"Faith is the sensibleness of what is real in the work of redemption... so the soul that believes doth entirely depend on God for all salvation... It is the delight of a believing soul to abase itself and exalt God alone." -- Jonathan Edwards, God Glorified in Man's Dependence from Selected Sermons of Jonathan Edwards edited by H. Norman Gardiner
Faith reinforces the factual reality of redemption. Faith infers the excellence of the object and the futility of the subject. When a man places his faith in Jesus alone, He is communicating, by necessity, that his salvation is from God, through God, for God and to God alone. It is itself a statement of abasement. To have faith in Jesus is to exalt Him to the exclusion of anything else.
Faith looks not to itself, but to Jesus alone. It excludes the seer in favor of what is seen. It ignores what is seen by sight and looks to what is seen by grace. It makes much of God's invisible qualities made visible and little of the Christian's visible qualities made invisible in His presence. Like a candle's flame swallowed up by the blaze of the midday sun, faith takes no credit for the light of day and adds nothing to it.
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