God Will Save

(Our Absolute Hope for Justice Immutably Preserved in Christ)

Walkersville Christian Fellowship

8.04.2002 - Gary L. Cox

Isaiah 50.  Verse 1, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of My creditors is it to whom I have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities, ye have sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away. Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? when I called, was there none to answer? Is My hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or have I no power to deliver? behold, at My rebuke I dry up the sea, and I make rivers a wilderness: their fish stinketh, because there is no water, and dieth for thirst. I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering.’ The Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth us morning by morning, he wakeneth my ear to hear as the learned. The Lord God hath opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back. I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheek to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting. For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. He is near that justifeth me; who will contend with me? let us stand together: who is mine adversary? let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord God will help me; who is he that shall condemn me? lo, they all shall wax old as a garment; the moth shall eat them up. Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God. Behold, all that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand; ye shall lie down in sorrow."

The first three chapters of the book of Revelation present the accurate picture of Jesus Christ today, active in His Church. A picture of great glory and great authority; a picture of ruling in the churches that are on the earth. In chapter 2 and 3 of Revelation we find letters that John wrote directly from Christ to the seven churches in Asia. Those letters were letters of encouragement, letters of promise, letters of correction, and letters of warning. Every letter had a warning that the candlestick, which represented their church before the throne of God, could and indeed would be snuffed out by Christ should they not heed the warning that was brought to them by John.

I have a practical burden for you all individually and that is, “What is your faith really like?” If you look at the preaching of Jesus Christ, it is clearly spoken that there would be two kinds of faith on the earth. There would be a pretend faith. There would be an imitation faith. There would be a kind of faith that was bound up with enthusiasm and excitement when the feel-good aspect of it bringing blessing and purpose would be upon the individual. And then there is another kind of faith which Hebrews call true faith; a faith that passes through the fire and when it is all the way through it still stands. When you look at history and you find a segment of population where actually the whole entire faith of a group of people is totally gone over a period of hundreds and hundreds of years under persecution, you have to ask a question, “Did they really have faith? What did they really have?” It is incredible to me to think that those of us who have tasted the redemption of Jesus Christ, who have known deliverance from the power of sin, that we fall into the trappings of religious expression as a substitute for living the dynamic reality of what our faith is in Jesus Christ and God alone. It is important that we understand that faith, whether we be a small child or whether we be an adult, has the same basic means of operation. Jesus said, “When I come, will I find faith on the earth?” The Bible talks about the time to come in the book of Revelation as a time which would try men’s souls. Jesus said, “Except for the elect’s sake the days would be shortened,” and that even the elect would cave in and give up if it was not for the fact that God Himself intervened and made the burden lighter so that those believers could make it to the end. We need to recognize that Christ is about proving whether we have faith. We have that which we think is faith and all we have is soulish preference and we arrogantly label it “faith” and we unrighteously label it as that which pleases God and it is a lie. And He will prove us and He will find us out. There is a lot of those who say they believe, but, on the truth of the Word of God, what you say means nothing because faith is proven by the manner in which you trust God when there is nothing visible, emotional, or physical, by which we can say, “I’m feeling good, I am on the right path.” 

Chapter 50 cannot be understood except in the context of the last three verses of Isaiah 49. A person that has absolute hope has true faith because our confidence has nothing to do with circumstances or other people. It has nothing to do with our own effort or our own skills or faithfulness. Our hope is resting entirely in that immutable person of Christ who Himself has done all that can be done in order to secure their redemption and who alone can preserve that commitment they have made to Him through all and in any circumstance. Scripture says, “Shall prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive delivered? But thus saith the Lord, ‘Even the captive of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contends with thee, and I will save thy children. And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and they shall be drunk with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know that I the Lord am thy Savior and thy Redeemer, and the Mighty One of Jacob’.”  All of chapter 50 is a practical application of the initial premise of perspective. There is in the human spirit one inescapable need for deliverance when he finds himself in the jaws of the adversary and nothing but devastation and ruin to be expected from those jaws. This kind of absolute immutable faith that we are called to live is not a faith called on the top of the mountain where the roses are blooming and everything is glorious and great, but this faith that we are called to is a faith when we are in the jaws of the lion and we have no visible possible means of escape or hope. And it is at that place that the Lord does the work of purifying and divining who really has faith. The person in the jaws that has an artificial faith will collapse, and he will look for some other means of deliverance because everything suddenly matters at that singular point of catastrophe. Jesus warned that even children would betray their parents, even husbands would betray their wives and mothers-in-law their sons-in-law. There is going to be an incredible kind of betrayal within the most intimate associations that we have on the earth. A betrayal because we have no faith and a betrayal because the singular and final hope that we are clinging to is our own well-being at the core of it. And pursuing our own well-being at the core is absolutely vain, it has nothing to do with salvation, and it marks us for destruction, because we are one who will fall into the trap of the enemy. 

I have on my heart an understanding of the need for us to walk in liberty; you and I to have liberty as the actual evidence of our faith which we live in day in and day out. Three principles - number one: liberty is preserved by God and ultimately realized by resurrection. Real faith does not stare a circumstance down and say, “In this circumstance I am going to be victorious as I would count victorious.”  That is temporal. For the believer all truth, all hope, and all confidence, springs from one thing and that is resurrection. That not only is ours but I have every confidence that it cannot be taken from us.  Back in the middle ages, they burned heretics at the stake. There was a mythical misunderstanding of theology at the time that if your body was burned then there would be no resurrection; that you would languish forever in hell. That is the ultimate attack against a person’s faith; to try to deprive them of resurrection.

We need to understand that on the earth we have a relationship with human government. And children, that means you have a relationship with your parents because that is the first order of human government that God has ordained and then we all are under human government which God has also ordained. And we need to never forget that the essential purpose of human government is absolutely preserved for every man whose hope is in the Lord. Government only has one divine origin, to preserve between individuals the rightful opportunity of life, so that they might in that liberty of life pursue their God. Anytime government strays from that principle, that government is oppressing that which they were designed to preserve. But nevertheless, that essential purpose of government is preserved for every man whose hope is in the Lord. God will always preserve my interests when I place my interests in His hands. There is no one who will ever pry God’s hands off of my interests.

There is a purifying reality that God has put on the earth which is the ultimate form of accountability for every form of authority, and that is the individual conscience that answers back to God and never surrenders that primary obedience to God. God is omnipotent and every man who has ever believed shall receive in entirety that which God has promised and shall suffer no loss whatsoever. In fact we find that the Lord has promised, that since He is not a robber, He gives double for that which was taken from us in this life.

Second principle. That which is our most precious heritage, our children, shall be preserved and saved by God Himself. To this end we need not to calculate nor calibrate self-preserving steps of safety and deliverance but boldly trust to proclaim all of that hope which is in the promise of God, knowing that “faithful is He who has promised who will also do it.” Fundamentally as parents, the number one struggle that you and I may have is that we are fearful that if we would somehow be taken out of the way and our children would be left without parents, whatever would happen to our children?  That is a powerful controlling fear that can enter into the heart of believers. If you have done any reading at all in history and you have heard some accounts of similar types of things, there are marvelous examples of how God miraculously cares for the children of those who trust Him above all, even to the losing of their life in the pursuit of their simple faith and obedience in God. 

The third principle. Injustice, suffering, and persecution, is God’s choicest instrument for giving evidence of His truth by which He declares with absolute certainty that He is Lord, Savior, and Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob, who by affording to us such manifest confidence of hope entices us to lay hold of the inseparable prize of His liberty. We need to recognize it is the opportunity to suffer injustice alone that enables the deep root of faith to take hold and to be manifest in the day and the world that we live in. We either have a God who is able or we do not. If we have a God who is able and we understand that He does not have to finish all the details in the next 5 minutes to my satisfaction but that He is going to right every wrong and settle all the details ultimately and entirely before it is all finished. That God is the God we trust and we transfer to Him that absolute certainty which make us, on His behalf, an agent on the earth as an ambassador by which we bring the very reality of the fear of God and the reality of God in the world in which we live. 

 Hope of liberty is crafted by suffering in three ways. Suffering purges away every false and deceptive hope which will not be realized. At the moment in which we are in, we have constructed in our expectation a certain outcome that we have labeled, “This is what God is going to do to deliver me,” and we begin hoping in our own expectation of deliverance, and in that very process where we look to our own understanding of how the deliverance will look and how it will feel, we very often find ourselves that we are not trusting in the Lord, we are trusting in an outcome. Who are you and I but advanced agents, advanced agents for the kingdom of Christ by which we walk in that expectation of His kingdom and we minister to others out of the hope of that expectation, getting other recruits as it were for the kingdom of God. If suffering purges away our deceptive and false hopes and expectations, at the same time it confirms with unwavering hope, the certainty of God’s declared promise. 

Second, suffering promotes legitimate goals of government by defiance when it errs and by harmony of happy allegiance when it is just. This is a very interesting part about how God brings accountability to the earth. Accountability always flows from the place of authority to that which that authority oversees and it possesses the power to correct that which is out of line with the authority. If you do not have those three elements, you do not have accountability. God has entrusted to you and I the most incredible aspect of accountability ever known on earth and that is the answer of a man’s conscience back to God at the willing sacrifice of my own life, because God Himself is the one I serve and I am unwavering in that service to Him. 

Suffering promotes the legitimate goals of government by defiance when it errs and happy allegiance when it is just. In the former instance, the answer of the conscience before God serves as the ultimate check and balance against false authority. By it, the oppressed declare their hope in the justice and power of Him who is immutably sovereign and omnipotently able to correct every wrong. Government is always getting out of hand and no where in the Bible does it tell you and I to obey every ordinance of government. “Obey every ordinance of government instituted among men for the Lord’s sake.”  It is the connection back to the Lord and to my obedience of the Lord. Peter, who wrote that passage in terms of dealing with government and obeying it, also was the one who demonstrated how to do it when the government overstepped its bounds. His answer in Acts was simply, “You figure it out, we ought to obey God rather than man.” We are called to obey only God and the only time that we cease to obey a government that God ordains is when the government that God ordained attempts to take God’s place in our life. When a man has no authority over you and you do not answer him because of that reality that he does not have the authority, you have put a check on him and though he take away your life in the process, you have established truth and that truth becomes a conscience. You are never a good testimony when you surrender to authority that does not exist in your life for any purpose. It is not a good testimony; that is confusion. The government only advances in injustice when it keeps the populace confused and they do not know their rights. 

The third way suffering crafts our hope of liberty. Suffering draws out of the heart and soul of the believer by compassion, the motivational commission of the Gospel, which is to preach good tidings to those who are oppressed in the confident expectation of deliverance. Here is the most practical point of suffering for believers as we minister to others: suffering gives us eyes to see in another person’s heart. How many times does the Gospel preach about compassion in the New Testament? To my knowledge, none. The Gospel is always preached out of compassion. Where does compassion rise from?  It arises from seeing the condition of someone that can be changed by the deliverance that is found in faith in Christ. It is that compassion for the needy that gives us that sense of ambition, intuitive motivation, to cross over and say, “I am going to serve someone else because they have a need.” Suffering enables us to see without based on injustice. The Gospel preaching is preaching relief to those who are in distress. It is a promise of deliverance from bondage; it is a rescue from that which is overcoming and that is the nature of the Gospel. Having a true sense of the Gospel, before a man can be delivered, he must first be in bondage. Before a man can be saved, he must first be lost. Praise be to God, we cannot live in this world without suffering bondage and loss. It is designed that way. It is important for us to understand that our conscience is placed where faith takes grip and root. And our conscience is giving an answer back to God on God’s terms. Our conscience is recognizing that there is no confidence for us at all except in God and God alone. The liberty of conscience is the ultimate rule of God’s righteous law. The temporary injustice imposed by any "lawful" judgment and the free proclamation of the Gospel by liberated, fearless men together become the persuasive means by which the kingdom of God and Christ are set forth in unwavering certainty, irresistible clarity, and absolute power.

 Chapter 50 verse 1 “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Where is your bill of your mother’s divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to whom I have sold you?’”  When God comes on the scene, He finds us in bondage. The description of bondage here is divorce and sold into slavery; someone who has been rejected and put away. He asked the question concerning bondage, “What did I do to put you in bondage?  How did you get into the condition that you are in?” We find ourselves in bondage, we find ourselves lacking the liberty that we desire.  The question is, “How did I get here?”  Without being too intensively theological, let me just say, it is your fault. You are in the fix that you are in because of your own sin and you have no one to blame but yourself. I want you to take that and think about it because you and I are so good at blaming the whole world around us. Our culture today has perfected it. We have so confused ourselves with a lack of personal responsibility, and the Lord speaks to us bluntly and formidably, “Are we squirming in our lack of liberty?”  It is our fault; it is not God’s fault. Probably one of the most formidable arguments that somebody would throw back at me is, “Mr. Cox, I got born into this family by none of my own doings and it is sure painful to be a member of this family, you do not know my mom or dad, this bondage I am in I had nothing to do with.”  That is a good thought. You are right, you did not do anything to get into someone’s family. God sovereignty placed you there. But this so called bondage that you are feeling is nothing more than your own sin trying to break out and have its own way. God gave you parents to give you liberty and you see that which God has given you for liberty as that which is keeping you from it. So you suffer and you languish day in and day out because you cannot have what they will not let you have and you do not get to have what you want. You do not like what you have and you want what you do not have, and you are a miserable person and it is your own fault because what you have is sufficient for God to meet you, and fill you, and bless you, and deliver you, but you despise it and rather you choose instead the course of bitter resentment and you speak against those who are holding you in bondage and you do nothing to gain liberty by going to the only means of liberty. 

“Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? when I called, was there no one to answer? Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot redeem? or have I no power to deliver? behold, at my rebuke I dry up the sea, I make the river a wilderness: their fish stinketh, because there is no water, and die of thirst. I clothe the heavens with blackness, and make sackcloth their covering.”  Second point: we are in bondage because we have not asked to get out of it God’s way. We mourn and we feel sorry for ourselves and we hang our head and we whine and complain with people of our equal pitiful condition. That is all well and good, but all we are doing is wearing ourselves out because God has made a way and we have not sought Him to receive it. When the Lord moves on the scene, He just says, “I have one problem here, there you are in bondage whining and complaining, having no hope, expecting to be totally consumed by your adversary and what you have not done is call upon Me who is able to deliver you.” We are there by our own fault and we are still there because we refuse to call the only One who can help us be delivered. 

In verse 4 we suddenly move into the example of Christ. Christ gives us a picture of what it means to walk as if there is one who delivers and His name is God. Verse 4 says “The Lord God has given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back.”  Those are one of the most beautiful two verses in the whole Bible on this singular topic of what it means to come to faith, to come to obedience, to come to the Deliverer on His terms. You do not get out of your own bondage by your own craftiness or the might of your own hand. What is necessary is to recognize that in the middle of all the confusion, God can give you light of perspective. With Christ here we see two things. We see what for you and I continues to be the double message of the cross in our everyday life. The first aspect of the message is that we are able to speak with a learned tongue. That has to do with a sense of communicating hope to another person who is in darkness. I find that you and I cannot escape our own bondage just isolatedlly looking at our own case. What God has chosen to do is to, through the fiber of compassion, to connect each other with the similar state, and to begin recognizing for another individual that which is also true for myself. It is as I objectively see someone else’s need for hope and I begin to clarify and speak hope to them on their behalf, at that very moment I am receiving back a much larger dose of the same kind of preaching and confidence back to me in my own circumstance. There is this mutual edification that takes places. 

There are two parts. One is the tongue of the learned, knowing how to speak a word to the weary in season. This takes us right to the daily process of our individual lives, day in and day out, and the relationships that we maintain. Children you do not know the resources, you do not know the depth of desire and capacity to encourage that your parents hold for you. If you will share with them just the feelings of your weariness, just open up your heart and tell them how you are feeling. Yes, it might be them who you are feeling it about, but come with that sense of your weariness, come with that sense of your need and come see your parents. An amazing thing will happen because God will open up the heartstrings of your parents and He will pour out, by His love, wisdom to encourage you in your own path. 

Second point, “He wakes mine ear to hear as the learned. He has opened mine ear and I was not rebellious, neither turned back.” The rebellion here is a unique kind of rebellion; it is the rebellion of the cross. When we have our ears open and we understand what the learned understand, we realize that we must die to our own expectations, to what we want. When we come to this place and the Lord opens our understanding, there is one word - “surrender.”  Surrender the turf, surrender the ground, give it up. We will never survive, we will never win, let it go. The rebellion here is the rebellion of refusing to give up our rights at a momentary instant of need.

If I refuse rebellion, if I refuse to turn back, then I must go to the cross. “I give my back to the smiters, and my cheek to them that pluck off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.”  There is the golden jewel of liberty, that our interests and our well-being we have laid down temporarily knowing God will right them later, we lay them down and are not afraid to take on the shame, the false accusation, the misunderstanding, the harsh rules, whatever it is, we will submit, we will let it go. When did Jesus do this? He did it in the Garden. He prayed three times and He prayed every time, “Lord isn’t it possible for You to do some other thing to take this cup from me? Isn’t it possible? Nevertheless, not My will but Thine be done.” This little phrase, “Thy will be done,” do not let anyone steal it from us in their false theology of instant gratification of temporal appearance of our faith being satisfied. That is the most precious reality of faith we will ever have. We get to the place where in our human desire and in our human need we want deliverance, we need it, we desire it and we come and we lay it before the Lord and we say, “God, all things are possible with You.” That is the first thing Jesus said, “All things are possible with You, if it is possible, remove this cup.” Did Jesus lack faith because He knew all things were possible? He did not lack faith. He had that which was necessary: He had the wisdom to know that God’s bigger and better understanding is sufficient and we will yield to that. Only God knows what He is looking at and for us to step in with our narrow view and to impose on God who has the larger view and so, “No God, You have to see it through my lens or You cannot see it at all.”  That is not faith. That is turning our back and going the other way.

The willingness “to give my back to the smiters and my cheeks to them that pluck off my hair” is obviously a reference to Christ and He was shamed. But what we do not understand is that when Christ was being spit on and being shamed, that was the ultimate point of His defiance of false human authority. What you and I do not realize is what tremendous, Heavenly perspective Christ had. Faith and obedience are about you and I learning to defy the temporal benefits that are available because we see that God has something bigger and better and we are going to trust our lot in His hands and we  will even today take reproach, we will suffer whatever Christ would have us suffer, knowing full well that we  shall never, never lose that which we have entrusted to His care.

Verse 7 is the heart and soul of this whole passage, “For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed. He is near that justifies me; who will contend with me?  let us stand together: Who is mine adversary? let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord God will help me?  who is he that shall condemn me?  lo, they all shall wax old as a garment; the moth shall eat them up.”  That is the ending of this incredible defiance of Christ. Godly defiance is not the antagonistic emotions against false authority by which we with hatred defy a false authority. The defiance of a believer is recognizing whom do I have on earth to fear? What shall I fear that man shall do to me?  We do not have anything to be afraid of. The Lord is right here at my right hand and He is going to be my defense. When Christ speaks in the terms of never dying, He is speaking in the terms of never dying as in the final and ultimate death of hell, as eternal separation from God. But in between we all go through the temporary process of death. And when we are trusting God, we are not trusting God merely so that we miss out on the temporal death, but we trust Him that we won't miss out on the eternal death and that He will help us even if He would call us to the ultimate sacrifice of temporal death. He will stand with us. He will be there at our very side. 

Connecting verse 7 through 9 back to chapter 49 verse 25 “Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered:” Why? “For I will contend with him that contends with thee, and I will save thy children.” We are not the contenders. We are the ones who know that the Contender is God Himself and He is fully able to contend for His issue and stand and make happen what needs to happen. Our absolute confidence in the Lord shifts away so that we no longer are in a tangle. When you and I are in the throes of the emotions of the loss of our own life and the troubles and torment of that, we are contending. And when you are contending with earthly authority, by your own flesh, how can you let God contend? “He is near that justifies me; who will contend with me? let us stand together: who is mine adversary? let him come near to me. Behold, the Lord God will help me; who is he that shall condemn me?” The reality of it is, our trust is primarily demonstrated by a refusal to take up our own case, to protect and preserve our own rights. And yet, from the human standpoint, when our rights get encroached and we get mistreated violently, it is a horrendous thing and we struggle with that emotional surrender. It is necessary that at the very end even, that we are looking to God standing with us to deliver us. Christ is the provision of wisdom, Christ is the provision of confidence, Christ is the provision of resistance. That which we need to survive oppression against ourselves is found in Christ and Christ alone.

Moving to the last two verses. First the positive exhortation to those who are the Lord’s, verse 10 “Who is among you that feareth the Lord?” Who is among us that fears the Lord? Is that the desire of our heart to be one who fears God?  If we fear Him we fear no man; fear Him and Him alone. It is interesting how easy obedience is when we fearing God. We relinquish the control to Him and when we relinquish the control to Him we do what He says. There is no more bondage; there is no more battle. We are in victory; the victory of following after Jesus. “Who is among you that fears the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of His servant, that walks in darkness and has no light? let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.” Brothers and sisters, there is no other exhortation that will ever get you and I through any crisis present or to come. There is no set of spiritual dynamics or exercises that we could do to make us. Do we trust in the Lord today in our circumstance? At that place of loss can we, will we trust in the Lord? Will we trust in His name, will we stay upon our God? In the Hebrew, the word “stay” literally means as if we take a staff and we rest, we lean on the Lord. We do not lean on our own understanding, we lean on the Lord. Faith cannot come to life except at the place where the cross of Christ cuts off that pursuit of our own person. It is laying it down; not being rebellious and refusing the pain and the sorrow of the cross. Parents, this is the key to the daily encouragement of our children day in and day out. Husbands and wives, this is the key to your marital success when you have struggles and difficulties. The question is not whether you get your way, the question is whether you trust the Lord and you are willing to suffer loss; you are willing to suffer the shame while God does His work, whatever it is. 

The last verse is a warning, “Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, and that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and the sparks that you have kindled.”  The judgment of the wicked is this: they get what they tried for. What a judgment! The picture here of kindling with sparks is interesting because you know that when you have anything that sparks a lot it is also something that does not burn very long, it is also something that creates a lot of smoke that blocks your vision but it has very limited value and it only has temporary sense of help and hope. And here what the Lord says, this is our choice: we can lean on the Lord and trust in Him or we can trust in our own device to get ourselves out. Every time we refuse the cross, we are lighting our own little sparks; we are getting ourselves out. We got a few more feet down, now we have the happiness we hoped for and the feeling of, “It worked, it was successful.”  It is not successful because we missed out on the only thing worth living one day at a time for and that is the increase of our faith in Jesus Christ. What we did is we learned that we can not worry about trusting Christ, we can devise our own escape and that is okay. The last verse is the verse of devastation because Scripture says, “You shall lie down in sorrow.” Lying down gives us that little image of the end; the finish. “You will lie down in sorrow.”

Do you trust Jesus Christ enough that you will suffer whatever it takes to suffer in order to continue trusting Jesus Christ?  Are we really Christians because nothing is dearer to us than the Lord Himself and nothing is more sure to us than His promises? We have a life of faith, from faith, to faith. The Lord is purifying our faith but it only happens at the place of the cross where we choose to give our backs to the smiters instead of to save our life for the momentary instant.