The Leap Of Faith Order Printed Copy

Author: David Yonggi Cho
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About the Book

"The Leap of Faith" by David Yonggi Cho is a spiritual guide that explores the importance of trusting in God and taking risks in one's faith journey. Cho shares personal stories and biblical principles to encourage readers to step out in faith and experience the transformative power of God in their lives. It serves as a reminder to trust in God's plan and follow His guidance, even when faced with uncertainty and challenges.

John Owen

John Owen’s life was incredibly difficult. Born in 1616 and dying in 1683, Owen lived through the deaths of his first wife and all of his children, several of whom died in very early childhood. He supported his last surviving daughter when her marriage broke down. He contributed to a political revolution, watched it fail, saw the monarchy restored and wreak a terrible revenge on republicans, and lived in and around London during the persecution that followed. For twenty years he would have seen the decapitated heads of his friends on display around the city. He died fearing that the dissenting churches had largely abandoned the doctrine of the Trinity and justification by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone; and, with Charles II about to be replaced by his openly Catholic brother James, believing that the English Reformation was almost over. Owen was one of the most published writers in the seventeenth century. He published around 8 million words. These writings included books on theology and spirituality, politics and economics, and ranged in length from the largest commentary ever published on the epistle to the Hebrews to a short Latin poem that has never been reprinted. For not all of Owen’s works have been kept in print. The most widely circulating nineteenth-century edition, most of which is published by the Banner of Truth, did not include Owen’s sermon manuscripts that are kept in various English libraries, nor the book for children that Owen published in 1652. Owen was one of England’s earliest children’s authors. The catechisms that Owen published (1645) outlined what he expected children in his congregation to know. These catechisms were published before the Westminster Assembly published its better-known examples. But Owen’s catechisms are in many ways simpler. The Primer (1652), which Owen prepared after the death of several of his children during the years of poor harvests and disease at the end of the 1640s, showed what Owen expected of an ideal Christian home. Its routine would be built around Bible reading and prayer, he believed, and his little book included sample prayers that children could learn to pray in mornings, evenings, and at meals. Owen argued that those who led church services should take account of the needs of children. Services that were too long, he believed, did no one any good. Adult believers should not need written prayers, he believed, and these should be banned from public worship. But children were different and needed all the help they could get. Owen enjoyed many warm friendships. His social network included many of the most famous writers in seventeenth-century England. Among his friends and rivals were John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Bunyan, and Lucy Hutchinson. Owen fell out with Milton and became the subject of one of his sonnets. Owen helped Marvell publish one of his most controversial political pamphlets. He encouraged his publisher, Nathanial Ponder, to publish Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. And he appears to have supported Lucy Hutchinson during her move into London, when she attended and took notes upon his preaching and translated large parts of his Theologoumena Pantodapa (1661)—a translation of which has been published with the title Biblical Theology. Owen’s letters reveal his kindness and care as a pastor, especially to mothers grieving their children’s death. Owen was deeply political. He preached to Members of Parliament on the day after the execution of Charles I, and pinned his hopes for the reformation of church and society on their efforts to transform England into a protestant republic. During the 1650s, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, Owen served on important committees that sought to establish a religious foundation for the new regime. But he grew dismayed by the ways in which the Cromwell family, and the administration they led, seemed to turn away from godly values. In 1658, he worked with leading army officers to create a crisis that, he likely hoped, would call the regime back to its earlier ideals. It failed, and instead created the crisis that was resolved by the restoration of the monarchy, the return of Charles II, and the persecution of dissenters that followed. During the Restoration, Owen kept his head down, and, as persecution slackened in the later 1660s, published pamphlets that argued that dissenters were the economic lifeblood of the English nation. But he was chastened by his attempts at political intervention and came increasingly to realize that his focus should be on things eternal. Owen often changed his mind. As his developing attitudes to political intervention suggest, Owen committed himself to some beliefs and behaviors that he came to regret. In his early years, he changed his churchmanship from Presbyterianism to Congregationalism. He innovated as a Congregationalist, installing as a co-elder and preacher a man who would not be ordained for several years. He argued for the weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper, though it is not clear that he ever persuaded any of his congregations to practice it. He thought carefully about the end times and came to believe that, in the latter days, a large number of Jewish people would be converted to Christianity and would return to live in the Promised Land. He dismissed a great deal of discussion about the millennium, but became convinced that the binding of Satan had yet to be achieved. Owen changed his mind because he kept on studying the Bible. Owen was biblical, through and through, and depended just as much on the Holy Spirit. He certainly believed in a learned ministry–after all, he had taught theology at Oxford and done his best to promote godliness within the student body. But he also trusted the Holy Spirit to guide ordinary Christians in small group Bible studies that did not need to be policed by a formally trained expert. Aside from his own Bible study, which advanced on the serious scholarship represented by the three thousand titles that were included in the catalog of his library published soon after his death, Owen encouraged church members to meet together to study Scripture in private. Owen trusted the Bible and the work of the Spirit after writing about both. Owen was not a philosophically-driven, rationalist theologian. His writing abounds in biblical citations. It is molded and contoured by biblical revelation. But he warned that Christians could approach their study of the Bible with absolutely no spiritual advantage to themselves. Christians who approached the study of the Bible without absolute dependence upon the Spirit who inspired and preserved it would gain no more benefit than Jewish readers did from their Scriptures, he argued. Christians should never choose between entire dependence upon the Bible and the Spirit. Owen believed that the goal of the Christian life was knowing God. Before Owen, no one had ever shown clearly how Christians relate to each person of the Trinity. Owen described the goal of the gospel as revealing the love of the Father, who sent the Son as a redeemer of his people, who would be indwelt, provided with gifts, and united together by the Spirit. Owen’s Communion with God is among his most celebrated achievements—and no wonder. It is the exhalation of his devotion to Father, Son, and Spirit, and the discovery of the limitless love of God. Owen is much easier to read than many people imagine. There is a mystique to Owen—a widespread feeling that his books are too difficult and best left to expert theologians. But Owen’s greatest books were written as sermons for an audience of teenagers. Publishers have begun to modernize Owen’s language in new editions of his works. Now more than ever, it’s time to pick up Owen and find his encouragement for the Christian life.

Can I Follow My New Heart

“Why shouldn’t I follow my heart? If I am a Christian — if God has caused me to be ‘born again’ and has given me ‘a new heart’ — isn’t my new heart trustworthy?” Readers have raised some version of this objection when I’ve exhorted Christians, “Don’t follow your heart.” And the objection is warranted. After all, the Bible clearly teaches that in this era of the new covenant, God writes his law on our new hearts so that we willingly follow him (Jeremiah 31:31–34; Hebrews 8:8–12). This would seem to not merely imply, but even mandate, that Christians should follow their hearts. But the Bible’s description of what a regenerated person actually experiences in this age reveals a more spiritually and psychologically complex picture — one that I believe gives Christians biblical warrant to cultivate a healthy suspicion of what they recognize as their hearts’ desires. So, while we may, and hopefully will, reach a point in our lives as Christians where it’s right, at times, to follow our hearts, allow me to make a brief case that the phrase actually undermines Christians as they labor and struggle to discern their various desires, and that Scripture itself discourages us from thinking this way. War Within How might we summarize the complex picture the Bible paints of the born-again experience in this already-not-yet age? The New Testament explains that when the Spirit brings us from spiritual death to spiritual life (John 5:24; Romans 6:13), we enter a strange new reality. Our regenerated new self emerges, “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” And yet our “old self, which belongs to [our] former manner of life,” is still “corrupt through deceitful desires” (Ephesians 4:22–24). We are “born of the Spirit” (John 3:6) while still inhabiting the “flesh,” our “body of death” in which “nothing good dwells” (Romans 7:18, 24). “The hearts of regenerated people are not yet fully free from the influence of their flesh.” When Christians are born again, we enter into a lifelong internal war where “the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Galatians 5:17). Stepping back and viewing these desires objectively, “the works of the flesh” that result from fleshly desires “are evident,” and so is “the fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:19–23). But Christians often struggle — on the ground, in real time — to discern the desires of the Spirit from the desires of the flesh. This is why the New Testament Epistles are full of exhortations and corrections addressed to Christians. James tells his readers (and us at relevant times) that their “passions are at war within” them (James 4:1). Peter warns his readers (and us), “Do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance” (1 Peter 1:14). Paul describes this internal experience of warring passions as “wretched” (Romans 7:24). And he admonishes the Colossian Christians (and us) with strong language: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5). Why did these apostles feel the need to speak this way to regenerated people? Because the hearts of these regenerated people were not yet fully free from the influence of their flesh, their old selves. Follow the Spirit Much of the Christian life is a war to die to remaining sin and live by the Spirit. John Piper calls it “the main battle of the Christian life”: The main battle is to see our hearts renovated, recalibrated, so that we don’t want to do those sinful external behaviors, and don’t just need willpower not to do them, but the root has been severed and we have different desires. In other words, the goal of change — of sanctification, of the Christian life — is to be so changed that we can and ought to follow our desires. That’s exactly right. And when we have been so changed through progressive sanctification, so renovated that our hearts (and therefore our desires, dispositions, motives, emotions, and passions) are, as Piper says, “calibrated to Christ,” then we should follow our hearts. However, at any given time within our churches, small groups, friendships, and families, different Christians are at different places for different reasons in this heart-renovation process. Some hearts are more sanctified, and therefore more reliable to follow, than others. I think that’s why we don’t hear the apostles generally counsel us to follow our hearts in our fight of faith against remaining sin, but rather to follow the Holy Spirit. Let Not Sin Reign Paul is the one who delves most deeply into this issue: “I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). He devotes most of Romans 6–8 to explaining the nature of the strange new-self/old-self, Spirit/flesh reality of the Christian life, including Romans 8:13: “If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” Paul lays the theological foundation of our understanding by explaining “that our old self was crucified with [Christ] in order that [our] body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Romans 6:6). Our new selves were “raised with Christ” (Colossians 3:1) so that “we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Therefore, we “must consider [ourselves] dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11). In light of this, Paul admonishes us, Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace. (Romans 6:12–14) And how do we do this? By learning to “set [our] minds on the things of the Spirit” and not on “the things of the flesh” (Romans 8:5) — by learning to follow the Spirit, to “walk by the Spirit” (Galatians 5:16), because “all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God” (Romans 8:14). Follow the Treasure One of the reasons I find “follow your heart” generally unhelpful as counsel for Christians is that many of us, from the time we were young, have absorbed this as a pop-cultural creed that says if we just look deep into our hearts, we’ll be shown our deepest truth, and discover the way we should go. Given the significant amount our sinful flesh still influences our hearts, it’s not hard to see how this phrase can easily increase confusion when applying it to the Christian life. “Some hearts are more sanctified, and therefore more reliable to follow, than others.” I also don’t believe the Bible encourages that idea since, when it comes to engaging our hearts, far and away what we hear in it is counsel to “direct our hearts,” not to follow them. We see that clearly in Paul’s instructions above. God made our hearts to follow, not to lead. And what do our hearts follow? Jesus gives the clearest answer: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:21). In time, our heart always pursues (follows) our treasure. When we are born again, the eyes of our hearts are enlightened (Ephesians 1:18) and, through faith, we begin to see the Treasure: God himself in Christ. And since our heart learns to pursue the object that stirs its greatest affections, its treasure, I suggest we not counsel each other to “follow your heart,” but instead to “follow the Treasure.” Looking into our hearts for direction can be spiritually hazardous. It is usually more helpful for us to direct our hearts to what is most valuable and delightful. Which is why I believe David counsels us, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). Article by Jon Bloom