Faith is NOT active?

"Faith means not doing something but receiving something; it means not the earning of a reward but the acceptance of a gift. A man can never be said to obtain a thing for himself if he obtains it by faith; indeed to say that he does not obtain it for himself but permits another to obtain it for him. Faith, in other words, is not active but passive; and to say that we are saved by faith is to say that we do not save ourselves but are saved only by the one in whom our faith is reposed; the faith of man presupposes the sovereign grace of God." -J. Gresham Machen


I don't know about you, but I got kinda dizzy the first time through reading the above quote. So I read it again. And again.

And I kept getting stuck on the phrase "faith...is not active but passive." Wait...what? Did he really mean to say that? But I think he did.

As I look back over the past few months and consider my "faith," I must admit that I've spent a lot of time launching darts at myself for not having enough faith. But as I read the above words (and Galatians 2:16), I realize that the root is not my lack of faith but my lack of God. The places in my heart and mind that struggled with believing in His plans for me were places that I had yet to allow God to invade with His Truth. I couldn't "turn on" the faith in those areas because I cannot create faith. And acceptance of faith requires humility and submission to God's infinite grace.

Author's Note: I'm sure this is probably an oversimplification of the full spectrum of "faith." This piece of it just happened to really strike me tonight as I considered the past few months of feeling so overwhelmed by the topic of faith and my seemingly small quantity of it in regards to the specifics of God's plan for our family's future. For the full article (which justifies and explains the quote much more fully, click here.)