there is faith in Jesus of the tender, personal sort.
At the close there's faith that He will actually meet the need of your
life and circumstance _without limit_. The highest faith is this:
connecting Jesus' power and love with the actual need of your life.
Abraham believed God with full sincerity that covenant-making night
under the dark sky. But he didn't connect his faith in God with his need
and danger among the Philistines.[69] Peter believed in Jesus fully but
his faith and his action failed to connect when the sore test came that
Gethsemane night.

The Bethany pitch of faith makes connections. It ties our God and our
need and our action into one knot. This is the pith of this whole story.
Jesus' one effort in His tactful patient wooing is to get Martha up to
the point of ordering that stone aside. He got her faith into touch with
the gravestone of her sore need. Her faith and her action connected.
That told her expectancy. Creeds are best understood when they're acted.
Moving the stone was her confession of faith. _Not_ that Jesus was the
Son of God. That was settled long before.

No: it meant this--that the Son of God was now actually going to _act as
Son of God_ to meet her need. Under His touch her dead brother was going
to live. The deadness that broke her heart would give way under Jesus'
touch. The Bethany faith doesn't believe that God _can_ do what you
need, merely. It believes that He _will_ do it And so the stone's taken
away that He _may_ do it. God has our active consent. Are we up on the
Bethany level? Has God our active consent to do all He would? Is our
faith being lived, acted out?

And the feast of grateful tribute that followed has an exquisite added
touch. The faith that lets God into one's life to meet its needs gets
clearer eyesight. Acted faith affects the spirit vision. There is a
spirit sensitiveness that recognizes God and discerns how things will
turn out.

Notice Jesus' words about Mary's act of anointing. There is a singularly
significant phrase in it. "Let her _keep it_ against (or in view of) the
day of My burying." "Keep it" is the striking phrase. What does that
mean? We speak of _keeping_ a day, as Christmas, meaning to hallow the
memories for which it stands. "Keep it" here seems to mean that. Let her
keep a memorial. Yet it would be a memorial _in advance_ of the event
remembered and hallowed.

It seems to suggest that Mary thus discerned the outcome for Jesus of
the comi