«　WEEK 6　DAY 2　»

　　Matt. 17:20 …Truly I say to you, If you have faith like a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.

　　Gal. 6:10 So then, as we have the opportunity, let us do what is good toward all, but especially toward those of the household of the faith.

　　In Matthew 17:20b the Lord spoke concerning the effect of faith… Nothing is impossible to faith. Hymns, #535, written by Charles Wesley, expresses this effect of faith.

　　I like his hymns very much, but I had never paid much attention to this hymn until recently. There is a wonderful line in stanza 5 that says, “Let me no longer live, but Thee.” It is marvelous that such a line is in this hymn on faith. Faith is to believe that God is and I am not. I do believe that Charles Wesley must have noticed this point. Otherwise, how could he have said in his hymn, “Let me no longer live, but Thee”? This is faith. Faith always annuls us and reveals Christ to us. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 1, “Crystallization-study of the Epistle to the Romans,” pp. 289, 295)

　　Only God is all able, omnipotent; nothing is impossible to Him (Matt. 19:26). But the Lord also indicated that nothing is impossible to faith. So this indicates that faith and God, God and faith, are one. If you do not have God, God remains apart from you. If you have God in you, this God becomes faith. Faith is the subjective God applied to your being. Thus, just as nothing is impossible to God, nothing is impossible to faith.

　　The believers are the believing ones in Christ, who are the household of the faith (Gal. 6:10). In the universe there are many houses with many households. But there is one particular house with millions of members. That is the house of faith. We belong to this house. This is a big family, and the family name is faith. This is the home of faith. We may say that a certain home is the Smith home or the Lee home. Now we are all members of the “faith home.”

　　We are believers, who do not believe nonsensical things. We believe in the word, and the word has three stages: the written word, the living word, and the applied word. Over two thousand years ago, there was only the written word, not the living word, because Christ was not here yet. Today we have the living word. Without Christ as the living word, it was very hard for God’s word to become the applied word as the Spirit. This is because before Christ came, the Spirit was mostly objective; He was not yet within God’s people. Before Christ, the Spirit of God was upon God’s people. But today we have the Triune God embodied in Christ and realized as the all-inclusive, compound, life-giving Spirit indwelling us all the time. Thus, when we touch the Bible, right away the Bible can become living and applied.

　　We are the members of the family, the household, of the faith. This faith house is a house that believes in God through His word. Hebrews 1 says that God has spoken (vv. 1-2). This word becomes the living word, Christ, and this living word is applied by the Spirit. Then we have the Triune God as the word in us.

　　The believers’ faith in Christ brings them into a life union with Christ (John 3:15, 36)… The more we read [the New Testament] , the more we contact the written word of the New Testament. Then we have Christ as the living word and the Spirit as the applied word. The word of God is embodied in Christ and realized in the Spirit to be our faith. This faith brings us into a life union with Christ, who is the embodiment of God realized as the all-inclusive Spirit. Faith links us with the Triune God. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 1, “Crystallization-study of the Epistle to the Romans,” pp. 290-292)

　　Further Reading: CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 1, “Crystallization-study of the Epistle to the Romans,” ch. 7