How many Christians miss out on the great duty of affirmation? When you pray in your special prayer, in your daily longer prayer, do you give time to affirming the things you believe? Do you praise God? You cannot rehearse the confession of faith every time you pray, but you can pick out something. You can pick out one or two attributes of God. Or you can pick out a doctrine of the faith such as the perseverance of believers. We owe it to him. We owe God our praise, but we owe to him our delight and thanksgiving in the great truths that are our faith. Every day you and I should affirm before God thankfully some aspect of our faith. It will lift us up in our hearts and consolidate us, and we will understand these things so much better. We will then feel our debt to God and our privilege for each thing all the more and do it without wavering.
This is not the same Greek word that is translated ‘wavering’ in the Epistle of James. Literally it means without being put under pressure and leaning over. Supposing there is some great trial comes into your life, and that you collapse in self-pity: your faith is kind of pushed out of the way. You can imagine somebody going through thick undergrowth, and pushing out of the way every obstruction. That is what the trouble has done to your faith; it has pushed it out of the way; your faith, your belief system has been bent over. Do not let that happen when you have your trial or your great trouble, but affirm your faith to yourself in praise and thanksgiving to God. ‘Whatever happens to me, whatever is going on around me I should stand. I may perhaps have failed initially in my response, but Christ pleads for me and he is near his people; he will bless and answer prayer, and I trust in him and what he has done for my soul. He will hold me and see me through to the end and affirm my faith.’ Don't let it be bent out of the way.
And another aspect of profession is witness. Do we grow selfish as Christians and seldom witness to others? Profession means personal affirmation and profession also means witness to others. This is the third element of our priestly duty. The priest had to approach God, the priest had to sacrifice – that was the symbol of repentance and forgiveness – and the priest, thirdly, had to teach and profess the great doctrines of the faith even in Old Testament times.