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Faith

The advantages of courting danger

A Christian is someone who has faith in Jesus Christ. Having “faith” is not the same as belonging to a political party. It means that you trust Jesus with your life. But if you never have occasion to actually exercise that trust – if you go through the whole of your life without ever actually needing Jesus – how can you really be “trusting” in him? Paul’s life was spent constantly needing Jesus to save him from his latest scrape, as illustrated by the shipwreck described in Acts chapter 27.

The ship on which Paul was travelling to Rome as a prisoner was caught up in a tremendous storm which lasted for a fortnight, and the crew and passengers thought that they would certainly perish, but Paul had a vision in which he was told by an angel of God that everyone on board would be saved. Sure enough, although the ship ran aground and broke up, all of the people on board managed to reach land safely.

You only ever really get to experience God acting in your life at those moments when you stand to lose everything unless God miraculously intervenes. Faith is a relationship between yourself and Jesus which grows as you experience miraculous intervention after miraculous intervention in your life. If you are not taking big risks for the sake of the Kingdom of God, then your faith does not get the opportunities to grow.