delivers it, but just because I deliver it through grace doesn’t mean you get to eat it unless you believe my word enough to get up from where you are, go outside your door, and pick it up. Somebody, put «pick it up» in the chat! Come on, somebody put «pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!» There are some things that God, by grace, has dropped at the doors of believers, but believers have not accessed them because they don’t realize or recognize—they haven’t received the revelation—that there are some things you need to go and pick up. Peace is outside the door; pick it up! Hope is outside the door; pick it up! Provision is outside the door; pick it up! Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up! If this is making sense, put a mind-blown emoji in the chat! Come on, faith’s essential! You know how important it is. It’s so important that the Bible says, «Without faith, it’s impossible to please God.» Isn’t that crazy? Without faith, it is impossible to please God, for he that comes to God must believe that He is. That means you’ve got to believe that He exists, and that’s the first step. But that’s not all! You know how there may be times when you run into people who say, «I believe in God.»? That’s not faith. Believing in the existence of an intelligent being—believing in what Paul Tillich calls an uncaused cause, something that created the world—that’s not even really spiritual; that’s just intelligent. Some might argue that it is unintelligent to believe this, saying Christians are duped or uninformed. But it takes way more faith for someone to believe in the Big Bang theory than it does for me to believe in an intelligent uncaused cause. That cause is so strategic and intentional that it covers my brain with a skull! It takes way more faith to believe nature did it alone than to believe that a creator ordered the universe, set the exact ratios of carbon dioxide and oxygen in our atmosphere, and placed the sun at the right distance so we can feel its warmth without being consumed by it. To me, that’s not just spiritual; that’s intelligent. So I have to believe that God exists, but the writer also says I have to believe He is a rewarder. I have to believe in His existence and in His character; He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. It’s impossible to please God without belief. What does God want? God wants to be believed! The Bible says in the book of Hebrews that we should follow after those who, through faith and patience, inherited God’s promises. He said to follow the example of people in Scripture who picked up what God promised, and they picked it up through faith.