Luther once said that we need to understand that when God creates faith in the heart of a human being it is as big a deal as the creation of the world.
“The impulse to bring God and us together again comes from God. We flee. God pursues us, overcomes the distance, and breaks through the opposition in order to bring us back. His loving capture makes us willing to surrender. His mercy, challenging and pulling us makes us want to come to him. His drawing becomes our seeking; his giving, our taking; his asking, our “yes”; his assurance, our “amen”. Christian truth is not something that we try to make ourselves believe; it is a message which we find we cannot disbelieve. God pours his love into our hearts (Romans 5:5) with an urgency that we cannot escape. Our surrender to the truth is not a sullen submission. Tasting God’s mercy we are really persuaded. We see the Saviors gentle way in the words: “I gave them the word you gave me, and they learned the truth that I came from you, and they believe that you sent me” (John 17:8). As we believe what God tells us about His Son we become righteous. “The righteousness of God comes without the law to all who believe, just by their believing in Jesus Christ”. We are now “Holy sinners”: there was nothing in us to which we could point and say “here I did not need forgiveness”; now there is nothing to which we cannot point and say, “it is holy.” Real faith is always individual faith. The salvation which God has prepared for all John 1:29; 3:16; 2 Corinthians 5;19; 1st Timothy 2:6 reaches its goal only when an individual says “I believe”. Then the universal fact of salvation of the human race becomes a personal, intellectual, and emotional, bond between a man and his God. “. [1] I would submit it as it is at this point that the missionary impetus really begins, and the person in Christ, says to himself, “this truth that I now believe is so good, so important, that I need to tell others. ”
[1] W.F. Beck, “The Basis of Our Faith”, CTM, June 1952
