Obedience Gives Us Faith

"What does obedience do for us? Obedience gives us faith.  How does the scientist learn the laws of nature? Does he command nature, or does the scientist sit passively and read the book of nature?  Are we reacting against Christ and his church, or are we accepting its authority?  Faith comes from that kind of submission. Remember that when our blessed Lord was born, Herod consulted the scribes, the theologians.  He said to the scribes 'Where is Christ to be born?'  The theologians knew their scripture.  They said, 'He is to be born in Bethlehem.'  Did they go?  There was not a single scribe at the crib--not one.  But they knew. Our faith today can be a kind of a credal assent, instead of a living act of the will, conscious of the fact that we are submitting to Christ, as Christ submitted to the heavenly Father. Scripture tells us how closely faith is related to obedience.  Notice, too, that at the crib, only two classes of people found their way to Christ when he came to this earth: the very simple, and the very learned--the shepherds who knew that they knew nothing, and the wise men who knew that they did not know everything; never the man who thought that he knew."