The

The Welcome to Faith is. I'm Pastor Rick Stevens, and this is the place where we understand that faith is absolute confidence in the trustworthiness of God.

Now, we know, you know, I know, everybody probably knows that faith is more than that because we use qualifiers

related to the word faith I understand that if you study theology you will probably

have heard someone talk about prevenient grace okay all we're doing is trying to say

that grace as it works in our lives generally or i'm sorry faith

grace is a different topic we can talk about that i've got a definition for grace too but let's talk

about faith faith in our lives as we live them out is about developing confidence in God. That's why we say faith is

absolute confidence in the trustworthiness of God. We had a conversation a couple of us this morning,

that God doesn't always do what we think he should do. And sometimes things happen that we think, hey, God, we'd

like to talk this over. You know, the old idea, have a little talk with Jesus. Yeah, we'd like to

talk this over and get this straightened out. And yet we remember and we remind ourselves that

we trust God's heart. We have absolute confidence in the

trustworthiness of God because we know how God has behaved toward people. We know his heart

toward people. And we trust that. And we also remind ourselves, and this is sometimes hard for some people,

we don't know everything God knows. So how can we pretend to argue with God that he should have done

X, Y, Z instead of A, B, C, when we don't know what God knows. And so we, because we know from the pages

of history, from the Bible itself, from our own experience, because we know that God is trustworthy,

we continue to have faith, and we stretch in God's direction to have absolute confidence in the

trustworthiness of God. I don't know how many of us will get to that absolute confidence,

but we still have to have an ideal to strive for. So that's what we do here. Now, I'm Pastor Rick

Stevens. I'm the pastor of a church in Cape Coral, Florida,

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