You are listening to the Passion City Church DC podcast. To learn more about Passion City Church, including our gathering times in Atlanta in Washington, D.C.

Visit us online at Passion City Church.com. Today's talk

comes from Pastor Ben Stewart.

Well when you begin as a pastor, you learn pretty early on that it's a bad habit to preach

other people's sermons.

And of course you're influenced by other people, but you don't want to preach their sermons, not just because of plagiarism, but also because if you get into that habit, you fail to develop the muscles you need to construct your own sermons.

But with that said, I remember from me when I was a young man reading the sermons of Charles Spurgeon.

He was a preacher back in the 1800s, late 1800s, and I remember reading a sermon of his

where he posited the question at the beginning, why does God want faith?

Why are we saved by faith?

Why not saved by love or by peace or by humility or something else?

And I remember when he said that it struck me,

I don't know and I feel like I should know that.

And so I read the rest of this sermon with rapt attention.

Like, why does God want faith from us?

And he walks down this course and these passages.

So I'm not going to preach Spurgeon's sermon, honestly.

But as I prepared for this message on faith,

I thought, but you know, I do want to walk you down the path

he led me down and he did it again not by looking at some technical passages on

faith that they're valuable and we'll swing past. He did it by looking at these two stories

and contrasting these two because there's something similar

...