This devotion is a monthly ministry of the Pee Dee Baptist Association, comprised of 31 Southern Baptist churches in Dillon and Marlboro Counties. For more information call 774-8062.
Featured this month is Rev. Austin Wynn, the pastor of Piney Grove Baptist Church, Lake View.
What is the source of your eternal security? What are you trusting will or won’t happen when you die? All of us trust things every day. We trust our car to start when we start the ignition. We trust we will still have a job when we head to work in the morning. We trust the chair we sit in won’t collapse when we first sit down.
We place our faith in things all the time. But the thing about faith is that it is only as good as its object. TV preachers often say things aren’t working out in your life because you don’t have enough faith, but this isn’t biblical. It doesn’t matter how much faith you have in your car to start, if your car is the object of your faith and it hasn’t started in a month; your faith is sorely placed.
So think about it with me …. it doesn’t matter how much faith you have, just how reliable is the source of your faith. There’s a scene in the gospel of Luke where Jesus is teaching the disciples about the radical forgiveness they are to extend to others, and they are so stunned that they blurt out, “Increase our faith!” But then we read, “And the Lord said, ‘If you had faith like a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,” and it would obey you’ “(Luke 17:5-6).
Jesus takes our eyes off the faith itself and onto the object of such faith. The thing about cars and jobs and chairs is that you will still be okay if these objects prove to be faulty sources of faith. You may be without a car or without a job if your earthly hopes prove false, but if your hopes for the afterlife don’t work out, the Bible says you won’t be okay at all.
The reality is, everyone reading this is trusting the security of their eternal soul to something. Yes, that means you too. Whether you claim to be a Christian or are the most staunch atheist, you are banking your soul’s eternity on something right now. Maybe the source of your faith is that your good deeds will outweigh your bad deeds and God will sweep all your sin under the rug of eternity and welcome you into His presence. Maybe the source of your faith is that God grades on a curve and, as long as you’re not as bad as Osama bin Laden or Hitler, you’ll make it into heaven. Maybe the source of your faith is that, when you die, that is it and everything ceases to exist for you. Whatever you believe will happen or won’t happen when you die, you are believing something and that is the issue I want to address.
The question I have is this: what is the source of your eternal security and is your faith in a reliable source? There is no question about it: you will die and God says this in His Word ….”It is appointed unto man once to die, and then comes the judgment (Hebrews 9:27). So, since the God Who created you will certainly judge you, the question you need to consider is this: Is my faith in the right place? And, if not, what should I do to make sure that it is? If your faith is in the wrong place and you acknowledge it, there’s still good news for you. But, if you decide to press on in your faulty faith, you will discover in the end that this was an eternally bad choice. We aren’t dealing with possibilities here but eternal realities whose consequences will carry on long into eternity. As one friend of mine always says, “Eternity is a long time to be wrong.”
What if God Himself could write a book that laid out word for word Who He was, who you were, and how you could be welcomed into His presence? And what if God Himself could put on human flesh and come down to earth, grow up in a small town out in the middle of nowhere, and Himself make a way for you to be right with Him?
The good news is that He has written a book (the Bible), and He has come down as a human (Jesus of Nazareth), and He has made a way for the vilest of sinners to be accepted into His presence (the cross and the empty tomb).
God’s way to be right with Him is the only way, because He made it up, and it isn’t a list of rules to keep or a list of bad things to avoid …. It is faith in a Person: Jesus Christ. Since you can never live a perfect and sinless life, Jesus did for you. Since you can never wash away all your sins, Jesus bore the full punishment for your sins against God on the cross.
If you will trust in God’s way, which is faith in His Son Jesus, you will find that your faith is in a trustworthy source for sure. The way to change the source of your faith is by turning from your sins and trusting in Jesus to save you.
Are you ready to place your faith in the only reliable source? The shed blood of Jesus, the Son of God? If so, you will find He has been drawing you to this all along and is ready to move into your heart and begin changing things for the better.
