The Idea Of Exercising One’s Faith

From a biblical perspective, the idea of “exercising one’s faith” is like expecting a skeleton (or a deadman) to do jumping jacks or to respond to your questions. Aint no way that it’s going to happen!  The deadman has to become alive FIRST before he can be expected to exercise anything or do anything that is contrary to his unsaved nature in his spiritually dead condition. An appropriate analogy would be to expect a caterpillar to have the same abilities as a butterfly BEFORE it has become a butterfly!

I am not sure where the idea of “exercising one’s faith” to become saved comes from with regards to the unregenerated soul – But as for believers, yes they can exercise faith in Christ since they have the power of God unto salvation within them, but the unregenerated, no, as they have no such power. If – as many free-will preachers espouse – that the unsaved can exercise their faith to become saved, then doesn’t that mean that a lost soul is only “partly lost”? Doesn’t it mean that those who are “dead in their trespasses and sins” are only “partly dead”? And then, aren’t the spiritually blind only “near sighted”? Are the spiritually deaf only “partly deaf”? Are the spiritually lame still able to hobble along? Don’t you see that by assuming the unsaved can somehow “miraculously” exercise THEIR faith to become saved – you are attributing abilities to the unsaved that the Bible does not allow you to attribute to them? Furthermore, I ask you: how in the world can anyone have faith in someone they don’t even really know?

To know Christ and all that He is, requires first being born from above. And as we see in this passage of Scripture, it is CHRIST’S FAITH and not our own that saves us: “And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through THE FAITH OF CHRIST, the righteousness which is of God by faith: THAT I MAY KNOW HIM, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death” Philippians 3:9-10.

The next time you go to a funeral parlor count how many of the corpses are exercising their muscles, even if its just their pinkies or eyelids.  Until I see that happening, I will not believe that those who are spiritually dead can exercise anything, except their will to do those things that the Bible says the spiritually dead are in bondage to (as mentioned in the list of the fruits of the flesh in Galatians 5:19-21).