The call of God is a narrative that runs all the way through Scripture, from beginning to end. It begins in the Garden of Eden as God calls the world into existence. He calls Eve out of Adam and then calls them to be fruitful and multiply. Then when they fall into sin, He calls them back to Himself; Adam where are you? In Genesis 12, He calls Abraham and He sets Him apart. And that call narrative continues from that point on throughout Scripture. The New Testament picks up on this Old Testament call narrative and says that we have been called out of darkness into His marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9).

To be saved means to be called by God. Romans 8:28 says, “We know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who are the called according to His purpose.” So Jesus, walking in Israel, comes up to the waters of the Sea of Galilee and He sees two brothers on a boat folding their nets after a long night of fishing, and He calls them. He says, “Come and follow me.” Now all we see is a rabbi calling two potential disciples to come and follow him. But when Jesus calls them, embedded in that call is everything that came with the Old Testament call narrative . . . the call of Abraham, the call of Moses, the call of Jeremiah, the call of Elijah . . .

The call of God is the call to be blameless (Genesis 17:1). The call of God is the call to be righteous (Isaiah 42:6). It is the call to embrace Jesus Christ; yet not only to embrace Jesus Christ, but to reject everything that is not like Him. That is the call. The call of God is to be holy even as He is holy, as Peter says in 1 Peter 1:15, “But just as He who has called you is holy, so you also be holy in all that you do.” The calling is a holy calling. Our calling is the calling to absolute holiness and complete and total purity.

But there’s a crisis, and the crisis is that all of us have already messed that up. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). And not only have we messed it up once, but we’ve messed it up again and again. And not only have we messed it up again and again, but we have absolutely have no ability to conform our lives to that call by our own power. That is, we could try for the rest of our lives and we could never answer that call.

Now there was a 5th Century theologian by the name of Pelagius. Pelagius, the big opponent of Augustine of Hippo, believed that Jesus was not our Savior, but our example. He was the example of one who lived a holy life from the time he was born to the time he died, and he showed us what it means to live holy before God and that if we strive with all of our might, we can live holy the way Jesus lived holy, and that is our salvation. Augustine hated that idea. The idea that by our own power, we could satisfy the righteousness of God was absolutely and totally and completely bankrupt to him. Why? Because if you look at Augustine’s background, Augustine was a tremendously prolific sinner. He could not resist the ladies, and he even fathered a child out of wedlock. His primary sin was sexual sin, and he could not find the desire within himself to change his ways.

His mother was always praying for his salvation, and she wept many tears in intercession for his soul. Once her pastor, Ambrose of Milan, found her weeping for her son and encouraged her with these words: It is not possible that the son of these tears should perish!

The words of her pastor eventually proved prophetic as Augustine met the Lord in a manner that could only be explained as God’s sovereignty. As he was walking in a garden one day he heard some kids on the other side of the wall singing a nursery rhyme that he had never heard before. “Take up the book and read. Take up the book and read,” they sang. As he was trying to figure out what the nursery rhyme meant, he sat down on a bench,  and there sitting next to him on the bench was a Bible. He picked it up and opened it right to Romans 13:14, where it says, “But clothe yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lust.” Upon reading that verse, the life-transforming power of the Holy Spirit overtook him, and he submitted his life to Christ once and for all!

So when Augustine looked at his own life, there was no way Pelagius was right because he wouldn’t be saved if Pelagius was right. He had no desire, but then the Lord met him and He took away his sin and gave him a new desire to live before Him and with Him. Augustine saw clearly that Jesus is not just our example; he is the atoning sacrifice for our sin! Our salvation does not come through striving for perfect holiness, but through surrendering our lives to Jesus through faith!

The call of God requires us to be holy, but the crisis of sin has determined that none of us are holy in ourselves. Yet, God does not leave us in this crisis, but provides us with the cure . . . and the cure is the love of the Father, the blood of the Son, the power of the Spirit, all communicated through the truth of the word. The cure is not our own striving, but God’s gracious provision. And there is no other cure . . . no other hope for the salvation of humanity than the love of the Father that causes him to send the Son to die for us and the Spirit to dwell in us.

But when you’ve been struggling with something for a long time and you’ve tried reading the Bible and you’ve tried praying, its easy to begin thinking that you need something more than the love of the Father, the blood of the Son, and the power of the Spirit. We’re living in a day and age in which people are convinced that the love of the Father, the blood of the Son, the power of the Spirit, and the truth of the word are not enough. Even Christians are convinced! Even Christians sometimes come to the conclusion that there are just certain situations that do not respond to the love of the Father, the blood of the Son, the power of the Spirit, and the truth of the word. You need something more. You need something other.

If there is anything we need as believers in Jesus Christ, it is a resurgence of confidence in this four-fold cure. Without confidence in this four-fold cure, we become lackluster in our  faith because we just don’t believe it works. We don’t believe it does us any good.

But it does work! It is the cure. However, when it doesn’t seem to work immediately, what we’re discovering is not that the cure doesn’t work, but that the cure needs a catalyst. That is, the catalyst is what activates the power of the cure on behalf of the person with the disease. And what is the catalyst? The catalyst is our faith. Faith is the catalyst that activates the power of the cure. Without faith we have no access to the power that is in the love of the Father, the blood of the Son, the power of the Spirit, and the truth of the Word. If we don’t approach that with faith, then that power is never released.

But our faith has to manifest three ways. And typically, what I see in the lives of most of us is that our faith only manifests in one or two of the three ways. And because of that, we don’t get the full catalyzing effect of our faith, and so we don’t tap into the full power of the love of the Father, the blood of the Son, the power of the Spirit, and the truth of the Word.

Our faith, first of all, must manifest in encounter with God. Faith is not just a passive act of trusting and believing in God. Faith is an active pursuit of God. And it’s an active pursuit that leads to encounter with God. Faith actually opens us up to the manifest presence of God. That is, when I begin to trust, when I begin to believe with all of my heart in the power of the love of the Father, the blood of the Son, the power of the Spirit, and the truth of the Word, my heart opens to God in this way. And when my heart opens to the love of the Father, the blood of the Son, the power of the Spirit, and the truth of the Word, the result of that opening up is encounter with God.

When you have a form of faith that simply demands that you believe in your mind and heart for your breakthrough apart from any manifestation of the presence of God, you’re back to your own power. That is, if I’m not believing for God’s presence to manifest in my life, then I’m just believing that by my own strength I’m just going to live according to this and I believe it. I believe God is able to to make me live this out. God is able, but he does not empower us to live out something without his empowering presence. His manifest presence is the power of change. His manifest presence is the power holiness. When he said be holy as I am holy, it means that we can only be holy in his presence. In the experience of his holiness, we learn what holiness is. When he says be holy as I am holy, it means you’ve got to discover what he means by as I am holy before you can be holy. And you only discover what that means when you come into his presence and you begin to cry out holy.

But I can only live that out from the presence. And so faith, first and foremost, leads to encounter. And in order to manifest the power of the cure, you’ve got to learn how to lay hold of the manifest presence of God on a daily basis. You’ve got to learn how to tap into that. Your faith has to lead you into the holy of holies; not just into the hallway of discipline. Your faith has to take you into the throne room.

And secondly, your faith must manifest in revelation. The author of Hebrews said in Hebrews 11:5 that by faith we know that the worlds were formed by the word of God. Now when he said, “by faith we know,” he didn’t mean “by faith we intellectually believe this.” That also is by my own power. But when I come into encounter with God, the next thing that happens is revelation from God. When the simple truths of the gospel come to you as revelation, you can get a revelation of something you believed to be true before you got the revelation, but then you didn’t really know it until you received the revelation.

And the author of Hebrews says, “by faith, we know.” When we come into the presence of God, he gives us the revelation that he is the Creator. And this is the whole purpose of meditating on Scripture. It leads you to the place of revelation. And all of a sudden, when you get revelation, it’s like God takes these simple truths and makes them profound.

I remember we were in Bible College and our friend Natasha got the revelation that “Jesus is the Son of God!” She had been serving Jesus all these years and she knew it was true, but suddenly she got a revelation of it, and she’s like “Whoa! Like, Jesus is the Son of God!” You can see it in someone’s eyes when they’ve just received a revelation from God. I saw a young man get a revelation and he was like, “My sins got taken away! Jesus took my sin away. He forgave me!” When you get a revelation of it, suddenly you begin to know things.

Often times we see faith as struggling to know something. “I’m struggling to believe this. I’m fighting to believe this.” And that’s not yet faith. That’s struggling to have faith. But when you get faith, suddenly you know. And that means faith manifests first of all in encounter with God, and secondly in revelation from God. But the third way that faith manifests, and is also just as important, is in your walk with God. It manifests in response. You see, encountering the presence of God is the first step, receiving a revelation out of that encounter is the second step, but now you have to steward that revelation. And what we see happening is that believers are having encounters all the time, they get all these revelations, but then you see them a year later and they’re saying all the same foolishness they were saying before they got the revelation. You even hear them testifying about what God brought them out of, and then a year later thinking “Well, maybe this is who I am… God set me free from this; well now I don’t know if I can be free from this.”

What happened? We lost the revelation. We lost the encounter. Why did we lose it? Because we didn’t steward it. So what does it mean to steward the revelation and the encounter? Because without the third way your faith manifests, you’re simply waiting for God to show up again and give you another encounter. You’re waiting for God to show up again and give you another revelation. And he will! Because for most of us, that’s the only level of faith that we have. If we have faith, we believe God is going to show up, his power is going to meet us, and he’s going to give us another revelation.

We must learn not only how to come to faith, but how to walk in faith. Coming to faith brings us to the moment of encounter with God and causes the release of revelation in our lives. But walking in faith is what it takes to climb the many mountains and cross the many rivers that lie before us in the journey of faith. And if we learn how to come to faith and then walk in faith, we find that we are able–by God’s grace and power–to answer his call and walk worthy of it.