From the NSA website:

sniffle there’s my old neighbors…..

There is one song that I can say with absolute certainty would be on my ‘top five songs of all time’ list. That song is by Andrew Peterson, and it is called Canaan Bound. Below are the lyrics.
This guy doesn’t get enough attention. I don’t hear enough of my friends talking about him and his beautiful music. So I’m just going to keep talking about him til he’s a regular household name.

And sorry about the lack of comments. Something must have happened to ‘ol Kris’s server.

The words ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in our day are increasingly becoming (to use a word that is quickly becoming over used, but still quite accurate) abstractions. They are thought of as concepts that exist in our heads, and have little to no relation to the physical world. Our own private little credos.

I think ‘trust’ is a word that means the same thing, but which has not lost that connection to the real world. When we speak of trust, it pretty much always has to do with some decision or action we make. I trust that you won’t steal from me, so I let you in my house. I trust that you won’t gossip, so I open myself intimately to you. I trust that you will catch me, so I fall into your arms. Etc.

Without the doing of something, trusting is pretty much meaningless. I think the same can be said of faith. Without our submission to God in obedience, faith doesn’t mean anything. There may be a situation where faith can be spoken of as separate from our actions, but it is those situations which need to be highly qualified. Not the other way around, which is the norm in most reformed circles today. We can’t talk about the presence of works in our life being required in order to be justified, unless with qualify it a thousand times. But, as James says, what is faith without works? It is dead, and does nothing.