As Christians we are believers. And there are many blessings to believing. But believing in something must ultimately lead to experiencing what we believe. If we are to take up our cross daily and follow Him, then by the Holy Spirit there must be a way to make all that Christ experienced through the cross our daily experience.

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Show Notes:

According to James, faith without works is dead. If you say, “I believe in riding bicycles,” do you stand back and never get on a bicycle? No, you jump on a bike and start riding it. This applies to your walk with God. If you want to walk with God, then you cannot stand back and say, “I believe in walking with God,” and yet never do anything to walk with Him. Walking with God is a daily experience of your belief in God.

Yeshua (Jesus) said that to be His follower you must take up your cross daily. That means the cross of Christ must be a daily experience in your life and not just a belief about the cross. That is the purpose of baptism. It is to take all you believe and manifest it in your life as an experience. It is not just a sacrament that we do religiously. If we are truly baptized into Christ, then His sufferings and death to the flesh, His life in resurrection, and His ascension to the Father and reigning with Him can all be experiential realities for us.

Do you find yourself struggling to believe God or struggling to be faithful to your beliefs? It is not that you need to try harder to believe. You need to experience the faith that you already have. In your daily prayer life and waiting on the Lord, ask the Holy Spirit to lead you into deeper spiritual experiences and make what you believe the reality in your life.

Key Verses:

• Luke 9:22–23. “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must … take up his cross daily and follow Me.”
• Matthew 10:38. “He who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.”
• Romans 6:3–13. “Consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.”
• James 2:26. “Faith without works is dead.”

Quotes:

• “Faith is something that enables us to move on into experience. Faith leads to works, and without works faith is dead.”
• “We have to be able to say, ‘I know the cross because I have visited the cross. I’ve experienced what Christ experienced on that cross with Him. I watched Him as though I was standing at the foot of the cross, embracing it as He was suffering upon it.’”
• “I think we should take up the reality of His death, His burial, and His resurrection so that they are experiences to us that we have connected with, even if it’s by a deeper and deeper revelation through the Holy Spirit.”

Takeaways:

1. We must understand that we walk by the Spirit, and we have the Holy Spirit through whom the Lord has granted for us to be able to experience our faith.
2. Faith without works is dead. The real purpose of faith is for us to progress from faith into the works or the experiences that we are to have because of our faith.
3. By the Holy Spirit let us be immersed experientially in everything Christ experienced in His suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension. This is what baptism is all about.