What is Real Faith — Steve Gallagher

Alright, I really appreciate, well, what Jordan shared, also what Nate shared as well, his prayer. I went over and showed Jordan. This is my conclusion of this great sermon you're about to hear. Right at the bottom.

Can anybody read that? Come on, Carla, squint. It says, let go. And you know, I love speaking at Pure Life Ministries. I wish that every time I went out to speak, I could have one of these guys introduce me because I know the Holy Spirit is going to speak through them and that's going to be the right kind of introduction instead of this flowery bunch of flattery that I usually get laden with before I get up to speak, you know, out there in different places.

Faith Is Centered on Jesus Christ, Not Self

It's a blessing. I want to talk this morning about faith. Real faith, sincere faith, living faith, saving faith. And you know, before I get into that, because it's a very personal thing I want to talk about, I want to say a couple of things that faith is not.

Just a couple of negatives about it. I want to start by saying you are not the center of the Christian faith and I'm not. Jesus Christ is the center of the Christian faith. Now, it may seem ridiculous to make a statement like that, but the truth is, guys, and I say it about myself 30 years ago, whatever.

The truth is that your faith has been almost entirely, if not entirely, on yourself. You have not had faith in God or Jesus Christ. You have had faith in yourself, in your mind, in your heart, in your inside world.

You have been huge and God has been tiny, insignificant. That's why you could flout His law and show up, have the audacity to show up in a house of worship and sing praise to Him after what you just did the night before.

Now, I'm not here to beat up on you. This is actually going to be a very encouraging message today. I just want to set you straight before we get started, okay? Plus I have to make the wives happy back there, so.

Just so you guys know, we take care of business here. You're not the center of the Christian faith. Something radical must change inside you. You know, part of the problem is that we come out of a religious system that has become entrenched in our culture, and it's very similar to what Jesus faced 2 ,000 years ago.

He came up through a religious culture that had become built on the traditions of man and had lost the reality of God. And by and large, that's what the case is in the American church today. By and large.

Not totally. There's godly people out there, but by and large. The Christian faith is not a creed or a doctrinal system. Some of you need to hear that. It's not a list of do's and don'ts. It's not being part of the evangelical movement.

It's not being perfect in church attendance or something. The Christian faith is a vital element in a person's relationship with Jesus Christ. That's what faith is. A vital element. That's what I'm hoping to explain a little bit today.

The Righteousness of God Revealed in the Gospel

All right, let's open up to Romans chapter 1. Last month, I spoke on verse 16, and at this rate, about 20, 37 or so, I'll get to the end of the book. But I'm going to speak on verse 17 this morning. Verse 16 was what?

It was about the gospel. Remember that? We talked about the gospel of Jesus Christ. And today, we want to look at verse 17, and I'm going to just kind of work my way through this verse. This little verse, like I said about the other verse, 16, is one of the most profound, meaningful, powerful statements in the Word of God.

And verse 17 is right there with it. They're covering two different things, but yet the same thing. So I'm not going to just barge through it like some preachers would, maybe. I'm going to work my way through it.

So look at the first part of this verse. And the context, of course, is the gospel. For in it, the gospel, the message about what God has brought to this earth, for in it, and I'm going to include a word here, is the righteousness of God.

In the gospel, in the Word of God, you will find from beginning to end, all the way through this book, a description, a definition of the righteous character of God. It's constantly being presented to you, His goodness, His holiness, His love, His compassion, His humility, His faithfulness, who He is.

That's what the Christian faith is all tied to, who this person is. And our relationship to that person. Now if Paul had just said that the gospel presents the righteousness of God, if it just ended there, that statement, then some people could think that, well, then all I've got to do is just read the Bible, and if I keep reading the Bible, then I will have this saving faith, but it doesn't end there.

He says something else here. You know, this is part of the thing with the church today, I guess, is that we have millions upon millions of people who have heard that message of the gospel. You guys heard it, read that message, and at least at some level have believed that message.

But you know something, reading it and mentally accepting it is not the same as taking it into yourself in faith. Jesus ended the Sermon on the Mount with a story about, well, not a story, I mean, He could look out ahead to Judgment Day, and He saw a group of people there on Judgment Day that had done this.

They had bought into the gospel message. They had accepted it. They had assented to it. They believed it in their minds. They believed what the Bible said at some level. But He said, I never knew you.

I never knew you. They had done all these things, but He said, I never knew you. And this is one of the dangers of organized religion, is it's very easy to substitute a living faith, a living relationship with this person, with this religious lifestyle that we have created in America.

Yes, the gospel presents the righteous character of God and everything else, but there's more to it than that. Paul says, for in it, the righteousness of God is revealed. Now this word revealed is apocalyptic.

It's the same Greek word, a different form of apocalypse, apocalypsis, the revelation of Jesus Christ, you know, that last book on the Bible that we always think in terms of end times, that's a revelation, an unveiling of a person before mankind.

That's what this word means. It's an unveiling. And it's saying that the gospel presents the righteous character of God. But not just that, there is a revelation that comes forth to people. But you know, a person can only receive that revelation through the Holy Spirit.

It's not enough to just read about it. There are theologians who are in hell right now, today. Jesus said, I praise thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and intelligent and didst reveal them to babes.

You know, the Jewish scholars just couldn't figure it out. They were so locked into their religious system, they were blind. God himself was standing in front of them and they were completely blind to it.

Because they were so locked in to their little box, their religious box. They had all the doctrines figured out, all the orthodoxy beliefs and all of it. It was all laid out and they lived their life in that little confines of that box.

They wanted it to be that way. And they were blind to who was standing before them. Jesus told them, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life. But they testify of me.

This is just a means to an end. It's not the end itself. So there's a revelation that comes forth. It must come forth. A spiritual impartation must come forth. So let's go back to our verse here. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.

Faith Receives God’s Revelation

Paul is saying that you receive that revelation through faith. Here's how I pictured it. God reaches down from heaven. He looks in a person's heart. He sees that that person would be open to receive what he's offering.

So he reaches down from heaven and presents a revelation of who he is to the person. And that person reaches up through faith and appropriates what's being offered. I think that's right. I'm not going to make any new doctrine out of it or formula or whatever.

But I think that's right. I think that's the way it is. Someone said that faith has absolutely nothing to do with earning the free gift of God. It has everything to do with taking it. And it's true. So, anyway, this kind of explains maybe the way it happens in a person's heart.

But, you know, I want to talk about what is faith. At least touch on it. Some people say that Hebrews 11 .1 is the definition of faith. And it is a partial definition for sure. You know, faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

It is at least a partial definition. I don't believe it's the whole thing. Let me put it this way. If I was trying to explain, you know, to some third-worlder, let's say I was down in Peru or somewhere, and they're not watching television, so they're not watching American television, so they don't know anything really about America.

And if I was going to try to explain to them what it's like to live in America, do you think I could do it in one sentence? No. I would have to tell them all kinds of different things about, you know, some of the great cities and the road system and the government, how it's run, and different personalities and people and the daily lifestyle.

I mean, there would be so much. It would take a book to describe what it's like to live in America, wouldn't it? And that's the way it is. You can't sum up the Christian faith and what it means to walk by faith by one statement.

It's not going to happen. It is a vast subject that requires an entire book to explain it. And that's what the Bible is. You know, it's a definition of it. It's a description of what it means to live by faith.

All right, so, you know, and actually, I mean, I'm going to, I want to just touch on a couple of the different aspects of faith, but even this is not by any stretch a definitive, you know, explanation of what the Christian faith is.

I'm just going to touch on a couple of things that I have seen down through the years and have come to believe. So, the first one is this. Faith is simply trust in God. It's simply trust in God. In Romans 10, Paul says, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ.

We desperately need the Word of God to explain what the Lord is like. I mean, you know, I'm a total advocate of spending time in the Word, of course. We need to spend a lot of time in the Word. We need to be in the atmosphere of the Word of God.

We spend too much time in the atmosphere of this unbelieving, mocking culture. We need to spend a lot more time in the Word of God and let it shape our thinking. And, you know, if you sincerely want to know the Lord, if you really want to know Him, He will give you a revelation of Himself.

It's His desire to do that. It's not like He's holding back or He's stingy or unwilling or whatever. He wants to reveal Himself to you. He desires to do that, strongly desires. The reason why is because He wants us in a relationship with Himself.

It's the passion of His heart. It's the passion of His heart. He wants us to trust Him. He wants us to trust Him, to rely on Him, to depend upon Him, to have a real relationship with Him, not just some religious thing, you know, but a real relationship with Him.

That is what He desires. I'll say it a little bit later. I'll wait. But I'll tell you this, that it means everything to the Lord that we trust Him. It means everything to the Lord that we trust Him. And, you know, I can trust the Lord.

I have, well, it's been 46 years since I came to the Lord. Maybe longer than that. I think I came forward in church. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church. And I think I went forward at the altar at 12 years old.

But it was when I was 16 and I was in real trouble. That's when I came to the Lord. And I, you know, did my best as an immature teenager for a couple of years to follow the Lord. But, you know, I ended up losing it all and backsliding and so on.

But I have come to trust the Lord over the years. Let me illustrate what I'm trying to say this way. I'll talk about my wife, who I've known for almost 38 years. So not quite as long as I've known the Lord.

I can tell you that I have total trust in my wife. I don't care what the enemy would throw at us. You know, there is nothing he could do that would get my wife to be unfaithful to me. Nothing. I don't care if, you know, if I was gone for a year.

You know, Nate and I are going to Europe here in a couple of weeks. And we'll be gone for several weeks. It doesn't matter. You know, and if someone wrote me an email back here and said, you know, I saw your wife out with some guy or something.

I don't know who he was. There was just not even a possibility in my mind. Not even the slightest possibility in my mind that she could be up to no good. I know my wife. We have been through thick and thin together.

We know each other intimately. We are so close to each other. We have a very, very close relationship. And I have complete trust in her. And that's the way it is with the Lord. He has proven himself to me over the years.

Time and time again, he's proven his faithfulness to me. Through so many different things that this ministry has gone through, I've gone through personally, the Lord just has over and over amazed me with his goodness and his faithfulness.

Trust me? If my trust is dependent on me, I am the most hopeless of all people. Because I can't, you know, I don't have it. I know I don't. But I know who he is. And I know, I know, I know whom I have believed in.

I know whom I have believed in. Now, this is a big thing. Because the devil is in the business of maligning God's character. And, you know, one of the things we really try to hammer home with you guys, and tonight you'll be in another mercy study, reading that crazy green book with all the capital letters.

What's up with that? I mean, just like you're reading a sentence and all of a sudden they're all caps. Why? I don't know. But I can tell you this. That man had a knowledge of God that I still have not attained to.

He walked with the Lord. And what he came to understand about God is that God is merciful. God is good. God is a God of love. And that's one of the things you guys tremendously need to come into awareness of.

A much greater awareness of. He is actually better than you. Think on that for a while, Cordero. That is amazing, isn't it? Think on that. He's actually better than you. Ever since the garden, the devil has been maligning the character of God, hasn't he?

And you have no idea how much some foul spirit is in your ear, planting doubting thoughts, critical thoughts, self-glorifying thoughts, thoughts that will get you to pump up in yourself so God will be tiny in your viewpoint.

There's always some devil who will gladly flatter you. And some of you guys walk around here all swollen up, you know, just full of yourself. And little by little, if the Lord has His way anyway, you're just going to deflate down to...

You see what's left of a rubber band, you know, I mean a balloon when there's no air in it. That's what you should look like when you leave here. Come in here all swollen, you know. I'm the greatest. This place, I'm going to ace this place.

Okay, hotshot, we'll see. We'll see. And little by little, the Lord starts in on you and starts showing you what you're really like and starts deflating you. And you know what happens? You come down and God becomes bigger.

That's faith. That's what you guys need, a great sight of a great God. Not a great you. You're really not that great. And neither am I. So we have this devil who's constantly maligning God's character and we have to have it as a conviction inside of us.

No, you filthy liar. God is not like that. And I'm not like what you're saying. You've got to have that conviction inside you so when those devils come with their blasphemous lies, you'll just dismiss them.

They won't even have any possibility of being able to latch into your thinking. We're also surrounded by a world that mocks at God and the things of God. And you know, some of you guys, when you leave here, you need, not some of you, every one of you, you wives too, we all as believers, we need to guard ourselves from the lies of the enemy through the world's system.

The news and the Internet and entertainment, it's all meant to diminish your trust and awareness and sight of God. That's the purpose behind all of it. So there's this whole world, and I have said this before, it actually was a real, kind of a revelation to me one time.

A few years ago, I was really doing a deep Bible study on faith and I just had this picture in my mind of like an auditorium with thousands of people in it and they're all raging against God and spewing their blasphemous thoughts about the Lord and all the stuff they want to believe about God so they can justify their sin and their love of darkness and just all this stuff going forth.

And I just had this picture in my mind that I would stand up in the middle of that crowd and I would say, I believe in you, Lord. I believe in the statements about you and the word of God. I believe in your promises.

I believe in your warnings. I believe in you as a person. And I have done that. Oprah Winfrey show was just one time of many where I had to face down that scoffing spirit. But you've got to have it inside you before you will react that way.

It's got to be a firm conviction inside you that God is good and He's merciful and it doesn't matter what the devil says about Him or what the world says about Him. So that's where it all begins is trust in the Lord.

Living Faith Produces Obedient Action

And number two, faith is the lifestyle that comes forth from that trust. Let's go back to our verse here. For in it, the gospel, the righteousness of God, is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the righteous man shall live by faith.

It doesn't stop in your mind. I don't know where people get these crazy notions at. You see how the enemy worms his way into the theology of the church and somehow the enemy has wormed his way in and twisted things a little bit here, a little bit there, and somehow has made it to where it's almost like the accepted belief system in the American church that it's the only thing that matters is what you believe and the way you live doesn't really matter because you're a child of God and you are saved and His grace covers you no matter what you do.

That is a lie. If you have saving faith, it's going to come out in the way you live your life. It's not enough to just have a big proclamation that you're a Christian. You've got to back it up with the way you live.

And if it's real to you, it will come out in your life. It's not that you have to work it up or something. It's just if it's real to you, it's going to come out. Romans 10, Paul said, For with the heart a person believes, yes, that's right, resulting in righteousness.

Now, go back a few months before you came here and if someone followed you around and watched the way you live your life and could zero in on your thoughts, would they be able to say, that guy really believes in God.

I can look at the way he's living his life, the way he thinks, the way he views stuff. That's a man who really believes in the Lord. Me too. The same with me. I'm no better than any of you. Worse by far than most.

Faith is an act of the will. Actually, living by faith is really just a matter of a lot of decisions. Throughout our daily life, we are constantly making decisions, decisions, decisions. Every day we're making choices, deciding something or other.

Faith is a decision. It's a decision to trust God, to obey God, to continue pursuing a meaningful relationship with Him, to live your life for Him, to do whatever He tells you to do no matter how crazy it sounds.

I said before that I've been around the Lord one way or another 46 years. And then after a couple of years, my faith was shipwrecked for 10 years of sin and rebellion, horrible darkness. But 34 years ago in Los Angeles, Kathy and I made a decision to give our lives to God and to obey Him.

33 years ago, I decided to quit my job on the L .A. Sheriff's Department and go to Bible school. 32 years ago, Kathy and I made a decision that we needed to start getting up and spending time with the Lord every morning.

No one had to teach us that. It was the Lord that spoke to us. 30 years ago, we made a decision to start a ministry to help men in sexual sin. 27 years ago, we made a decision to move to Kentucky and open our house to men in sexual sin.

Kathy left her dream job to do that. 25 years ago, we made a decision to take a huge gamble and buy this property. We were so poor you would not believe it. It was totally an act of faith to buy this property.

There was no way. Here's one of the problems, guys. You look at your past and you see failure, failure, a lifetime of failure, but I want you to just forget about that. Other than to repent, you repent of it, you renounce it, you make a consecration to walk away from it, then forget about it because God's got a new life for you.

One of the things that kills faith is to look at things through the natural mind. And there was no way. If you could have seen the situation here 20-some years ago when we bought this property, and we weren't known around the country.

There was no way we had the money to buy this property, but I felt like God said to do it, and we did it. And here we are. Paid off, all of it. All of our properties are paid off. Every building you see in this place was begun in faith.

Back in the day, the first building project was the addition to the main house. I mean, to scrounge together a couple of hundred bucks to pay our bills, we were just happy to do that, but we had to make room because we were getting overwhelmed with need.

And so we just, you know, we don't have the money to do this, but we just got enough money to pour the foundation over there, and then the money came in to pay the bills. And so we got enough money together to get the lumber, and we framed it up, and the money came in to pay the bills.

Money we didn't have, but there it was. And it was that way every single one of these building projects, and not just building projects, but so many other things. This ministry has been operating in the miraculous for 30 years.

Not because we're something, but because we serve a faithful God. You know, every one of those decisions involve risk. Anybody can live by sight, you know. Any unbeliever, any heathen can live his life by sight.

They do live by sight. Anybody can make decisions that contain no risk. I'll put it to you this way. If there isn't risk involved, then you don't have faith. If you're not risking anything, you don't have faith, because if you're going to be a believer, you're going to be taking a huge gamble in life.

Faith Is Strengthened Through Trials

All right, we got to get moving on. Number three, faith is a decision that must be strengthened and deepened. Now, you would think that if God wanted to attract followers, that He would do all kinds of miracles, mighty things, that would just really prove to people that He was there, that He just was a mighty God.

You would think that. And you know, He tried that. The Hebrews were in Egypt. They were in bondage. They were worse than the physical bondage was the spiritual bondage, and people don't usually talk about that, but they were in deep darkness.

And God sends Moses in there, and Moses goes in and tells them, God is going to set you free. And they're just like, yeah, I'm so sure. You know, because why? Because everything was based on what things have been in the past.

And so God just pounds Egypt with the 10 plagues, and then He opens up the Red Sea and takes the people through and swallows up the Pharaoh's army, and then He takes them into the wilderness for a few months of training, and He leads them around by a pillar of fire.

Just imagine, you get up in the morning. Oh, there's the pillar. Oh, the pillar's going south, you know, so you just start following the pillar. I mean, what would that be like? And they were thirsty one day, so Moses just hits a rock and water comes out.

They're hungry, so quails start dropping from the sky, and then He just feeds them manna from the sky every day. And, you know, Korah and his people get rebellious, so the Lord opens up the earth, swallows them up.

These people have witnessed all this stuff within two years. And then the Lord says, okay, we're going into the promised land. They said, well, let's send some spies so we know what we're getting into.

That was not God's idea, that was their idea. That's like the way a lot of ministries are run. So, you know, they go in there, and sure enough, there's giants, there's walled cities. After all they have just experienced?

And the people were so quick to believe the evil report. And you guys have a history of doing that too, believing the evil report. You know, in Hebrews 3 it says they died in unbelief. How tragic and sad all that the Lord did to try to reach them.

You're not going to build your faith by demanding miracles or demanding God prove Himself. It's not going to happen like that. And it's not going to happen in mountaintop experiences. You know, mountaintop experiences are great, they're encouraging, but that's not where your faith is built.

Your faith is built grinding it out in the daily life, down in the valley floor, where you're slogging through swamps and snakes and everything. That's where your faith is built. It's not like we want it to be.

God doesn't build your faith by making it easy to believe Him. He builds it by making it hard to believe Him. You getting that down, Cordero? Okay. What did I say? That was 10 minutes ago. You're not writing fast enough.

You know, it's like, now T .J. will tell you this. If you want to build your body, go downstairs to the, no, you can't go downstairs to the weight room. Because there are male egos in this place that will just explode.

That's why we don't let you do it. But if you were to do it, you don't build your muscles by being nice to them, do you? You go down there and you abuse your muscles. You are literally tearing your muscles when you lift weights.

And when you're done, you're like a dishrag. But that's how you grow stronger, isn't it? And faith is the same thing. That's what the Lord does with us. He doesn't go easy on us. He takes us through increasingly greater challenges to our faith.

What an awesome God. So amazing. James said, I'm going to read this in the Phillips translation. This is your favorite verse. James 1. He says, Because when all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives, my brothers, don't resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends.

Realize that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed, and you will find you have become men of mature character.

That's what God's doing for you. But it takes time. And, you know, I've used the illustration of the boxer. A kid goes into, you know, one of these big boxing gyms, you know, one of the big cities. Let's say a kid goes in there and he tells the trainer, you know, I want to learn how to box.

And so the guy says, all right, well, here, come over here. He puts some gloves on him and takes him to the heavy bag. And he says, go ahead and throw some punches. He just wants to see what the kid's got.

You know, and, of course, the kid just flails away. He's not trained to be a boxer. But this guy is an expert. He's been doing it for 30 years. Hint, hint. He knows what to look for. And, you know, so the kid goes up and he's flailing away.

It looks ridiculous. But the trainer knows what to look for, and he sees in him, you know, he's strong. This kid has got natural strength. He's got coordination. He's fast. So what this guy sees in this kid, even though, I mean, there's no way he could put him in a boxing ring, but he sees potential.

And so what's he do? He starts, he teaches. First thing, right off, your first day, you're just going to stand in front of a mirror and learn how to hold your fist. And you may throw some punches, you know, and how to do that.

You do that for a couple of days. Then you get on the heavy bag and you just throw jabs. And you have to learn how to do it. You have to do it, you know, like the boxers do it. You have to snort. I don't know why they do that, but that's how they do it.

And so, you know, you just spend like several days just doing nothing but... And then after a while, they let you throw two punches, you know, like that. And then after a couple of weeks, then you throw some right crosses and some hooks and some uppercuts.

You learn a few things. And maybe they'll let you get in the little ring there with another guy, you know. And eventually, you get thrown into amateur fighting. And you fight some other guy who doesn't know anything about it.

And so you do it for a while, you know, 20, 30 amateur bouts. And finally, you're ready to go pro. And the first thing they do is they put you in with a club fighter. You know what a club fighter is, right?

Someone who looks like they've been clubbed half to death. This guy's ears are all cauliflower, his nose is all smashed in. He's a terrible fighter, but he likes to fight, you know, so they always use him to...

And then over time, you know, you build up until if you keep winning, eventually you're going to fight for the championship. And that's what the Lord is doing in you. He's not doing it by making it easy on you.

He's not going to baby you. As much as you may want it to be that way, that's not what Christianity looks like. The violent take it by force, right? Peter, after all that Peter had gone through over the years, 30 years in the Christian battle, he wrote this, In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold, which is perishable, even though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

That's what it's all about. And that's what I was saying earlier is your faith, what you believe about God, means everything to him. He's not looking for Pharisees. He's not looking for law keepers. He's not looking for people who learn how to do this robotic Christianity.

He's looking for people who will love him and trust him and be in a relationship with him. So we made it to the final page. Faith is trusting God rather than trusting yourself. And the Lord is asking you to entrust your life into his hands.

Surrendering Your Life to God

That's what he's asking of you. You thought you came here just to get some nice little tips on overcoming pornography or something. How pathetic. I told you this place is the greatest bait and switch around.

The Lord fooled you into coming here because he's after something much greater than that. But you know something, guys? You've got to step out in faith. You've got to jump over the cliff with God. And, you know, the whole Christian thing works off of that principle.

God says something, you obey him, and you live your life like that. And you know something? Since the moment you arrived on this property, there has been a loud message going forth that God is going to set you free and give you a new life in Jesus Christ.