{"id":1572,"date":"2010-01-01T12:53:16","date_gmt":"2010-01-01T20:53:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2010\/01\/01\/persevering-faith\/"},"modified":"2010-01-01T12:53:16","modified_gmt":"2010-01-01T20:53:16","slug":"persevering-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2010\/01\/01\/persevering-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"persevering faith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the interminable theological debates is the source of faith. Some insist that faith is given by God. Others insist that faith is what a man does himself when he believes. I doubt very much that a blog post by me will bring this debate to any sort of resolution.<\/p>\n<p>What I want to talk about, though, is something I heard in a recorded sermon preached by a friend of mine. He said something like this (loose paraphrase from memory):<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#222222\" face=\"Verdana\">God gives you faith. He gives it to you in such a way that genuine Christian faith will lead you to persevere in that faith. They won\u2019t be able to burn it out of you, you will persevere to the end.<\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><font color=\"#222222\" face=\"Verdana\">And such like\u2026<\/font><\/p>\n<p>Well. This raises some questions in my mind:<\/p>\n<p> <!--more-->  <\/p>\n<p><strong>What about Sir Thomas More?<\/strong> He was beheaded by Henry VIII because he refused to sign the Act of Supremacy 1534 which made Henry the head of the Church of England. He was a vicious opponent of William Tyndale, stoutly defending the doctrine of salvation by works as opposed to Tyndale\u2019s doctrine of salvation by faith alone. (Ironically, Tyndale was martyred shortly after More was beheaded.)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Did Thomas More have God-given faith? (I would suspect not.)<\/li>\n<li>If not, why was he able to persevere to the end in his non-God-given something-or-other?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What about historical persecution of the Jews?<\/strong> The sons of Abraham have endured many persecutions in many lands in the last 2000 years. Many have been put to death by sword, fire, gas, or almost any other means. Yet they persisted in their refusal to acknowledge Christ as the Messiah and died in their unbelief.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The belief system of these Jews, was it God-given?<\/li>\n<li>Or perhaps you wish to argue that God gave the Jews blindness (see Rm 9-11)?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What about thousands (millions?) of others who have died in the name of Allah, Buddha, Krishna, etc.?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How did they get their persevering faith?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So you see, I am bothered by my friend\u2019s statement. I think he is overstating the case. I am not making an argument one way or another about the source of faith. But the many men who have died for other religions and causes are a testament against the way he presented it. People will burn persisting in error as much as they will persisting in the truth.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border-bottom: 0px; border-left: 0px; display: inline; border-top: 0px; border-right: 0px\" title=\"don_sig2\" border=\"0\" alt=\"don_sig2\" src=\"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/01\/don_sig2.png\" width=\"150\" height=\"50\" \/> <\/p>\n<p>P. S. Regardless of the <em>source<\/em> of faith, it is an unfair accusation on the part of some to say that if man is the source of his own faith he therefore believes in salvation by works. Paul quite clearly states that faith is not a work: Rm 4.5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the interminable theological debates is the source of faith. Some insist that faith is given by God. Others insist that faith is what a man does himself when he believes. I doubt very much that a blog post by me will bring this debate to any sort of resolution. What I want to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-pm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}