(Clip) Faith Is Not Like Sitting In a Chair!

Some people say, I've heard this, maybe you've heard this too. Faith, faith is like sitting in that chair. You just need confidence to sit down there. It's just the same way you trust that that chair holds you up, you need to trust Christ. Reject that. You know what, that's just not even true. None of you sat down in the chair thinking, oh, you know, oh, I'm sitting in this chair. What does it say here? It says, in hope, he believed against hope. Because he looked at his body and said, my body's as good as dead, I'm 100 years old. You see what this is like? This is like looking at that chair, and the thing is on one leg. And you're like, hope against hope. Nobody sat down in the chair you're in right now and said, you know, hope against hope, I'm going to sit in this chair. That's not it. You know what the reality is? People sit in chairs all the time, and they don't collapse. Human observation tells you, hey, you know, there's sufficient wood there. This is not a matter of faith. It's no more than you get in your car, and you're not walking by faith that it won't blow up on you. You hope it won't blow up on you, but you know they typically don't blow up. I mean, it's a statistical thing. You can hit it with mathematical analysis, that you know what, the likelihood that my chair is going to collapse when I go down after the service to sit down, or the car that whoever takes me home blows up. It just doesn't happen. Well, it could happen, and it does happen. I've seen chairs. But listen, that's not what we're dealing with. We're not talking about some statistical analysis. We're talking about, look, I am faced with something that is going to fail 100% of the time unless God and what he promised comes through. You see where the eyes are? And I'll tell you this, faith, if you really want to bolster that faith, that shield, faith in Scripture is an active thing. Faith, you know what you read about in Romans? The obedience of faith. You know what James said? Faith without works is dead. Here's what I want you to recognize. The more you seek to live a life where you're seeking to do what is humanly impossible, but you've got some promise of God to go on to do this thing. The more you live in that realm, the stronger and broader your shield will be.