Faith To Live By by Prince Derek

Author:Prince, Derek [Prince, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Whitaker House
Published: 1998-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Faith Must Be Confessed

Once faith has come, there are three phases of development through which it must pass: confession, outworking, and testing. We may call these the three great “musts” of faith. Faith must be confessed with the mouth; faith must be worked out in action; faith must be tested by tribulation.

Confession with the Mouth

The words confess and confession are important scriptural terms with a special meaning. The Greek verb homologeo, normally translated “to confess,” means literally “to say the same as.” Thus, confession is “saying the same as.” However, translators sometimes use the related words profess and profession in place of confess and confession. The phrase “profess our faith” is widely used among many Christians and is synonymous with “confess our faith,” which is the term that I will use in this chapter. Regardless of which word is used, the basic meaning of confess and profess remains the same: “to say the same as.”

In this special sense, confession is always related directly to God’s Word. Confession is saying the same with our mouths as God says in His Word. It is making the words of our mouths agree with the written Word of God.

In Psalm 116:10, the psalmist said, “I believed, therefore have I spoken” (kjv). In 2 Corinthians 4:13, Paul applied these words to the confession of our faith: “But having the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, ‘I believed, therefore I spoke,’ we also believe, therefore also we speak.” Speaking is the natural way for faith to express itself. Faith that does not speak is stillborn.

The whole Bible emphasizes that there is a direct connection between our mouths and our hearts. What happens in the one can never be separated from what happens in the other. In Matthew 12:34, Jesus told us, “For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart.” Today’s English Version renders this, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” In other words, the mouth is the overflow valve of the heart. Whatever comes out through that overflow valve indicates the contents of the heart.

In the natural world, if the water that comes from the overflow valve of a cistern contains particles of grit or fungus, then it does no good to claim that the water in the cistern is pure. There must be grit or fungus somewhere in it. So it is with the contents of our hearts. If our hearts are filled with faith, then that will be expressed in what we say with our mouths. But if words of doubt or unbelief come out of our mouths, they inevitably indicate that there is doubt or unbelief somewhere in our hearts.

As a hospital attendant with the British forces in North Africa, I worked closely with a Scottish doctor who was in charge of a small field hospital that cared only for dysentery cases. Every morning, as we made our rounds, the doctor invariably addressed each patient with the same two opening sentences: “How are

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