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Colin Smith: How come your faith survived all the unanswered questions of your life? How come your faith survived all the bitter disappointments that you've faced? How come your faith survived all the exhausting struggles that you've been through? How come that at the end of all that, you still would have to say, I love Jesus Christ? The amazing thing is not that your faith is weak, but that it exists at all.

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. And Colin, that's quite a statement. The amazing thing is not that your faith is weak, but that it exists at all.

Colin Smith: It is amazing and it is wonderful. And here's the deal: if my faith was simply my commitment to Jesus Christ, if that's all that it was, I would have uncommitted myself a long time ago. And I think many people listening will say, if it was just me, then the unanswered questions, the big disappointments, and the exhausting struggles would have absolutely floored me.

So why didn't they? And the answer is that when a person is born again, there's a new life in you. The Holy Spirit lives within you. It's like you're born again of a living seed that is the enduring word of God. And what God does can never get snuffed out. It's like putting a bulb in the ground, and you dump all this stuff on the top of it, but its life still presses up through.

The amazing thing is that God guards you and he keeps you and he preserves his own. And I think that's marvelous. I think that's something to celebrate.

Steve Hiller: It is, and we're going to see that today from the book of Jude. If you can, join us there as we continue a message, "Build Yourself Up." Here's Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Build yourselves up in your most holy faith. There may be times when your faith seems to be at a low ebb. You feel you're not growing. There may even be times when you say to yourself, I wonder if I'm really a Christian at all. And Jude says, here's where you need to begin. Build yourself up in your most holy faith. That's the first thing you need to work on if you're to get yourself in spiritual shape.

The obvious question then is, okay, how are we going to do that? And I want to suggest four very practical exercises—four exercises that will help us to build ourselves up in our most holy faith. First, give thanks for your faith. Now, one of Satan's greatest strategies against a believer is to seek to discredit your faith. Have you ever had something running in your mind that says, for all the years I'm a Christian, my faith seems to be so puny, so weak, so small, so embarrassingly little in its growth and development? You see, that's what the enemy loves to shoot into your mind.

And there's only one way to counteract that strategy, and that is to recognize that the faith that you have, however small it is, is a miracle and a gift from God and therefore to give thanks for it. Now, if your faith is at a low ebb this morning, this is where you begin. You look up into the face of Almighty God and you say, thank you that your Holy Spirit is at work in me. And when you begin to give thanks for what God has done and for what he is doing in your own life, then you will find that a cloud lifts and your faith begins to grow.

Faith is like a bulb that is planted in the ground. Dig out a hole, and then what's the next thing that happens? A load of dirt gets dumped on top of this little bulb. It's a miracle that it survives, isn't it? But you see it has life in it. And that life pushes its way through all of the muck. And eventually, you see a little shoot just peeping through the ground. You say, that's amazing. There's life there.

Now, you think of everything that is arrayed against your faith. How come your faith survived all the unanswered questions of your life? How come your faith survived all the bitter disappointments that you've faced? How come your faith survived all the exhausting struggles that you've been through? How come that at the end of all that, you still would have to say, I love Jesus Christ?

The amazing thing is not that your faith is weak, but that it exists at all. Begin here. There is only one explanation of your faith: it is the gift of God. It is the result of the prayers of Jesus that have sustained it when all kinds of opposition was dumped upon it. And it is the ministry of the Holy Spirit that has caused it to keep growing.

The faith that you have, however weak and however small it sometimes seems to you, is a miracle. It is the work of Almighty God in your soul. So begin here, thank God for that miracle. Recognize what he's done, and your faith will begin to grow. So there's the first thing. Give thanks for your faith.

Secondly, affirm your faith. Now notice that Jude says we're to build ourselves up in our most holy faith. He's talking, of course, about the faith referred to in verse three—this faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. So it's both personal in that it's your faith, but it's also bigger than you because your faith is to embrace the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.

And one of the ways in which you can build yourself up in your most holy faith is to affirm what you believe. That is why Christians throughout the centuries have found it very helpful in worship to recite creeds as part of their worship to God. It is a very useful thing to do and perhaps something that we should do more often. I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

Some of you know the name of C.H. Spurgeon. Spurgeon had the awesome responsibility of preaching to vast crowds in London over 100 years ago. When the time came for Spurgeon to enter the pulpit, there were times when he felt so overwhelmed he struggled to get up there and speak. I have to tell you honestly that I know how he felt. To speak personally for just a moment, to speak the word of God in such a way that people would see Jesus is an awesome responsibility.

To stand up and seek to press home the claims of Jesus Christ, knowing that you are charged to speak of eternal things, sometimes feels utterly overwhelming. And years ago, I found out something that Spurgeon did to help him and it has helped me ever since I discovered it. He used to speak from a pulpit that was raised high. There was a gallery in the church where he spoke, and as he climbed these 20 steps, feeling the weight of his responsibility, he said one thing to himself: I believe in the Holy Spirit.

You picture him. He's climbing these steps. I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in the Holy Spirit. If I didn't believe in the Holy Spirit, there's no way I could even begin to attempt what I'm called to do. But I do believe in the Holy Spirit, therefore I press forward to do what he has called me to do today.

Now, you may want to say that as you step into a job interview this week, or perhaps as you're admitted into a hospital, or perhaps as you go into a law court or some other situation that God puts you in that you find quite overwhelming. And you need to say to yourself this affirmation of your faith: I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in God the Father Almighty.

Maybe Satan comes and he keeps raising in your mind some sin that you've confessed and you've brought it to Christ, but he causes you to feel ashamed over and over and over again and you can't get free. How are you going to counteract that? The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from every sin. Satan, I believe in the blood of Jesus. I believe in the blood of Jesus.

Read the Psalms. You'll find that they're full of affirmations of faith to build up the soul. Why are all these affirmations of faith there? Because this is what we most need to feed our faith upon. The world, the flesh, and the devil are always assaulting your mind with lies and doubts and unanswerable questions. So feed your soul on affirmations of what you believe.

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. He is good. Nothing that ever happens to me will be without his work to bring my good out of it. Give thanks to the Lord for his love endures forever. I may feel so desperate, but I am surrounded by his love because it endures forever. Affirming your faith by confessing what God has revealed will be like fresh air to your soul and it will cause you to grow.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith in a message called "Build Yourself Up." If you joined us late, have to leave early, or you want to go back and listen to this again, you can do that at our website, openthebible.org.

Well, I love reading, but admittedly I don't have a lot of time to read. So when I'm in the car, I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I listen to a lot of podcasts. And maybe that's you; you resonate and identify with that. If that's the case, we're excited about a brand new podcast we want you to check out. It's called Hike Through the Bible.

Colin Smith: Yeah, and the Hike Through the Bible podcast will take you on a journey through the entire Bible story, giving you the option of listening or watching rather than reading. And in each episode, I'll read a chapter of my book, Hike Through the Bible, and then I'll discuss it with some friends. I hope you'll join me in hiking through the Bible. You'll grow in your faith, you'll deepen your grasp of Scripture, and you'll come to love Jesus more. It's not too late to get started. You can subscribe to the Hike Through the Bible podcast for free wherever you get your podcasts, and you'll find more information at openthebible.org/hike.

Steve Hiller: Well, thank you, Colin. I do hope that you'll take that hike through the Bible with Pastor Colin. I certainly look forward to doing that together. Again, if you want more information, openthebible.org/hike. Back to the message. Here's Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Now here's the third exercise. The first one was giving thanks for your faith. The second in this first workout was affirming your faith. And here's the third: exercise your faith. Faith is like a muscle, and the way in which it grows strong is when it is used. And all of you who have ever worked out in a gym know that if you want to develop a particular muscle, the way that you do it is that you put some weight upon it and pull or push against that weight, and in this way you will build the strength of that muscle.

Now, it's exactly the same with your faith. How does your faith grow? Your faith will grow when some weight is put upon it, when your faith has to pull or to push against some great burden. And that's not happening all the time in life, but it does happen particularly when God allows some trial to come into your life.

Suddenly one Friday you discover you haven't a job. Your girlfriend or your boyfriend packs you in. Your business bottom line comes out the wrong color. What you had always feared actually comes to pass. And suddenly, God has thrust you into the gymnasium. This is the moment God is handing you the weights. This is where faith will grow if it is exercised.

Whenever God allows you to face some burden, some trial, some weight in your life, he is calling you to exercise faith. And faith grows as it is exercised under pressure—that weight that he's given you and allowed you to carry. Now, one reason why many people never really grow in faith is that when God put you in the gymnasium and showed you the weights, you just sat there in a chair.

Going into a gymnasium and looking at the weights will do you no good in terms of your physical fitness if you do not pick them up. And you can go through a trial without ever really praying, without ever really exercising faith in God. You just go through the trial, you come out the other side, you survive it, but you are no stronger spiritually than when you went in because you missed the moment to exercise your faith. You missed your moment in the gymnasium. You allowed your session to pass without doing anything.

Now, if you can identify that pattern in your life, and it happens very often, let me give you this assurance: God will put you in the gymnasium again. Ask God for eyes to see when it happens. Might be a relatively small thing this week, but it's something that goes wrong and you need to exercise faith. Ask God for eyes to see, and then seize the moment and say, "Lord, this time when this has gone wrong, I am going to trust you. Strengthen my faith and cause it to grow."

So give thanks for your faith, affirm your faith, exercise your faith. And here's the last thing: feed your faith on Jesus Christ. Remember that Christian faith is above everything else faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is fed and it is nourished by him. That is why the Bible says, let us fix our eyes on Jesus because he is the author and the finisher of our faith. In other words, my faith won't grow by looking at my faith. My faith will grow by looking at Jesus. You spend an hour contemplating your faith and you'll simply be discouraged. You spend an hour contemplating Jesus and your faith will grow.

Now, Christians in an earlier century used to talk in a phrase that's hardly ever used and not even known in many circles today—about getting a view of Jesus. It's a rather beautiful phrase. What they meant was simply this: they knew that their faith would be fed and nourished by Jesus. And so whenever they read the word or whenever they came to worship, they were looking for the Holy Spirit to give them some fresh glimpse of the reality of the love of Christ and to renew the knowledge of that deep within their own souls.

As I was thinking about this, a memory came back to me strongly. One of the things I loved to do as a kid growing up in Edinburgh was to go and see Scotland play rugby at Murrayfield, the national stadium. Sometimes we got tickets for what was called the schoolboys' enclosure. It was right at the side of the pitch—I know it's a field, but I'm going to call it a pitch. It was magnificent to be right there on the sideline next to the great heroes of the nation. You'll need to translate the sport and you'll need to translate the names. I know all that, but you know what I'm describing.

If we didn't get tickets for the schoolboys' enclosure, we had to go onto the main terrace. Now, this was before all-seater stadiums. We just stood packed like sardines on these banked terraces with some crush barriers every so often. And the problem was that when these terraces were packed with 30,000 people, it was relatively difficult for a kid to see what was going on. But we found the solution: empty drinks cans.

They were a bit more substantial then than they are now, but I can assure you from experience that six large empty drinks cans placed on end together on the ground make an excellent platform that can give you an advantage of between six and nine inches, depending on the brand, to see over the head of the tall man in front of you and to catch a glimpse of the glory that is going on on that field. Now, it wasn't terribly good when the crowd crushed forward.

But I want you to take that picture of a little kid who would only be below the shoulder height at that time of most of the folks in this vast crowd around him. But he's finding a way to get up these extra few inches to peep between some heads on this packed-out terrace because he longs to see the glory of what's going on in the field. And he didn't pay his money for that ticket to stand there looking at the back of the coat of the man in front of him.

That is how you have to approach the word of God. That is how you have to come to worship if you want your faith to grow. We are looking for a fresh glimpse of Jesus. He is here. We discern his presence and his beauty with the eye of faith. We look for him in the word. We ask the Holy Spirit to refresh a glimpse of him and of his love to our hungry and our thirsty souls. That's how you must come to worship.

Has your faith been stretching, as it were, for a glimpse of Jesus in this last hour or have you just been sitting here? See, some of us have become used to worship being rather like an experience of a small kid surrounded by tall men in woolen coats who just kind of stands there and can't actually see a thing of the glory that other people are cheering about that's going on in the field.

We have come so used to never seeing anything that we never expect to see anything. We just read the Bible and come to church and go home. And other people are caught up in the glory of what's going on. They're catching a glimpse of who Jesus is and their souls are being fed, but you don't see it.

There's an old prayer that I've found so helpful. Make the book live to me, O God. Show me thyself within your word. Show me myself. And show me my Savior. And make this book live to me, O God. And if you will come to the word, and if you will come to worship like that, you will find that the Holy Spirit begins to give you glimpses of Jesus. Your soul will be renewed and your faith will be fed and it will grow. You'll start moving from reading about him to fellowshipping with him. You'll find yourself feeding on him.

So here's the first workout for a healthy Christian life. Build yourself up in your most holy faith. You do that as you give thanks for your faith, as you affirm your faith, as you exercise your faith, as you feed your faith on Jesus Christ. And as you do these things, your faith will grow and you will be on the path to getting yourself in spiritual shape.

Steve Hiller: A great way to kick off this new series with this powerful word of encouragement from Pastor Colin. Our message is entitled, "Build Yourself Up." And isn't it great to know that our faith can grow? Well, today's message is just the first in our series Keeping Yourself in Spiritual Shape: Seven Workouts for a Healthy Christian Life.

You know, there's no shortage of materials to help you keep your body in shape, but this series gives you some advice for keeping your soul in shape. And each one of these workouts is drawn from the book of Jude. And as we put these workouts into practice, our spiritual muscles or our faith will begin to grow. So if you're looking to get your spiritual life back into shape this new year, well, this series is for you. If you want a copy of today's message or this entire series, Keeping Yourself in Spiritual Shape, come to our website, openthebible.org.

Well, Colin, it's Friday and the weekend's coming.

Colin Smith: Yeah, and I want to encourage you to get to church on Sunday. You know, across the country people who love Jesus will be gathering to praise him. And if you love Jesus, that's something you'll want to be part of. So find a church where the Bible is opened. And if you live in the Chicago area and you don't have a church home, I'd love for you to join us at The Orchard. There are six locations in the northwest suburbs. For more information, go to theorchard.church. That's theorchard.church.

Steve Hiller: Well, thank you, Colin. And thanks for listening. I'm Steve Hiller and I hope you'll join us next time. This program is a listener-supported production of Open the Bible.

Colin Smith: Hi, this is Pastor Colin again and I want you to know about Watch Your Life. Watch Your Life is a six-session course that is geared for leaders but accessible to every believer. The six sessions will show you how to grow in godliness, how to feed on Christ, how to pray in the Spirit, how to battle temptation, exercise faith, and discern God's will. There are questions at the end of each session and you can use them on your own or you can discuss them with a friend. For more information, visit openthebible.org/courses. That's openthebible.org/courses.