Daily Devotional

August 20

A First Book of Daily Readings

by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (selected by Frank Cumbers)
Sourced from the OPC website

With Christ in the vessel, I smile at the storm

Browning ... defined faith.... ‘With me, faith means perpetual unbelief kept quiet, like the snake ‘neath Michael’s foot’. Here is Michael and there is the snake beneath his foot and he just keeps it quiet under the pressure of his foot.... Faith is unbelief kept quiet, kept down. That is what these men [in the boat on LakeGalilee} (Luke 8:22-5) did not do, they allowed this situation to grip them, they became panicky. Faith, however, is a refusal to allow that. It says: T am not going to be controlled by these circumstances —I am in control.’ So you take charge of yourself, and pull yourself up.... You do not let go, you assert yourself....

That is the first thing, but.... That is not enough, because that may be nothing but resignation. That is not the whole of faith.
Having taken that first step, having pulled yourself up, you then remind yourself of what you believe and what you know.... If only they had stopped a moment and said: ‘Now then what about it? Is it possible that we are going to drown with Him in the boat? Is there anything He cannot do? We have seen His miracles, He turned the water into wine, He can heal the blind and the lame, He can even raise the dead, is it likely that He is going to allow us and Himself to be drowned in this way? Impossible! In any case He loves us, He cares for us, He has told us that the very hairs of our head are all numbered!’ That is the way in which faith reasons. It says: ‘All right, I see the waves and the billows but’—it always puts up this ‘but’. That is faith, it holds on to truth and reasons from what it knows to be fact.

Spiritual Depression, pp. 143–4