God calls on us to put our faith in Jesus, his Son. Why have we done so? Is it because we have the ability within ourselves to respond? No. We must admit that the reason for our faith lies outside ourselves. We come to faith in Jesus because Jesus comes to us. He isn’t a Jesus who once lived in the past; he is alive right now. And by the Spirit, this living Jesus comes to us meeting us where we are in our unbelief. He has stepped into our world encountering us personally in all the astonishing power of his love for us. And in response, we say “Yes!” to the living reality of Jesus.

As we come to faith, we may feel that we have grasped Jesus and so we have. Nevertheless, we have grasped him because he has grasped us. He comes to me calling me to himself. And I now see that he wants to become more real to me than I am to myself. There and then, I realise that the only proper response is an unqualified “Yes”. So my whole self becomes a single “Yes”. A free, cheerful and obedient “Yes” to the God who is love and who has come to me in love. Thus faith is not a human initiative (to which God responds) but a human response created in living encounter with Jesus by the Spirit.