How's Your Breathing?

Breath in.

Breath out and hold. (Really, do it! It will make sense later.)

Sometimes I wonder why God has made the body to function as it does. I know that our body is designed to constantly need a constant influx of oxygen and an expulsion of carbon dioxide. (I hope you’re still holding your breath. If you neglected to follow directions, shame on you.) Couldn’t God have created us to not need it? That’s a rhetorical question, of course.

Now breath again.

Was that not a great relief to breath in again? As I try the same exercise rereading what I’ve written, I start to get a tingling in my chest, my toes start to curl and my body starts to fidget uncontrollably. My body is telling me that I need some air!

I can’t tell you much about the biological aspects of what is happening when we stop breathing. I just know we begin to suffocate. I know I don’t like it. I feel my finiteness. It reveals my need of something outside of me. And while it is something that is usually there, it is something I really have no control over.

Over the past several months, I have been focusing and meditating on two huge subjects: the Gospel and faith. I’ve learned a lot about both. It has been awesome! I’ve in no way perfected it, but that’s the beauty of justification: having been declared righteous in the sight of God because of Christ’s imputed righteousness upon me (Thanks Josh!).

Getting back to faith, the Lord has given me much more clarity with the necessity of faith in fighting sin than I have ever had before. It is only by faith through the working of the Holy Spirit that I will ever find true, God pleasing victory. Anything outside of faith is “Cainic” (Hebrews 11:4), if I may be so bold as to coin a term or so dumb as to mess up one that already exists and forget its existence.

Now that I’ve got that down pat (sprinkled with a pinch of sarcasm), I figured I should be on the easy street to godliness. One moment, I’m praying, “Lord, help me to live by faith. I recognize that you are infinitely better than anything the world can ever offer me.” And, the Lord leads me into sweet fellowship with Him. Then as I’m walking down the yellow brick road of “holiness”, I find a loose brick and fall flat on my face. How could this be? I had sought the Lord and had been living by faith.

Then it dawned on me. Somehow, I had forgotten to continue to live by faith. I had ignorantly thought that since I had put my faith in Christ a few hours ago, that it would still be good for now. I had realized that living by faith is just like breathing: it must remain constant and consistent.

Romans 1:17

For in it God's righteousness is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.

When we breath, that breath is efficacious for that moment. The second we stop breathing, we start suffocating. The very instant, we stop living by faith, we start suffocating spiritually. Just as the breath I took when I began writing this is no longer efficacious for this moment, the faith that I had two hours ago is no longer efficacious for this moment... now.

So, as we go through each day, we must constantly and consistently live by faith. The moment we stop, we should feel it. If you don’t, check your pulse. It should be just as natural for us as breathing. And with each new breath of faith, we will become renewed and invigorated with power of the Holy Spirit and the righteousness of Christ that has been poured out on us who believe.