Trust God

We must then trust God for His grace – ask Him to forgive us – and He will
We had the sentence of death in ourselves, so that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead. (2 Corinthians 1:9)

Real Faith is Not Blind

Once you have fully opened up to God, it's time to exercise your faith or trust in God.

Many people struggle with the idea of faith, believing it to be what is described as blind faith. However, the bible never speaks in those terms. Instead, it asks us to read the historical record about Jesus Christ, that He claimed to be the Son of God, that he was crucified even though He never did anything wrong, but then He rose again from death.

All these facts are clearly recorded in the bible and are attested to be many other historical records. In fact, there is far more hard evidence about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ than about anyone else from that time.

We are asked to put our trust in this divine person to perform for us what nobody else ever could or has ever claimed to be able to do. Most people who go into hospital for an operation trust their lives to a surgeon, anaesthetist, nurses and other medical staff, most of whom they know nothing at all about. So faith is not all that alien a concept.

Faith is About Submitting to God

You need to ask Jesus Christ, who has already paid the penalty of death for your sin, to forgive you and to take over your life. That means Jesus becoming boss in your life – taking over full authority.

Many people also have difficulty understanding what this means, but anyone who has been in the armed forces, or any kind of employment for that matter, understands fully what it means to submit to the authority of another person, even to the point of dramatically changing the way in which we live our lives.

The major difference with Jesus is that He doesn't take over in order to win human wars or to make himself fat profits or anything like that. His only purpose in taking over our lives is to make us become more like Him – free from wrong conduct, attitudes and aspirations. Instead, He wants our lives to be full of right behaviour and attitudes that please God and help other people.

There's More – There's Power

But this is not merely someone exercising authority in our lives. God also promises that the Holy Spirit (who is also God) will actually take up residence in our lives. You may wonder how that is possible and there is no easy answer to that, but if you have any concept of the human spirit and wonder where that resides in our bodies, the same is true of the Holy Spirit.

The bible tells us that in terms of power and ability, nothing and nobody surpasses the Holy Spirit. It was by the power of the Holy Spirit that God created everything in the first place. It was also by the power of the Holy Spirit that God raised Jesus Christ from death and we know of no other power in heaven or earth that can equal that.

The reason that the Holy Spirit takes up residence in your life is to make all that power available to you to overcome temptations in your life and to begin living in the way God always intended when He first created men and women.