Faith and the Father's Will
Greetings and good morning brothers and sisters. This is Dr. James Perry continuing with our series
where we seek to explore the deeper meanings of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Over the years,
the heavenly Father has revealed many revelations of spiritual truth to me, and I want to share them
with you. This morning we seek to understand the relationship between faith and the Father's will.
And now, sit back and listen to today's message.
Faith and the Father’s Will
"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourself: It is the gift of God."
Ephesians, Chapter 2, Verses 8.
Brothers and sisters, faith is the assurance that somehow, some way things will turn out all right. The
Father's will is the response to and cause of faith. The Father's will guarantees that everything will
turn out all right. When faith is directly joined to the Father's will, then may we proceed through life
with the confidence of success in all of our moral and spiritual endeavors.
But faith does not appear in the human heart fully developed. It must grow. And like all things that
must grow, error and evil are always distinct possibilities during the growth process. The Father's
will is handicapped by our incompleteness. Faith grows through several stages. The early phases of
faith have to do with the child's confidence in his material father and mother. The growing child's
faith continues to grow and so do the things that he expects his parents to do. Eventually his faith
in his parent exceeds their abilities. This is the first crisis of faith in the life of the child. The child
is taken aback when he realizes that his parent cannot do everything or does not know everything.
This is the material phase of faith. Most people never purify their faith of this material
contamination. Long after they have passed through the intellectual phase and have entered the
spiritual phase, they still look to God to work out everything materially in their lives. They recognize
the reality of the Father's will but continue to insist on material manifestations as proof of that reality.
But strange to say, faith in God persists in the face of all erroneous concepts. This is proof of the
reality of the Father's will since the Father is the source of this persistent faith.
Following the material phase of faith, the growing child next enters the intellectual phase of faith.
In this stage, the child recognizes that knowledge of material facts is the key to controlling the
manifestations of material reality. He then begins his search for intellectual knowledge, the attempt
to discover more and more facts about material reality. But though this search increasingly discloses
more and more facts about material reality, there are several drawbacks associated with this approach
to reality. First of all, the discovery of factual knowledge is likely to be piecemeal and therefore not
particularly useful in the complete solution of a given intellectual problem. Secondly the search for
intellectual knowledge alone does not yield wisdom. Wisdom is essential in the appreciation of
knowledge if one is to avoid creating a larger problem.
The absence of wisdom in the intellectual phase of faith leads the growing child into the spiritual
phase of faith. Inherent in such a state is the realization of the failure of the material approach and
the intellectual approach to provide satisfactory solutions. The spiritual phase of faith recognizes the
over control of all reality by the Father, and that there is a divine purpose somewhere concealed in
the display of reality. The spiritual phase of faith instructs the growing child to seek his true place
and purpose in this unfolding reality-to seek to do the Father's will.
The pursuit of knowledge has revealed many things that can be done, but it has utterly failed to
provide what things should be done, how they should be done, under what circumstances, and to
what extent. Knowledge has failed to provide the appropriate means to appropriate ends. Only
spiritual insight can provide these answers. Only the pursuit of the Father's will can solve this puzzle.
This is the mystery that the conscious mind cannot fathom, for the simple reason that the revelations
of divine values and meanings take place on a super conscious level. Intellectual logic can never
arrive at spiritual insight, though spiritual conclusions are consistent with logic when viewed from
the spiritual point of view.
Faith must ever stand for these inscrutable transactions. Faith must stand for the proof of the reality
of doing the Father's will. Faith must stand for the continued doing of the Father's will in the face
of seeming failure. Always will there exist more of the Father's will than we can ever master. The
Father's will is infinite, eternal, and absolute.
It is helpful to think of doing the Father's will in turns of an equilateral triangle, with the base
representing the entrance of the creature upon doing the Father's will, and the apex representing the
doing of the Father's will in perfection. A line running perpendicular to the base and the apex
represents the perfect doing of the Father's will. On either side of that line lay error and evil. Error
represents imperfections of the mind while evil represents imperfections of the soul.
As we proceed through time and space, we move closer to the apex. It does not matter where along
the base we begin. As long as we remain true to our desire to do the Father's will, we can remain
confident that in spite of the errors of the mind and evils of the soul, we are ever moving closer to
the doing of the Father's will in perfection.
This concludes today's message on understanding the relationship between faith and the Father's will.
We hope you find something in this message to ponder and pray about as you go about your day.
Until next time, this is Dr. James Perry
Inspirational Messages
By Dr. James Perry
Your Kingdom Come, Your Will Be Done!
Faith and the Father's Will
