There is no instrumentality without faith, no blessing without faith. Faith must be exercised for anything spiritual to be accomplished. Every prayer you ever utter to God for yourself, for your circumstances, for some provision on behalf of your wife, your husband, your children, someone to whom you witness, your Sunday school children, or an overseas workers; if it is made without faith nothing can be done. Without faith on the part of someone, the Lord Jesus Christ could work no mighty miracles. And that is still true today. The most precious thing you have is your faith. Do you exercise it daily? Do you remember your responsibility to exercise faith in every trial, in every prayer? Every prayer is made with a statement of faith in the power of God and in the power of Christ, and you mean it with all your heart. This is the purpose of this entire passage.
Where does this faith come from? You were given it. It is attached to you. It's part of you. You are entrusted with it. But you must exercise it. The faith will not earn anything; it will not pay, it will not deserve or earn. It is only the hand held out and grasping on the promises of God. It is called appropriating faith. If you don't have a hand to reach out to God, then your prayer can't be answered. So why don't we look after our faith? Why don't we ask ourselves daily, have I exercised faith today? Why don't we begin the day with an exercise of faith, and like Abraham at the start of the chapter, say, ‘Here I am.’
For Abraham, the trial is over. Christ is seen. Says the Lord Jesus Christ to the scribes and the Pharisees, ‘Abraham saw my day and was glad.’ God gave him a tremendous insight even into how the Father would feel when the Son was offered up on Calvary's cross, no doubt about that. Abraham was a prophet, had a personal insight. He stood as an example of faith. Isaac stood, as a shining example to all who are young in years. Don’t let youth pass and look back one day and say to yourself, ‘How I wish I had made those difficult decisions when I was young, and stood by the word, and obeyed the Lord, and held my ground, and trusted him. We all look back at times when we didn't trust, and we didn't exercise this golden gift of faith that God has given us, and so we were not provided for. How precious is the faith, given by God, refined by him, if we exercise it, use it daily. Faith is never applied in vain. Trust the Lord, and that means obey him in everything.
There are two psalms (Psalm 89 and Psalm 132) in which David is promised by God that he would have a seed, a very special seed, through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed. Through that seed, which is Christ, his kingdom would stand for ever. But in both those psalms it is said, very specifically, that the Lord swore unto David, made a covenant with David, and yet there is no record in 2 Samuel 7, where the promise is made, that God made any oath to David, or swore to David. That has created some problems from time to time, because people have said, ‘There is a discrepancy in the Bible. These two psalms both say that God made a covenant and there is no sign of a covenant. So what is the explanation? And as far as I know, the first person on record to give the correct explanation was Martin Luther when he said, ‘The promise, the oath made to Abraham, is what is appropriated, because it was made to Abraham, and God swore by himself. That oath attaches to the promise wherever it is subsequently made. So the promise is made to David: you will have the seed, the Messiah, and the oath comes with it from Abraham. So it is not actually mentioned in 2 Samuel 7, but we have to assume it is there, which the later psalms do.