The Ingredient Of Faith Series

INTRODUCTION

• SLIDE #1

• READ INGREDIENT LIST??

• When you look at food and drinks, you see that all the items have ingredients. When you put a recipe together, it takes ingredients.

• If you want to make TURTLE COOKIES you will need to ingredients pictured above, although you would substitute sugar for the faith. 

• If you decided in you quest to make the turtle cookies to leave out the flour, you would not have turtle cookies. If you leave out the chocolate chips or caramel bites you would not end up with turtle cookies.

• We are going to spend the next 5 weeks looking at the ingredients needed in order to if you will bake salvation cookies.

• Put another way, we will look at what God’s Word says are the necessary ingredients one must have in order to be saved.

• The question of “What must I do to be saved” is one of the most important things that we can answer for a person. This is a question that we must have a correct biblical answer because it will affect the eternal destiny of other people.

• This question has been asked since Jesus walked the earth. Is salvation something that we earn? Is it something we can buy? Is it something that we can even know if we have it? Can we just say a prayer?

• If you look to the church for the answer to that question, you will receive many answers to that question ranging from, “nothing” to a correct biblical answer. It is so important that as people of God, we give people answers from God’s Word, not the answers of other people.

• Why doesn’t the church have the same answer to the question of receiving salvation? Sometimes it is because we pull passages out of context; sometimes we do not look at all of the other passages on a subject.

• Other times we go to the scriptures with our minds made up and then we try to explain away passages that do not fit our way of thinking.

• Today we are going to examine the ingredient of faith.

• How does faith fit into God’s way of saving man? Is faith all we need? Can we just “claim” to have faith and be in good standing with God?

• Today let us explore that the ingredient of faith is all about and as we examine this ingredient we will see why this ingredient must be in our recipe of salvation.

• SLIDE #2

SERMON

I. What is faith?

• When we look at the ingredients of many of the things we eat, we have no clue what they are. EXAMPLE.

• When it comes to looking at the ingredients for the recipe for salvation it is very important for us to understand what each ingredient is because if we do not know what it is, we will struggle in our quest for Jesus.

• How we answer the question, WHAT IS FAITH, will determine HOW we carry it out in our life. It will also determine what we will and will not do for Jesus.

• If we misunderstand what faith is, then we will misunderstand what God expects from us.

• For many people when they think of the word FAITH, they equate it with the word ACKNOWLEDGE or a weak form of the word BELIEVE.

• In the Bible both faith and believe come from the same root word.

• Is there more to faith than simply acknowledging something to be true?

• SLIDE #3

• A working definition of faith is as follows:

o Faith is whole-soled trust in God’s Word because of the sufficiency of the evidence, which leads to doing what God says.

• Some when they think of faith think that God wants them to take a BLIND LEAP OF FAITH, but this really is not the case. There a leap involved when it comes to faith but it is not BLIND.

• People think that God wants us to take a blind leap of faith to follow Him. That could be the furthest thing from the truth. When Thomas doubted Jesus’ return, Jesus allowed him and the others to examine Him.

• Faith is a “trust” built upon sufficient evidence.

• God gives evidence of Himself through creation and many other ways.

• We can see enough evidence of God to put our trust in Him.

• Just saying we believe in God is not what FAITH is about!

• FAITH INVOLVES A RESPONSE, A CALL TO ACTION.

• Think about a parachute for a moment. You are on a plane that is going down, you are with experienced skydivers and there is an extra parachute. You KNOW a parachute will keep you from crashing with the plane and going out a legend.