40 Days of Faith E-Book

Paul David Tripp

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: 40 Days Devotionals
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

"Faith is breathing in the oxygen of God's grace, giving life to my once-dead heart." —Paul David Tripp As breath is to the body, so faith is to the Christian life. Through 40 daily meditations from his best-selling devotional New Morning Mercies, popular author and speaker Paul David Tripp explores how deep-seated trust in God and his word radically alters not only the way we think, but also the way we live. Tripp urges us not to rely on our own wisdom, experience, and strength—but to ask God to transform us into people who live by faith with a radical, God-centered point of view.

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40

Days

of

Faith

Books by Paul David Tripp

A Quest for More: Living for Something Bigger Than You

Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide for Parenting Teens (Resources for Changing Lives)

Awe: Why It Matters for Everything We Think, Say, and Do

Broken-Down House: Living Productively in a World Gone Bad

Come, Let Us Adore Him: A Daily Advent Devotional

Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry

Forever: Why You Can’t Live without It

Grief: Finding Hope Again

How People Change (with Timothy S. Lane)

Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change (Resources for Changing Lives)

Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional

Lead: 12 Gospel Principles for Leadership in the Church

Lost in the Middle: Midlife and the Grace of God

My Heart Cries Out: Gospel Meditations for Everyday Life

New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional

Parenting: 14 Gospel Principles That Can Radically Change Your Family

Redeeming Money: How God Reveals and Reorients Our Hearts

Sex in a Broken World: How Christ Redeems What Sin Distorts

Shelter in the Time of Storm: Meditations on God and Trouble

Suffering: Eternity Makes a Difference (Resources for Changing Lives)

Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn’t Make Sense

Teens and Sex: How Should We Teach Them? (Resources for Changing Lives)

War of Words: Getting to the Heart of Your Communication Struggles (Resources for Changing Lives)

What Did You Expect?: Redeeming the Realities of Marriage

Whiter Than Snow: Meditations on Sin and Mercy

40

Days

of

Faith

Paul David Tripp

40 Days of Faith

Copyright © 2020 by Paul David Tripp

Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

The devotions in this book appeared previously in Paul David Tripp, New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014).

Cover design: Josh Dennis

First printing, 2020

Printed in the United States of America

All Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-7425-2 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-7428-3 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-7426-9 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-7427-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tripp, Paul David, 1950– author. 

Title: 40 days of faith / Paul David Tripp. 

Other titles: Forty days of faith

Description: Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2020. | “The devotions in this book appeared previously in Paul David Tripp, New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014).”

Identifiers: LCCN 2020022785 (print) | LCCN 2020022786 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433574252 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433574269 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433574276 (mobipocket) | ISBN 9781433574283 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Trust in God—Christianity—Meditations. | Faith—Meditations. 

Classification: LCC BV4637 .T75 2020 (print) | LCC BV4637 (ebook) | DDC 242/.2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022785

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022786

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2020-12-29 10:35:44 AM

Introduction

Faith is at once a very important and very confusing word. I once tried to get a definition of faith out of a small group of people I was speaking to. We walked a circle of synonyms that led us back to the original word—belief, trust, faith. As we arrived back where we began, it hit me that these people heard and used this word all the time, but didn’t understand it. The word faith was in the Bible that they read, in the songs of worship that they sang, and in the sermons that they heard, but it still wasn’t clear to them. Yet God, in his word, gives it an extremely high level of importance. 

Habakkuk 2:4 says, “The righteous shall live by his faith.” Just as you cannot physically live without breathing oxygen, you cannot spiritually live without exercising faith. Faith is breathing in the oxygen of God’s grace, giving life to my once-dead heart. What could be more important than that? Hebrews 11:6 says, “And without faith it is impossible to please him” (God). You and I will never be what we were designed to be and live as we have been called to live without faith. It is faith that propels us to live in a way that is pleasing to the Lord. What could be more important than this?

Here is why faith is so essential in God’s redemptive plan. Sin has rendered us incapable of pleasing God on our own. On our best day, with our best intentions and exercising our best efforts, we fall horribly short of God’s holy and wise standard. We can’t even keep our own laws, let alone his. That is why God sent his Son. Jesus measured up to God’s standard in all the ways that we are unable to and he paid our penalty with his own life. So God doesn’t ask us to perfectly obey his law in order to please him. No, what God asks of us is this one simple thing: faith.

Faith is more than intellectual assent to God’s existence. It is more than committing yourself to a community of faith and a regular set of religious habits. Faith is more than developing biblical literacy and doctrinal knowledge. Faith is not saying, “I believe that,” when it makes little difference in the way you think about yourself, the way you relate to God, and the way you live your life. Faith is something that shatters you and rebuilds you. Faith is a transaction of your heart that will radically alter the way you live your life. 

Faith is abandoning your own righteousness and entrusting the hope of your soul, in this life and the one to come, to the righteousness of another. Faith is the willingness to confess, without excuse or shifting the blame, sins that you once denied or hid. Faith is abandoning your own wisdom and feeding your heart on the wisdom of God. Faith is giving up on your delusions of control and resting in God’s sovereign authority. Faith is admitting your weakness and crying out for the strength that only God can give. Faith is refusing to be a glory thief any longer and living for the greater glory of God. Faith is taking up your cross, dying to yourself, and committing yourself to live as a disciple of Jesus. Faith is letting the cross of Jesus Christ and his empty tomb define your identity and your hope. Faith is much more than a one-time decision; it is a lifestyle lived with the presence, promises, and call of God always in view.

I’m about to write something that will surprise you. Faith is impossible. It is unnatural and counterintuitive for us all. Self-trust is natural. Fear is natural. Worry is natural. Self-righteousness is natural. Doubt is natural. Autonomy and self-sufficiency are natural, but faith isn’t natural. So here’s where the call to faith always leads you. Faith, properly understood, always leads you to cry out for God’s grace. It takes grace to have the faith to entrust yourself and everything you are and have to God and his grace. Faith is important because it is the only pathway to finding and receiving God’s greatest gift, his grace in the person of his Son, Jesus.

So I am inviting you to take a forty-day faith journey with me. If you do, you will come to know Jesus better, you will celebrate his grace more fully, and things in your heart and life will become more pleasing to him. Remember, without faith it is simply impossible for anyone to please him.

Day 1

Faith in Christ is not just about knowing the truths of the gospel, but about living them as well.

It is vital to know that faith is not just an action of your brain; it’s an investment of your life. Faith is not just something you think; it’s something you live. Hear these words from Hebrews 11:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God. And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. (vv. 1–7)

What is faith? Verse 6 is very helpful. Biblical faith has this foundation—you must believe that God exists. This is the watershed, the great divide. There are only two types of people in this world—those who believe that the most important fact that a human being could ever consider and give assent to is the existence of God, and those who either casually or philosophically deny his existence. But intellectual commitment to God’s existence is not all that faith is about; faith means you live as though you believe in God’s existence, or as though you believe, as the writer says, “he rewards those who seek him.”

Faith is a deep-seated belief in the existence of God that radically alters the way you live your life. Now, here’s the rub. Faith isn’t natural for us. Biblical faith is counterintuitive and countercultural. So we even need God’s grace to have faith to believe in the existence of the one whose grace we so desperately need. And the grace is yours for the asking again today.

For further study and encouragement

James 2:14–26

Day 2

God calls you to believe and then works with zeal to craft you into a person who really does live by faith.

I don’t know how much you’ve thought about this, but faith isn’t natural for you and me. Doubt is natural. Fear is natural. Living on the basis of your collected experience is natural. Pushing the current catalog of personal “what-ifs” through your mind before you go to sleep or when you wake up in the morning is natural. Living based on the thinking of your brain and your physical senses is natural. Envying the life of someone else and wondering why it isn’t your life is natural. Wishing that you were more sovereign over people, situations, and locations than you will ever be is natural. Manipulating your way into personal control so you can guarantee that you will get what you think you need is natural. Looking horizontally for the peace that you will only ever find vertically is natural. Anxiously wishing for change in things that you have no ability to change is natural. Giving way to despondency, discouragement, depression, or despair is natural. Numbing yourself with busyness, material things, media, food, or some other substance is natural. Lowering your standards to deal with your disappointment is natural. But faith simply isn’t natural to us.

So, in grace, God grants us to believe. As Paul says in Ephesians