Fundamentals of a Faithful Life

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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In your copy of God's Word, I invite you to turn with me to Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 15.

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Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 15. Today I have the esteemed privilege of preaching on verses 15 and 16 as we turn our study from the every spiritual blessing that the

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Christian has in Christ to now the theme of Paul's thanksgiving and prayer in this magnificent book that is the letter to the

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Ephesians. In some ways, when we have a smaller group, I almost feel emboldened to preach it more carefully, more personably.

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And may the Lord give me help to do that. So with our attention turned to verse 15, let's read this passage together.

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And I remind us, this is the word of the living God. And let he who has ears to hear, let him hear.

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Verse 15. For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the

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Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.

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Today as we begin our study in God's Word, our text takes us back to the very basics of what it means to be a community of individual

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Christians before the living God. As the

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Apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians, we see him here. He's a picture of a plane taxiing away from the gate and to the runway.

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He is spooling up his engines to begin prayer on their behalf or at least to recount his prayer on their behalf.

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And here he begins with this prayer of thanksgiving. A prayer of thanksgiving that we would all do well to take heed to.

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Because, and this is why, because Paul here in this prayer identifies the bare essentials of what it means to be a

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Christian and a church that is worthy of rejoicing over, that is worthy of giving thanks to God for.

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And to frame our time together, I want to take us back a few centuries to demonstrate why it is important, as often as we can, to get back down to the very basics of our

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Christianity. You are going to think at various times in this sermon,

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Shane, this is so basic, this is elementary, this is Sunday school material, give me meat.

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But there are times when even those of us who are healthy, who are robust, who have an appetite for solid food, there is a time when we need to get back to the very basics of our

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Christianity. And let me demonstrate to you why that is. At the beginning of the 16th century, especially the first half of the 16th century, the first generation of Protestant Reformed Christians found themselves in a bit of an unprecedented situation, or at least it was unprecedented for about a thousand years before their time.

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As local churches began to emerge out of the Reformation, under leaders like Calvin and Knox and Melanchthon and Luther, to name only a few, the broader

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Christian community started to run into a whole host of new hurdles. Think about all of these brand new churches out of the gate, and what they discovered is that they could not, they had a great deal of difficulty deciding, determining who belonged and who did not belong to the true universal church.

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You see, while the Roman Catholic Church was simultaneously denying the gospel and persecuting these true

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Christians on the one side, on the other side of this, on the other side of the spectrum, there was a group of radical

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Christians who belonged to, amongst some, the Anabaptist movement and other similar assemblies who promoted erroneous views that upset whole cities, you might have heard of Munster, and thus invited even greater persecution.

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And somewhere there in the middle between the Roman Catholic Church denying the gospel and persecuting

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Christians, and this zealous, overzealous perhaps, and error -ridden church, there were these true churches who endured great persecution simply for being faithful, as they simply sought to reform their lives and their communities according to the standards of God's word.

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And so as they were doing this, and as they were experiencing persecution and wondering, what do we make of this group?

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They begin asking the questions, well, what churches can we associate with? Can we in good conscience associate with churches that deny the gospel and that persecute us?

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Are they part of the true church? Can we associate with those who preach the true gospel but who get almost everything else wrong?

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And so they ask the question, what are the basic ingredients of a true local church?

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In this landscape that was littered with true churches and false churches and confused churches, how are they to identify the genuine from the counterfeit?

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Eventually, in 1561, a group of Christians in the Netherlands formed a confession that became known as the

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Belgic Confession, which amongst other things, sought to answer this question once and for all.

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And so from a painstaking study of scripture, in the crucible of persecution, being refined in that crucible, they concluded that the church, at its most basic form, had three marks that determined, that identified them as a true church of the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And some of you know these three marks, I'm sure. The first mark, they said, was that that church must be marked by the pure preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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And then number two, that church must be characterized by the pure administration of the ordinances as instituted by Christ, that is, baptism in the

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Lord's Supper. And then number three, they said, that church must demonstrate the faithful exercise of church discipline as taught by Christ.

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And so they concluded, I would suggest rightly, that the true church should consist of certainly more than these things, but could never consist of less than these three basic elements.

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So looking at scripture and not church tradition, looking at God's word and not culture, they stripped it down to the very studs of scripture and concluded these are the absolute basics, that the non -negotiable minimums of what it meant and what it means even today to be a true biblical church.

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The preaching of the gospel, the pure administration of the ordinances, and church discipline.

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Now I bring this up because it demonstrates something remarkable. That nearly 500 years ago, as the early

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Reformation church was just in its infancy, it rediscovered something that was so foundational and so basic to the existence of the church, that the church universal should have never lost sight of it again.

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That generation of faithful and long -suffering Christians found a baseline, a benchmark, by which they could determine, distinguish true churches from false churches.

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And this should have been remembered for decades and then for centuries up until today, and I would suggest into the future until the return of Christ.

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But it wasn't even a few years later, a few hundred years, even now we look at it today, less than 500 years ago or later, most

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Christians and most Christian leaders for that matter know nothing of the basics, the basic ingredients of a true church.

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Even though they are written as it were in bold ink in our Bibles and highlighted by the witness of the history of the church, this has been almost altogether forgotten.

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And this is evidenced by the fact that if we were to go to most evangelical churches today, we would find that most churches, sadly, possess maybe only one or two of these true marks of a true church.

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Some preach the gospel, we would find, but they have a loose and unbiblical view of the ordinances. Some would preach the gospel and practice the ordinances faithfully, but would altogether reject, even cast away the practice of church discipline.

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And some, we must lament, call themselves churches, but do not practice any of these things at all. Now why is this?

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It is because as fallen human beings, we become so enamored with the trappings and the accessories of the

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Christian life that we all have a propensity to lose sight of the fundamentals.

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And before long, we can no longer see the forest for the trees. And the same can be said for ordinary

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Christianity. Ordinary Christian experience.

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What it means to live an ordinary and faithful life. Let me ask you, do you know this?

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What are the essential ingredients of a God -pleasing Christian life?

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Just like the Belgic Confession, if we were to strip it down to the bare bones, how can we distinguish a

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Christian, a genuine Christian, from a counterfeit one? And where do we get the answers for these questions?

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Do we get them from the culture? Do we get them from the Christian subculture? Do we get them from John Calvin? No, but we shall get them in our

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Bibles. And we get them here in Ephesians 1, verses 15 and 16. Today as Paul begins to detail his prayer of thanksgiving for the

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Ephesians, we see him answer this fundamental question, what constitutes a Christian?

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As we see the opening lines in this record of his prayers, he provides us with a benchmark. He shows us the fundamentals of a faithful Christian life.

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The kind of Christian life that you can rejoice in when you see it in others and when you see it in yourself.

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The kind of Christian life that we can all be thankful for, to God. The kind of Christian life that we can all emulate.

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So turning our attention to the substance of verses 15 and 16, let's quickly orient ourselves in the passage.

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And we've done a number of reviews, I'm not going to go too far in depth. But what Paul has just done is he's concluded a detailed list of the spiritual blessings that the

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Christian has received in Christ. And now building on that list, he's going to turn his attention to describing his own prayer life for the

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Ephesians. And in true Pauline fashion, he describes his prayers for them with a sentence of truly biblical proportions.

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If ever you have complained that someone's speech, they speak in too long of sentences, that their words maybe sometimes make fun.

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Speaking of reading an old John Owen book. If you've ever thought, boy, that person is really verbose.

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Well, Paul almost certainly has them beat. In verses 3 through 14, what we looked at previously, that is the longest sentence in the

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Bible. And then perhaps the only sentence second to it is in verses 15 through 23.

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All nine verses, if we were to go back to the original language, all nine verses are one single sentence from the

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Apostle Paul. And as I looked at this, I thought, how do I break this up so that I can preach it in a way that is faithful to the fact that this is one sentence, one thought, and at the same time, not drown you in a flood of commas, in a flood of clauses.

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And then I discovered, as I was doing my reading and my study and my exegesis of this passage, that this prayer, this single sentence is actually broken up into two components.

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Thank the Lord. And what that means is that the first component, verses 15 and 16,

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Paul describes, and we can see it for ourselves, his prayers of praise for the Ephesians.

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There's a prayer happening here, but there are two kinds of prayers. We see it in the pastoral prayer often, in our prayer meetings, that we pray prayers of praise, prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of confession, prayers of supplication.

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And so in verses 15 and 16, we see prayers of praise. But then in verses 17 through 23, we see

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Paul introduce a second section, that is, prayers of petition for each of the Ephesians.

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And so despite the daunting length of the sentence, there's actually a very natural break at the end of verse 16.

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And so that's what we're going to go up to, verses 15 and 16, as we consider Paul's prayers of thanksgiving for the

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Ephesians. And as is often the case in the epistles, Paul begins the section in verse 15 with a conjunction.

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Now, if you've not been studying language at all, a conjunction is something that joins two words together, or two ideas together, a conjoining.

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And so often in our English language, we see conjunctions like for, therefore, since, because.

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And we see the apostles often do this. And when the apostles do this oftentimes, and we see the for or the therefore, they're usually writing this to build upon what they have just said.

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So they have laid a foundation, that the previous truth is that foundation, and then with this because or the therefore, they place that idea on top.

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It becomes contingent on that foundational truth. But Paul is up to something a little bit different here.

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What he's actually doing is he is moving with his for this reason, with his because, he's moving in a forward direction.

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And that might not mean anything to you, let me explain it a bit more. What Paul is saying here,

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I'm just going to get down to the very basics of it, is that he has not ceased to give thanks for the church in Ephesus.

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He has remembered them in his constant prayers to God, for this reason, because, and then here we see the meat and potatoes of verse 15.

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Because he has heard of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And he has heard of their love toward all the saints.

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Paul begins this section, by expressing that he is profoundly thankful to God for the

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Ephesians. And the primary reason for this is because, they have demonstrated a fundamental, but praiseworthy, or the fundamental, but praiseworthy attributes, of true

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Christian faith and true Christian love. And while these attributes are far from groundbreaking, they are not at all revolutionary, they are the main things.

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Hear me on this. He is praising them because they are the main things, that Christians are to attend ourselves to.

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Oh, if every Christian, if only every Christian could understand this one concept, that there are main things that we are to attend to, and they are these, faith and love, it might transform the world.

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But it can be so difficult to keep these main things in their proper place. As I was thinking about it this week, the main things are often the slipperiest, the most easily lost, the easiest to drift from.

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And this is why, when some of the men, and myself included, some of the best pieces of practical advice, that the beginner preachers have received, whether it's from books, there's one book

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I have in mind on this, or classes, or from experienced preachers. One of the best pieces of advice that most preachers get is this.

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And the men who have preached, who have read some of these books, will smile as they hear this. You'll know exactly what it is.

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The main thing, remember, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

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Remember, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. And why that is, is because, as Haddon Robinson put it, a mist in the pulpit becomes a fog in the pew.

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That if I have a thousand streams going out of the pulpit, by the time it gets to you, it's no longer a stream, it is a mist.

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It's a fog. And you can't see through it. But if I have one laser -focused idea, the main thing that goes before you, then you can capture that, ah, he is talking about that.

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A sermon has many constituent parts, and a myriad of ideas are conveyed, but ultimately a good sermon is only about one thing, and that one thing is the main thing.

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And Paul writes, praise be to God, that the Ephesians are excelling at the main things in the

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Christian life. Rather than a mist, it is a stream, a solid stream of the important things, the non -negotiable things in the

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Christian life. They are excelling at what every Christian must excel at.

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What are those things? Faith and love. So Paul erupts in thanksgiving to God for them.

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And we should seek to emulate them, then, by concerning ourselves with the main things as well. As I was preparing this sermon this week, for those of you who have done any kind of in -depth

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Bible study where you have a bunch of commentaries in front of you, sometimes it can be really frustrating when you're trying to get down to the main thing.

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Because this commentator says one thing, and this commentator contradicts him, and then this commentator says another thing.

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And I was blessed to come to my commentaries. I see Sam nodding his head. I was blessed to come to my commentaries this week and to hear all of the commentators singing the same refrain on the main thing.

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And the words are so forceful, I want to read just some of them to you. And you can hear where I'm getting some of my commentaries as well.

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Charles Hodge said, the leading graces of the Christian character, the leading graces are faith in Christ and love to the brethren.

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John Calvin said, in this verse we find the whole excellence of the Christian character.

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One commentator wrote, here Paul sets before us the two things which must characterize every true church and believer, loyalty to Christ and love to men.

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John MacArthur said, these are the two cardinal marks of a true

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Christian. These two fundamentals are what ultimately make a faithful Christian life.

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How many of us want to come before the throne of grace at the end of days when the trumpet sounds and we enter into the very presence of Almighty God?

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How many of us want to hear those words, well done, my good and faithful servant.

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You might get a whole host of ideas about how you will hear those words. But what

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I am bringing us back to, the very basics of the Christian life is this. It's certainly more than this, but never less than these things.

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It must start, brethren, and we need this reminder with love, sorry, with faith and then with love.

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And so let's look at them one at a time. I have a two -point sermon. What a wonderful thing.

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You'll know that I'm being faithful to the text and not just trying to preach three -point sermons. The first thing that I wanted to draw our attention to is faith in the

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Lord Jesus. Paul has been away from the Ephesians now for some time.

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Most agree that it's been about four or five years since Paul first planted the church in Ephesus.

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And now years later, despite being under house arrest somewhere in Rome, he had heard a great deal about this young, growing church.

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And whether through Tychicus, who we read about in chapter six, or through other written letters,

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Paul has heard about the church's faith in the Lord Jesus. Every single word in that sentence is important.

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Faith in the Lord Jesus. Many of you have been members of this church, looking out here today, some of you almost since the beginning.

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But even for those of you who have belonged here for only a short time, if you were to leave our church next month and remain away, picture this, we would miss you for four or five years and then receive a verbal report of how the church was doing.

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What would you want to hear by way of an update? You've been away for four or five years in a faraway land, and someone says,

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Grace Fellowship Church, I will tell you how they're doing. You want to hear it? What would your heart's desire and prayer to God be for the saints of this church?

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Would you want to hear that the church was growing? Yes, I think you would. Would you want to hear that this church was as committed as ever to expository preaching?

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Yes, I think without a doubt. Otherwise you wouldn't be here, I don't think. But what would the best news in all of the world be?

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I will tell you what I would want to hear if I was away for four or five years. For someone to come back and say,

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Oh, that church, that church is growing in her faith and in her faithfulness.

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That that church, she trusts in Christ more. Those people, they are more convinced of the veracity of the

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Gospel than ever. They're more assured of their justification by faith alone in Christ.

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That church treasures Christ above all things. That church is increasingly submitted to His Lordship.

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Oh, that church is a faithful church. Oh, would that that would be true of this church.

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It would be truly good news. Now let me ask you, does that describe us today?

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Does that describe you today? Treasuring Christ, more assured than ever before, submitted to the

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Lordship of Jesus Christ as obedient children. Is that our current trajectory?

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Is the church at large heading in that direction? When I look at the church at large,

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I think that fewer and fewer professing Christians truly know what saving faith actually is.

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Now it can be, I want to, this is a little, an aside for a second. Churches sometimes, teachers and false teachers especially, sometimes will cast shade on other churches so that they can increase and establish their dominance and their control over the people.

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It is a manipulation technique. I'm not seeking to do that. Not seeking to be in competition with other churches.

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But I just mean at a basic level, from an honest perspective. It seems that fewer and fewer professing

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Christians truly know what saving faith actually is today. Many professing

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Christians, when asked how the Lord saved them, and you've heard this, you're familiar with this language.

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They will tell you that they had some kind of experience that led them to believe in God.

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And that is it. And when you probe a little bit further and what about Jesus?

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What about Jesus? That is it. I believe in God.

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And if I believe in Jesus at all, He is a mere window dressing. This Christianity consists of a shallow faith in a vague

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God -like being who they once had an encounter with at a youth rally or amongst a friend or even in old age at a good local church.

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But theirs is a religion of moral therapeutic deism.

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Now what is moral therapeutic deism? It is essentially a description of the greater

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Western church. A view that God wants little more than for His people to be nice, to do good, and to avoid bad language.

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Such is the faith of millions. And it is no faith at all. It makes me want to cry out.

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Like James, you believe that God is one, you do well, but even the demons believe that and they shudder.

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But there are others still who speak of faith as if faith were an end in and of itself.

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That it seems almost as if the point of the Christian life is to have faith in your own faith.

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That I possess faith. Just like I possess a wallet. I possess faith.

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But there is nothing in the wallet. There is nothing in the faith. And others still have a faith that God will come through, yes, but He is going to come through in that big game.

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He is going to come through when I apply to that big job. He is the God who exists to make my dreams come true and to protect me from every mild inconvenience.

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Nicole and I once met with a young couple at a wedding. We had met at a wedding and it was the middle of the night.

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And you know those situations where someone is in your home and the only thing you want to do is sleep and yet you're too polite to ask them,

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I think it's time to go because we need to go to bed. And I remember it was three or four in the morning and we had young children.

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We were going to be up again at seven in the morning. It was set. This was coming.

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We were going to get three hours of sleep. And I remember speaking to this couple and they were so enthusiastic about their faith.

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And when we asked them about the object of that faith, they did not say that they believed that God would forgive them of their sins through faith in Jesus Christ.

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But they said that they had finally discovered, they had unearthed the faith that allowed them to be healthy and happy and no joke, one day own an island off the coast of Florida and to buy

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Ferraris and Lamborghinis but not to be materialistic because we will drive them for a time and then we will give them away.

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That was the subject, the object of their saving faith. Saving from what

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I do not know. I don't say this to judge other people's professions of faith but to point out that there is an imposter in the camp and each one of us to some degree has been affected by that imposter.

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Much of what professing believers call Christian faith today is little more than an adult belief in some cosmic

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Santa Claus. But we cannot simply allow this to persist so long as God puts breath in our lungs and the true gospel in our hearts.

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The stakes are too great. Hebrews 11, 6 says, and without faith it is impossible to please

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God. That there is a potential for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, people in this room who they will find it will be impossible to please

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God with their lives. Why? Because they do not have the kind of faith that pleases

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God, the kind of faith that Paul is speaking about in verse 15. What then is the true nature?

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The nature of true faith. Our brother read from Hebrews chapter 11.

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Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

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Does that mean that anything that I am assured of, that I am convicted of, is faith?

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What is true biblical faith? I once heard a brother say, reading from this passage in Hebrews 11, that it is not this.

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It is not that I can climb to the highest point of Capilano Christian Assembly where we meet.

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And standing at the pinnacle of the building, I can say, I have the assurance that I can fly.

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Unaided, without an airplane, without a parachute, without anything else, I am going to step off this building because I have faith,

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I have conviction of things not seen. No one has ever seen this, and I will fly today. Now is that true biblical faith?

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This brother who shared the story, he said, that is a leap into philosophical darkness.

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And faith is not a leap, not a leap into whatever it is that I am convicted of, that I am assured of, that God will give me an island tomorrow, when

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I name it. Then what is faith? We don't have to go there, our brother read it in Hebrews 11, but what we see in Hebrews chapter 11 again and again and again is this.

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It is Abraham believing the promises of God. It is

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Noah believing what God has said and doing something about it. It is all of these men and women throughout all of scripture who have stood on that which

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God has said. And so the first thing we need to understand about the true nature of faith is this.

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True faith is standing upon the word of God. Standing upon the promises of Almighty God.

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True Christian faith is taking all that God has given to us in this book and believing it and staking our lives on it.

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Every promise, every word, every gift is ours, is yes and amen in Jesus Christ and we cling to that truth.

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Deuteronomy 29 .29 is often quoted as speaking to the secret will of God versus the revealed will of God.

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But I want to take it a bit further that it also speaks to what it is that we are to have faith in.

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There, Moses says, the secret things belong to the Lord our God but the things that are revealed belong to us and our children forever that we may do all the words of this law.

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Or if I might add, that we might believe all the words of this book.

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There's an image, a picture of this. A man named George Smith who in the 1730s left his home and went to South Africa and he endured tremendous persecution all the while believing what

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God's word said that if he went out and brought God's word to unknown tribes, to godless people,

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God's word would never return void. He had a promise that he clung to and he was so intensely persecuted that eventually it drove him right out of South Africa.

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He spent seven years there tormented by these people believing that God's word would not return void.

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And by all accounts his mission was a failure. While other missionaries were coming back speaking of stories of tens of thousands of people coming to faith in Christ, George Smith came back to his homeland and said, in my seven years of preaching the gospel one poor woman professed faith in Christ.

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If there was a missions magazine in the 1740s he was not going to be on the cover of missions magazine.

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It was going to be somebody else. But fascinatingly, amazingly, about a hundred years later when the

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South Africans, there was a group of South African Christians who looked back at the founding of the mission that reached them.

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They looked at the history of it and they sought to sum up all of this brief work and calculate how many believers had come to faith through George Smith's ministry.

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Well George Smith shared the gospel with countless people. One person believed. And then through her a whole host of other people believed.

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So that at the end of that 100 years there were 13 ,000 believers in South Africa who could say, praise be to God for George Smith coming with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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That is biblical faith. To see what God has written and to believe it.

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But there's more than just that. There is the object of true faith. We've looked at the nature, let's look at the object of true faith.

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We are not to have faith in our faith. We are not even to have faith in God in a generic sense.

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That even in and of itself is not enough to please God. Now that might sound crazy to you perhaps.

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But I will catechize my children on this all the time and say to them, how must we be saved?

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Actually, I love it that my children come to me now and say, Dad, ask me the questions. Ask me the questions.

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I know exactly what questions they're wanting me to ask. Okay, who made you?

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God made me. Have you sinned against God? Yes, I have sinned against God. What is our punishment for sin?

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Well, our punishment for sin is hell. It's an eternal separation from that God.

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And then how can we be saved? And they know that if they say,

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I need to believe in God, they're going to get gently corrected. Believe in God who?

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Believe in God the Son, Jesus Christ, who is the propitiation for my sins.

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I love what one Bible dictionary says. It says, faith is the attitude whereby a man abandons all reliance in his own efforts to obtain salvation, be it his deeds of piety, of ethical goodness, or anything else.

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It is the attitude of complete trust in Christ, of reliance on Him alone, for all that salvation means.

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Now Shane, you might ask, is this true? Can this be true? Let me show you what

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Paul says in verse 15. I heard of your faith. But does he stop there?

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I heard of your faith, period. But he says, but I have heard, because I have heard of your faith, in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. If any of us are to have a pleasing, praiseworthy, true, faithful faith in Jesus Christ, or faith at all, it must be a faith in Jesus Christ.

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And a faith that acknowledges the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It is not a mere faith in the details of the

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Gospel, even. But it is a faith in the person of the

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Gospel. And a faith that submits to the person of that Gospel.

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This might surprise you, but in our Bibles, if we were to go through our New Testaments and look for the word

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Savior, as it describes Jesus, as it is attributed to Jesus, how many instances would we find?

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If we were to look through the whole of the New Testament, Jesus is referred to Savior just over 20 times.

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But if we were to look for that same equation, but instead of Savior, we were to look at Lord.

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I did this this week. Jesus is called Lord in the New Testament over 600 times.

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For every one time that he is Savior, he is 20 times

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Lord. He is both Savior and Lord. And we must come to him for our saving.

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And we must come to him for his mastering over us. That is faith that pleases

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God. And let me talk about then how we see an increase still to this true faith.

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There's a story about an old man that I believe it was

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George Whitefield had communed with. And there was this group of Christian men who were around and one of the young men remarked, it was actually

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Whitefield, to the older man. He said, you are the oldest man among us. Do you not rejoice to think that your time is so near at hand when you will be called home?

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And the old man replied, I love this. May this be our spirit whether we are 20 or 89.

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What a random number. My business is to live as long as I can and as well as I can and to serve my master as faithfully as I can until he shall think proper to call me home.

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Resolved to be more faithful still. What a peculiar wisdom that is seen in this comment and how few there are who think this way.

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Many people view faith, faith in God and faith in Jesus Christ, faith in the promises of God and submission to the

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Lordship of Christ as one dimensional. As if it were a dichotomy, it's a toggle switch, it's on or it's off.

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I have faith or I don't have faith. But that is not at all the way Scripture views faith.

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But in fact, faith can be qualified and quantified. That people can have a strong faith and they can have a weak faith.

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Romans 14, 1, Paul says, As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him not to quarrel over opinions.

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Meanwhile, on the strong side of the equation, Proverbs 3 and verse 5,

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Trust in the Lord and then it qualifies it with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding.

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In 1 Corinthians 16 and verse 13, Be watchful, stand firm in the faith.

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Act like men, be strong, let all that you do be done in love.

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Here we see faith and love paired. We are commanded in Scripture to seek a more firm, established, resolute faith.

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And brethren, let me just give us a couple of quick pointers on how we can find that increase in our faith.

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We see in Scripture that those who had a weak faith prayed for a stronger faith.

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In Mark chapter 9 and verse 23 through 25, Jesus said, a man said,

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If you can heal, and Jesus said, If you can heal, all things are possible for one who believes.

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Immediately after the father of the child cried out and said, That I believe, help my unbelief.

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Let me ask us, how many of us are praying that the Lord would increase our faith? We might pray that the

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Lord would increase our love, that He would increase our holiness, but how many of us are asking, and I would suggest you begin today if you are not,

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Lord increase my faith. That it would be unshakable.

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More than that, we can study to increase our faith. It's been said that our faith will grow in direct proportion to the object of that faith.

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Meaning that if we have a small view of God, or a small view of Christ, then we ought to expect that we will have a small faith in that object.

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But the more that we study that object, that object becomes big, and great, and strong, and stable, and immovable, the greater our faith will be in that object.

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And this is, Charles Leiter has a good picture of this that I'm going to add to a little bit, that if I were to put a blindfold over your eyes and say,

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I'm going to pick on you Steve. Steve, boy oh boy, do we have a challenge for you today. We're going to blindfold you, and I'm going to allow you to walk alone across a bridge.

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And you do not know the condition of that bridge. It could have been, for all you know, a bridge made out of popsicle sticks by my children this weekend.

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And by the way, it's spanning the Grand Canyon. Or, I could say to Steve, Steve, I'm going to cover your eyes, and you do not know the strength of this bridge, and yet I know in my own mind that he is going across the most technologically advanced, the strongest, the most stable bridge that has ever been built.

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Well Steve, if he thinks, if he believes in his mind that it is a bridge made out of popsicle sticks, when he comes onto that bridge, because he has faith in my care for him, he knows that I love him, and he trusts in me, perhaps he would shuffle onto that bridge, trepidatiously, not wondering if it's going to break beneath his feet.

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But this is the thing. Whether Steve walks onto that bridge confidently or trepidatiously, it has no bearing on the strength of that bridge.

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But if I were to take that blindfold off and show Steve, look, behold, the biggest, the best bridge that has ever been built.

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He can walk across that bridge with great confidence. He can drive his whole family across that bridge.

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Why? Because he knows the strength of the bridge. And if we are going to have a strong faith in the

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Lord, the reason why so many of us have a weak faith is because we have a weak and feeble view of God.

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But if we have a strong, assured, confident sense of who God is, then that will most certainly strengthen our faith.

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And might I say, we can exercise faith. We go to the gym to exercise our muscles, trusting that they will get bigger.

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We do a whole host of things, exercising language and exercising our minds to see them expand.

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Well, the same is true of faith. In John 4, verse 1, it says, Let not your hearts be troubled.

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Believe in God, Christ said. Believe also in Me. And so we can come to places where our hearts and our minds are troubled and we can say,

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The Lord has commanded me to believe in Him. Not that He will let me fly off the roof of Capilano Christian Assembly, but that I can believe what the

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God of the universe has said in His inerrant Word. Now, we are justified by faith alone, but never by faith that is alone.

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And so we see that Paul not only commends them, not only gives thanks for their faith, a faith that we ought to commend if we are to hear those words,

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Well done, my good and faithful servant. But he not only gives thanks for that, but for this, he says, for your love toward all the saints.

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Not only did Paul receive a report about the Ephesians' faith in Jesus, but he received a report about their love for all the saints.

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And I could not imagine a higher commendation. To put ourselves back in the shoes of that person, hearing a report from Grace Fellowship Church, their faith is stable and steadfast.

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They love the Lord Jesus Christ. And brother, you would not believe their love for each other.

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To have faith in Christ is to be a Christian. But to love others in the light of that faith is to prove that you are a

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Christian. Oh, how many of us have such a poor witness of our faith in Christ because there is such little love in our lives?

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I fear that the church at large not only has a crisis of faith, but also a crisis of love.

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Not only do many not know what true faith is, but many do not know what true love is.

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And the reason for that is because we have been sold a false bill of goods. And those who have professed the name of Christ, oftentimes have been instructed on love, the nature of love, more by Hollywood movies than by the pages of Scripture.

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And because we take our cues from the culture and the world rather than from the word, most of what many

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Christians call love today is mere sentimentalism. Oh, I feel in love with you today.

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Oh, I want to do good because I feel like it now. Or I want to withhold doing good and demonstrating love because I do not feel like it now.

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Many Christians do not possess the kind of love that Scripture describes that is a counter -cultural, costly love that is rooted, anchored in, built upon the person and work of Jesus Christ.

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Many of us in this room, brethren, I love you, I know you, I know myself, myself included, many of us have a fickle and a shallow love.

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Oh, that God would give us a truer and a higher and a biblical view of love.

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And so what is the nature of true love? Well, first of all, true love is not a feeling.

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True love is not something we do when we feel like it or refrain from doing when we don't feel like it.

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But true love finds its root in the one who is himself love.

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That to love others, to love God, to love neighbor, to love the saints is to take our cues from God.

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And therefore we understand that to love one another is not something we do because we feel like it.

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But it's something we do because we have been commanded to do it and because God who is himself love has put that love in our hearts through the

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Holy Spirit. In Mark 12 and verse 30 it says, And you shall love the Lord your

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God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the second.

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The second is this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself for there is no commandment greater than these.

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How many of us would have better marriages, better friendships, better testimony to the world if we loved the way that Christ loved?

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An obedient, God -rooted love. And we've heard it read at weddings all over the place, but 1

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Corinthians 13 gives us a bit of a recipe as to what that love is. Turn there with me just so we can look at it together.

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Paul speaking to the Corinthians is speaking about the essence, the necessity of love.

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And I fear, even in our circles, churches that have a high view of God and who desire to hold right doctrine,

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I fear that there are many churches who have all of these things and yet are noisy gongs and clanging cymbals because they have not biblical love.

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He says, if I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, in verse 1, but have not love,

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I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, see with me here, that it's faith and then love.

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But have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love,

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I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast.

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It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful.

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It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

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If I were to send you with a homework assignment this week or for the next month, memorize one or two verses, one verse a day, or if you don't have a good memory, one or two verses a week and memorize 1

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Corinthians 13, verses one through seven, and you will almost invariably find that as you are being impatient, as you are being rude, love is patient.

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The Holy Spirit will bring it into your mind. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast.

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It is not arrogant or rude. We must take our cues on biblical love from the

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Bible. What would the church accomplish?

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What would this church accomplish in the world if we sought to say,

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I am going to conform every aspect of my personality and of my affections and of my love according to the scriptures?

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Brethren, this is our standard and yet most of us do not know it. We never think about it, but we need it.

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Love itself becomes a test of our salvation. In 1 John 3, in verse 14,

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John says, we know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers.

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Whoever does not love abides in death. R .C.

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Sproul says, the most significant manifestation of true love, sorry, of true faith, I always do this,

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I always get these quotes wrong. The most significant manifestation of true faith is love.

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The true fruit of authentic faith is always love and a biblical love.

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Faith and love, MacArthur writes, must be kept in balance. Many monks, hermits, and countless others throughout the history of the church have endeavored to keep their faith pure, but have not reached out to others in love as the

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Lord commands every believer to do. They often, and this is Christian Twitter here, they often become heresy hunters, eager to tear down what is wrong, but doing little to build up what is good, full of criticism, but deficient in love.

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Let this not be our church. Who is to be the object of our true love?

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Christ said in John 13, 34, a new commandment I give you, that you love one another.

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Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. And Christ, or John, inspired by the

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Holy Spirit in 1 John 3, 16, tells us how we are to love one another. By this we know, love, that He laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.

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But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does

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God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth.

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We're commanded to love. We're commanded to have a biblical love, and we're commanded to love each other in deed and in truth.

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Not simply in word and in talk. I love that this church is so vocal in our love for one another.

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And let me just encourage us a little bit further, that we would not only be vocal in our love for each other, but active, deedful, in our love for one another.

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And there's this sweet word. It is a sweet word in verse 15.

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Your love toward all the saints.

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How easy it is to love people who are like us. How easy it is to love people who have common interests, who think the way we do, who are not socially awkward.

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And it is wonderful that the Lord saw fit to include that word all.

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In Greek, we memorize this expression, pas pantapan, which means every or all.

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That is the word used here. Every Christian in the assembly. All the Christians in the assembly.

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There's something that we talk about in our institute classes. We look at Acts chapter 20, in verse 28, and how the elder is to interact with all of the

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Christians in the flock. Where Paul said to the Ephesian elders, interestingly enough, the Ephesians, pay careful attention to yourself and all the flock in which the

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Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.

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The idea is this. Pastors, elders, shepherds, every single last one of the flock has been bought by the precious blood of Christ.

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They are dear to him. Christ paid for them with his own life on that cross.

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Therefore, pay careful attention to all the flock.

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The same is true, not just elders to Christians, not the elders to the flock, the under shepherds to the sheep, but sheep to sheep we are commanded to love all.

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And so what that means, practically, is I know that we all want to hang out with Ezra after the service.

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But we can't. We have to direct our attention to every member of the flock.

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And so if there's one person that we see sitting alone, we say the Lord has commanded me to love all of the saints.

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To call that saint that I have not spoken to and yet I know that they are ill, I will call them and I will love them.

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Why? Because they are part of the all. And that is how the world will know that we are his disciples.

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By our love for one another, all of the one another's. And when love,

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Calvin says, is properly regulated, it begins with the saints and afterward it extends to all others.

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Galatians 6 says that we are to do good to everyone, especially those who are of the household of faith.

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But once we've done good to the household of faith, it moves beyond the household of faith. From the household of faith to the neighbors, and then if I can keep quoting

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Calvin just a moment further, he says, our love must have a view to God. So the nearer any man approaches

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God, the stronger unquestionably must be his claim for our love. So that we are so filled with love for each other that it expands over and over and over, even so that God himself is loved through our loving of one another.

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In fact, that is one of the ways that scripture says we demonstrate our love for God. In 1

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John 4, 20, if anyone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he does not know he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love

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God whom he has not seen. And so brethren, let's pursue an increase of that love.

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Our love, like almost everything else in our lives, is in a continuous state of flux.

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It is going up or it is going down. It almost is never just in maintenance.

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It is impossible, let me convince you of this, it is impossible to coast in loving.

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You cannot remain in neutral and be increasing in love. You are rolling backwards down the hill.

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So we must pursue an increase in this true love. And we see a cautionary tale in Revelation chapter 2, in verse 2.

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This church, it is wonderful the way God's word is just weaved together like this.

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This church that was so excelling in their love for each other.

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By Revelation chapter 2, just a few years later, the Lord Jesus in his speaking to the

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Ephesian church, he says this, I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name's sake and you have not grown weary but I have this against you that you have abandoned the love that you had at first.

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One man says, nothing is more dangerous than to be satisfied with that measure of spiritual benefit that we have already obtained.

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Whatever may be the height of our attainments, let them be always accompanied by something higher still.

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And so let me exhort you to just as I said with faith, to pray for more love.

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Oh Lord increase my love for your people. To study love.

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To practice love. I'll end with an illustration on this point.

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This is the last thing I will say. There was a man named

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Henry Morehouse who was a young preacher. He became a great sanctifying influence on the 19th century evangelist

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Dwight L. Moody. And Morehouse, who was a British itinerant preacher, he was well known for studying a subject, so you'd find a subject, he would study it from Genesis to Revelation and then he would preach on that subject from the whole of scripture.

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Fascinating. Everything he did was a systematic theology on that particular topic. And of all the subjects that Morehouse loved studying and preaching on, his favorite text was

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John 3 .16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life.

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And as he traveled from church to church to church preaching from the scriptures, eventually he found himself in America preaching at Dwight L.

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Moody's church in Chicago. And interestingly enough, there was an odd dynamic. D. L. Moody didn't really like Morehouse and yet he allowed him to preach.

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Maybe what a wonderful testimony that is of preserving unity, of a desire to pursue unity.

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And there he preached for seven consecutive days in D.

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L. Moody's church on John 3 .16. Now you might say, Shane, you've preached on these two verses long enough for me.

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Well, he preached seven consecutive days on John 3 .16. And covering the whole scope of the

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Bible from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, he took Moody's church on a stunning exposition of God's perfect love.

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Everything that Morehouse said was saturated in the Bible. It was Bible verse after Bible verse after Bible verse on God's love.

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Even D. L. Moody, who wasn't that fond of Morehouse at that time, said he could not hold back the tears as he listened to Morehouse hammer away verse after verse from Scripture on God's love for lost sinners displayed in Christ's death.

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And up until that point, interestingly enough, Moody had only ever really preached on divine judgment for sinners.

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He'd never really highlighted God's love. It was a justice transaction and it's a forensic atonement.

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And there was no emphasis on God's love. Eventually, what D. L. Moody did, he was so struck by Morehouse's ministry that in approaching him,

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Morehouse said, you need to go study this for yourself. And Moody, taking up the topic of love, he said this, studying love.

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I took up that word love and I do not know how many weeks I spent in studying the passage in which it occurs, the passages in which it occurs, till at last

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I could not help loving people. I've been feeding on love so long that I was anxious to do everybody good whom

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I came in contact with. I got full of love. It ran out of my fingers.

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You take out the subject of love in the Bible and you will get so full of it that all you have got to do is open your lips and a flood of love, of the love of God, flows up upon the meeting.

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There's no use in trying to do church work, he says, without love. A doctor, a lawyer, may do good work without love, but God's work cannot be done without love.

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He studied love so much, he was so full of it, he opened his mouth and out came love.

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And Henry Morehouse, such a beautiful picture, just a few years later, found himself on his deathbed.

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He was 40 years old, a young man still dying. And the man said to him, you know, if God could raise you up again just for one time more, what would you do?

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And he said, I should like to preach more of the text, for God so loved the world.

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But because he was so ill, Morehouse died and his family had on his tombstone placed

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John 316. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.

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Brethren, I ask you, is your love for Christ and the saints more like Morehouse, or more like the

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Ephesians of Revelation 2? The Lord desires, the

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Lord commands us, the Lord is pleased with us when our lives are characterized by these things, faith in the

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Lord Jesus and love for the saints. Let's ask for his help to do that.

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Thank you for listening to another sermon from Grace Fellowship Church. If you would like to keep up with us, you can find us at Facebook at Grace Fellowship Church, or our

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Instagram at gracechurch, Y -E -G, all one word. Finally, you can visit us at our website graceedmonton .ca.