Welcome back this Monday morning. We begin our new week together asking whether we should

encourage non-Christians to pray for faith or as a faithless prayer like that, basically

pointless. Here's the question. Your pastor, John, my name is Jeff and I am a PhD student

in Los Angeles. My question is about faith. Many times I have been evangelizing my friends

and they say that they admire my faith, but they don't possess faith like mine. They

have difficulty believing themselves. I always tell them that God generously supplies

faith and it's not something I mustered up myself. I might show them 1 Peter 1, 3 that

he God caused us to be born again or 1 Corinthians 2 verses 11 to 14. We receive the spirit that

we might understand. Which I tell someone who realizes that God gives

us faith, but who feels stuck waiting for God to give them that faith. The natural person

does not accept the things of the spirit of God until they've been given by the spirit

or should a faithless person not pray at all or do they simply wait until God may or may

not give his spirit. Pastor John, what counsel would you have for Jeff?

The first, let me agree with Jeff, saving faith is humanly impossible. The fallen, sinful,

spiritually dead, human soul does not have the moral ability to believe. They have the

mental powers. They have the powers of volition, but the heart is so bent away from God. It

cannot make itself prefer God. Can't make yourself love God. Can't make your

feel treasure. God can't make yourself rely upon God if you are dead and bent away from

God. When the rich young man turned away from Jesus and refused to follow him in love with

his money, Jesus said it's easier for a camel to go through the Ivan needle than for a rich

person to enter the heaven and his disciples threw up their hands and said, well, who then can be

saved? And Jesus didn't respond by saying, oh, you overinterpreted my words. He didn't say that.

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