How to Have a Rock Solid Faith | Part 2

Hope is an anchor for our souls. Listen closely to Adrian Rogers.

What good is an anchor without a solid rock? Welcome to the Bible. We may not even come from the world, from our flesh, or the devil himself, but our conflict teaches us consistency. What happens when faith takes its full effect? If you have your Bible, turn to Romans chapter 5 as Adrian Rogers delivers part 2 of How to Have a Rock Solid Faith. Listen. Is it peace, or is it tribulation?

The answer is yes. Now, we read about the peace of God in verse 1, therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. But notice verse 3, and not only so, but we glory in tribulations. Don't think, dear friend, that when you get saved, that all you get is peace. And there's no problem, no hard faith, no tears, no disappointment, oh, no. When God is going to build into you a rock-solid faith, He's going to mix in some tribulation.

Four things I want you to notice. Point number one, conversion brings conflict. Did you get that? Conversion brings conflict. Now, the word tribulation means pressure.

That's literally what the word means. God is going to bring pressure into your life because without pressure, God will not make you a strong saint. You need conflict. You need pressure. Conversion brings conflict.

A diamond is a lump of coal that's been under pressure for a long, long time. Now, this conflict and this pressure may come from Satan, or it may come from God, but God is over it all. Satan will bring conflict to cause you to stumble. God will bring conflict to cause you to stand, but you're going to know pressure as a Christian. The late, great Vance Habner said, he said, I'm often amused and amazed by the way we equate Christianity with success, popularity, and prosperity.

We may not admit it, but we may not admit it, but we use the same old gauge that the world uses, except we use religious language. It would appear that gain is godliness with us in spite of Paul's formula, that godliness plus contentment equals prosperity. Now, I'm telling you, folks, that the first step in God-building a rock-solid faith is conflict.

Step number two, now, this is what God is going to do to build character into your life. Conflict teaches constancy. Conflict teaches constancy. Notice again, knowing that tribulation worketh patience. Now, what is patience? Not the ability to thread a needle. Not the ability to finish a crossword puzzle. No, the word patience means constancy.

It means consistency. Now, come up close. I'm going to tell you something. You will never learn much of anything worth learning if you don't have constancy, endurance, and patience. You just won't do it. If you want to learn how to play the piano, you're going to have to learn the scales.

If you're going to learn Greek, you're going to have to study the verbs. If you're not severe, you're going to have to endure. There is no instant maturity. Conversion brings conflict, and conflict is meant to teach continuance, constancy. The Bible calls it patience. What do you do when the conflict comes?

There are four things you can do. Some people just retreat. They just run away from conflict. Whether physically or emotionally, they get a plane ticket. They take a pill. They turn up a bottle.

They take a needle. They take a gun. They just try to run from conflict. One man said, the way to fight a woman is with your hat. He said, what do you mean? He said, grab it and run. So some, when conflict comes, they retreat.

Others, when conflict comes, they resent. I mean, they say, I gave my heart to Jesus Christ. I went down there. I got baptized. I started going to Sunday school.

I started tithing. Now look what is going to happen to me. And they pout. They get a grudge with God. They become cynical. They don't retreat. They resent. Others resign. They just cave in. They give up.

They lie down on the field and surrender their shield, and they give in to discouragement and despondency. But what is God's plan? God's plan is not for you to retreat, not for you to resent, not for you to resign, but to resolve by faith. That you will follow Him. Faith, listen to me, faith is shown more in patience and constancy than in any other way. If you really have faith when trouble comes, you will endure. Faith is not receiving from God the things you want nearly so much as it is accepting from God the things He gives.

Translation, works, patience. Don't try to wiggle out of what God is doing to you. Job said, though he slay me, yet will I trust him. Winston Churchill was a man who looked like a bulldog, stood like a bulldog. He was the one who said, never, never, never, never give up. And he reminded us that a bulldog has his nose slanted backward so he can hold on and still breathe.

That's a bulldog. Now what you need to do is to get a bulldog grip on Almighty God and like Job say, I don't care what is happening, what my children do, what the doctor tells me, what my banker tells me, I will not let go my anchor holds. You see, what does this constant say? William Barclay describes it so well, I want you to listen to what he said. It is not the patience that can sit down and bow its head and let things descend upon it and passively endure until the storm has passed. It is the spirit which can bear things, not simply with resignation but with blazing hope. It is not the spirit which can sit statically enduring in one place, but the spirit which bears things because it knows that these things are leading to a goal of glory. It is not patience which grimly waits for the end, but patience which radiantly hopes for the dawn. That's the kind of endurance that the child of God has. Oh, I wish you would hear what he says.

This conversion brings conflict. Conflict teaches constancy and constancy develops character. Now watch it. Look in verse 4 if you will. And patience, experience. Now what does he mean to experience? Character.

Patience, constancy brings character. And God wants to build into you character. God wants to build into you rock and roll. God wants to build into you rock, solid faith. God is building you saints with spiritual steel and spiritual concrete.

You see, reputation is what others think about you. Character is what God and your wife know about you. God wants to build character into your life. This word experience was used in the Bible of gold that's tried in the fire and comes out pure.

The same word. That is, it has character to it. You see, God is going to put you in the fire of affliction. Why? To test you. The faith that can't be tested can't be trusted. So God is going to put you in the fire of affliction.

To test you. And that's the way that you're going to learn how much dross there may be in your life that needs to be burned out of your life. The sludge that's in the gold ore. You see, that's the way God builds character. I hate to tell you this, folks, but the time that I've grown the most and the time you will grow the most, not when everything's been going fine with me. You think back about those times when you grew the most in the Lord and most likely that there were times when you were going through sorrow and pressure and trouble. Isn't that true? Listen, it is just simply true that God in the furnace of affliction, somebody wrote these lines, I walked a mile with pleasure.

She chatted all the way but left me none the wiser for all she had to say. I walked a mile with sorrow and not a word, said she, but oh, the things I learned from her when sorrow walked with me. God wants to build character into your life. And what God does is not to remove you from difficulty or pain. But to the contrary, God is in the transformation business. You know, God did not take away evil. What God does, he transforms it. God didn't stop the crucifixion.

He just gave us Easter. You see, God's method is not the method of substitution. Most of us want God to give us health instead of sickness. We want God to give us wealth instead of poverty.

We want God to give us friendship rather than loneliness. We just want God to substitute things. But God is not in the substitution business. God is in the transformation business. God took Paul's weakness and he transformed it into strength. He took his suffering. He transformed it into glory. You're going to have character, which is also translated experience, without experience.

That's the reason why I think the King James Version translates it experience. Somebody was talking to a businessman. He said, how do you become a success in business? He said, good decisions.

Well, he said, that's fine. He said, where do you learn how to make good decisions? He said, experience.

He said, well, where do you get experience? He said, bad decisions. You see, what God is going to do, God is going to put you in the furnace of affliction and God is going to build your character. You can be instantly spiritual, but you cannot be instantly mature. And by the way, you can be young once, but you can be immature for a long time.

Now listen here. Conversion brings conflict. Conflict teaches constancy.

Constancy builds character. If you will stay in the fire, God knows what he's doing. And most of us just want to get out of the fire.

We don't want to stay there. But they say that when the refiner who's refining the gold, he knows it's pure when he can see his face reflected in it. And what God is looking for is his character, his likeness reflected in our lives. Now, here's the fourth and final thing. Are you following with me?

You're following along? Now listen. Conversion brings conflict.

I'm sorry, but that's true. Conflict teaches constancy, patience, endurance. Stay in there. When you do, that constancy will build character. Then you know what will happen to you? That character will give confidence.

That's the last thing. That's the rock solid faith I'm talking about. The confidence.

Look at it here in God's Word. And patience, experience, character, and experience what? Hope. Hope! Now, what does the Bible mean when it says hope? It doesn't mean maybe so.

It might be. No, friend, you need to understand this, and if you don't get this, you're going to miss the whole thing. When the Bible uses the word hope, it means rock solid. Rock solid faith. That's what it means.

For example, the second coming of Jesus is called what? The blessed hope. That doesn't mean a blessed maybe.

No, no. He is talking about hope as an anchor of the soul. All right, now let me give you the scripture that I thought of. Hebrews chapter 6 and verse 19, which hope we have as an anchor of the soul. Both sure and steadfast.

What good is an anchor without a solid rock? Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul? Steadfast.

Sure. You say, well, I want a rock solid faith. All right, conversion brings conflict, and conflict teaches constancy, and constancy brings character, and character brings confidence. You've been through the fire, and you know He has not failed you.

You know that He has kept His Word. You know that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Do you know what hope is? Hope is faith in the future tense.

I mean, it believes God not only for the present, but it believes God for the future. Thomas Brooks said, Hope can see heaven through the thickest clouds. It doesn't matter what. I have that absolute confidence. Now look at it. He says here, look, and patience, experience, and experience hope. Now watch this. Make us not ashamed.

What does that mean? Make us not ashamed. It means it will never disappoint you. He cannot fail. He will not fail.

But you need to get a bulldog grip on the things that really count. No one ever has or ever can put His faith in Jesus and be disappointed that He did it. I read somewhere of a Salvation Army lass who had been witnessing to a family in a poor neighborhood. There were some people who lived in an upstairs tenement, and the father in the home was an atheist and a vowed atheist, a philosophical atheist. And this girl who worked in the Salvation Army had been trying to lead this family to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The father was in a conflict with her, but she just kept loving and kept going. The son in that family grew ill, and he was critically ill.

They didn't have enough of whatever it took to put him in the hospital. He was dying at home. This girl went back one more time to see if she could witness, to see if she could share the love of Jesus.

And as she stood outside the door, she could hear what was going on in the door and reported it later. The boy asked his dad, Dad, am I going to die? And the father said, Son, you will die. But don't worry about it. After you die, it will be all over. You won't feel anything. You won't know anything.

You will have forgotten the pain and the sorrow. So don't worry about it, son. I love you, son. And just hold on, son.

Just hold on. After a while, it will be over. And the father said, the son said, but father, I'm afraid, and I don't want to die. Father, I need some help. And the father said, son, my son, I love you. It will be over in a moment.

It will be all over, all over. Son, hold on. Just hold on. And that Salvation Army last said, I heard that boy pathetically say, father, you're telling me to hold on, but there's nothing to hold on to.

Friend, I want to tell you something. When you know Jesus, and when your feet touch those chilly waters of death, and when the winds are blowing, your anchor will hold. You will have a rock solid faith. That's what hope means. That's what hope means.

Conversion brings conflict. Conflict teaches constancy. Constancy builds character. And character enables us to trust God in the darkest storm. Which hope we have is an anchor of the soul. The apostle Paul in the book of Ephesians talked about those who were lost. And he talked about them being alienated from the life of God without hope in this world. Aren't you glad there is a hope? Not a maybe, a hope, a certainty.

That's what we have today. Now, it begins with conversion. If you're not certain that you're saved, let me tell you how to be saved. Would you pray a prayer like this? Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus, I know that you love me. Thank you for paying for my sin with your blood on the cross. My sin deserves judgment.

Thank you for taking my judgment. Thank you for bearing the penalty for my sin. Thank you for being my Savior. Thank you, Lord. And now, Lord, just by faith, I open my heart.

I receive you. I believe you're the Son of God. I believe you paid the full debt for my sin.

I believe that God raised you from the dead. And now, right now, I receive you into my heart as my Lord and Savior this moment. Forgive my sin. Cleanse me and save me. I'm not asking for a special feeling.

I'm not looking for some kind of sign. I stand on your Word. I just trust you by faith. And, Lord Jesus, because you died for me, I will live for you. I will not be ashamed of you. I will confess you openly. I will follow you the rest of my life by your grace and for your glory.

Amen. Please, let us hear from you today. Now, if you'd like to order a copy of today's message, call us at 1-877-LOVEGOD and mention the title, How to Have a Rock Solid Faith. This message is also part of the insightful Foundations for Our Faith series. With that complete collection, all 27 powerful messages, call 1-877-LOVEGOD or go to lwf.org slash radio.

Or you can write us at Love Worth Finding, Box 38600, Memphis, Tennessee 38183. Do you want to have a rock solid faith in spite of stormy circumstances? Remember, conversion brings conflict, which brings constancy, which brings character, which brings confidence. We hope you'll join us next time for more timeless truth from Adrian Rogers, right here on Love Worth Finding. Here at Love Worth Finding Ministries, our mission is to share the profound truth of the gospel so simply anyone can understand. That's why we're excited to tell you about our newest book, His Story, rooted in the timeless teachings of Adrian Rogers, which is rooted in the truth of God's word. This book will help you learn practical ways to increase your head and heart knowledge of Jesus.

The goal of the book is to help you see Jesus in all of history and better understand the message of redemption in the Bible from start to finish. To purchase your copy, go to our online store at lwf.org slash radio. Or you can write us at Love Worth Finding, Box 38600, Memphis, Tennessee 38183. And thank you for your continued support of Love Worth Finding.