I don't claim to be at the place described below regarding humility of faith but nonetheless.
Quoting,
"This morning while hearing my wife read to me of Islam's fury and intolerance of the infidel, I was reminded of the self-righteousness that is implicit in the attitude of many believers towards those that do not believe."
""Unless we see our ability to believe as amazing grace, owing nothing to ourselves, we have not yet adequately distinguished between what is possible to man and what is not, between what is 'partly' (even 'mostly') of grace, and what is 'all' of grace. Hence, we are not that far removed from those that feel such astonished outrage and intolerance towards the 'infidel', such as we see in the pride of Islam."
If we have the faith that excludes all boasting, we will weep and say with David 'who am I?' How is it possible that this should come to me? Only God has the moral ground to require faith and to condemn the unbeliever for his unbelief. On our part, we could never glory over another who is destitute of what has come to us only by a sovereign act of merciful divine intervention. Such faith as counts with God is not from hence ("not of yourselves; it is the gift of God")."
"Such faith as counts for a new creation is itself the result of a new creation, and cannot exist in the believer until it is quickened of God. The faith that raises the dead is itself a resurrection phenomenon. How then can we glory as though we did not 'receive' it? Peter's faith, though at times weak and failing, was of this kind. His ability to correctly identify Jesus did not come by 'flesh and blood'. No true living faith that counts with God can come on any lesser basis than Peter's. It must be quickened. It is necessarily beyond human power, else there would be a division of the glory. If we suppose otherwise, we build again what grace destroyed, namely, the false ground that enables the 'believer' to glory against the contemptible 'unbeliever', just as the gentile 'believer' has historically boasted against the unbelieving 'natural branches', ascribing Jewish unbelief to a special stubbornness or moral depravity that he finds less prevailing in himself. This naïve optimism concerning human nature, particularly our own, is the ground of all boasting, and any faith that is predicated on such boasting cannot stand in the judgment, which occasions Paul's "be not high minded but fear." This, because boasting is inherent in a faith that traces itself to something in man or of man."
"To find something in ourselves that makes us to differ is precisely what permits our sense of astonishment and moral outrage at the unbelief of the despised 'infidel'. While the believer knows the great and unjustifiable evil of unbelief, he also knows that it is only by the gift of grace that he has escaped the power of this overwhelming plague that has damned a world."
"In times of great distress we learn how rare and beyond man true faith really is, what pure gift it is, and how it is so to be distinguished from the far more humanly accessible surplus of beliefs that prevail nothing apart from 'the gift of this supreme grace'. Oh to believe, to really believe God! As one young brother so eloquently said, "it takes God to love God." The same is true when it comes to faith, because only Christ in us can truly believe God. This is why the coming of such faith in the hour of trial is to the desperate soul as the very appearing of Christ. Where then is glorying save in a God of sovereign mercy?"
