Good afternoon Church,
 
I hope you had a blessed Thanksgiving with your family this past weekend.
 
In our series through Galatians, we have spent a lot of time talking about faith. It is right at the heart of the letter. We have seen how crucial faith is to salvation. Paul says he has believed in Christ Jesus, “in order to be justified by faith in Christ” (Gal. 2:16). The Galatians also received the Spirit through faith, and this past week, we looked at Abraham receiving his righteousness through faith. We use this word faith a lot in Christian circles, and it can become very cliche. But it is important to remind ourselves of what it means to have faith. Faith means we trust God and put our hope fully in Him.
 
When we put our faith in God, we are declaring that we trust Him. Trust is the fundamental building block of a relationship. It is trust that makes relationships possible. You are not going to be friends with a person you do not trust. You will not share deeply with or go to a person for help unless you trust them. Likewise, there can be no relationship with God unless we put our trust in Him. I love the example that illustrates this from C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair from ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’. Aslan the lion (the Christ figure in the story) invites the girl Jill to drink from a stream in front of him. But in order to drink she has to come near Aslan, which is terrifying because he is a lion whom she does not trust yet. She must make the decision to trust that Aslan will not eat her. It is not until she decides to trust Aslan (Christ) that she comes and receives the water she so desperately needs. This need to trust is what Abraham experienced in Genesis 15:1-6 when God showed him the stars of the sky and said, this is how many descendants you are going to have. He had to make a decision to trust God despite the fact that humanly speaking there was no possibility for him to have a single child, since he was old, and his wife was barren. It is only as he trusted God that Abraham received salvation and the child he was promised.
 
When we put our trust in God, we are putting our hope in Him. Here is a human example which illustrates this: I take my car to a mechanic because I have put my hope in the fact that he can fix my car. It is this hope in his abilities that leads me to take the car to him. Likewise, when we put our faith in God it is because we put our hope in the power of God to do what he promised. This is what Abraham did when he heard the promise of descendants. He banked fully on the fact that God was able to do what He had promised. He could not set his hope on his own body or on anything else around him. All other hopes were abandoned as he hoped alone in the promises of God.
 
The simple invitation comes to us today to trust in the Lord just as Abraham did. We know that no one who trusts in Him will be put to shame (Psalm 25:3). We will see His salvation and He will move in power in our lives by His Spirit. God calls us to come set our hope fully upon Him. We must bank on the promises that He has given us in His Word, “knowing the righteous shall live by faith” (Gal. 3:11) and “He who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:23).
 
May God richly bless you this week as you trust in the Lord.  
 
In Christ,
Taylor Ewert