"By the grace given to me I bid everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him." In earlier days when I was able to make pastoral visits, and when the Church Insurance Agency allowed priests to offer pastoral counseling, I often heard people wishing they had more faith, or more often even, sort of apologizing wistfully for not having more faith. Faced with some dreadful moment in their lives, people would say, "I should have more faith, I should have had more faith, I just wish I had more faith." I guess I just don't have enough faith. St Paul would be flummoxed by such an apology. He clearly would feel it is utterly necessary. In his epistle this morning he assures us the faith we have is the faith we were assigned. You do not have faith because you are good or holy or devout, you do not have more or less faith than someone else because you are better or worse than them. Each of us has the faith we were assigned by God. No other. Not more, not less—the faith we were assigned by God. God intended you to have the faith you have., Not someone else's yours, what you have is what God wants you to have, it is the faith that will sustain you, that will please him, that will show that you love and know and serve him. The faith he gave you, not the faith you did, or did not, come up with on your own. What good news! What glorious news! I know my salvation does not depend on me, you know that you are not justified and made holy and reckoned righteous because of how good you are, but solely because of how good God is., And now, we get even better sweeter, more wonderful news yet: We do not have faith because of who or how we are. It is because of God. Jesus points this our in his moment with Peter—when Peter says, faithfully, "You are the Christ, the Messiah," Jesus remarks, "Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my father in Heaven." In other words nothing human, not even, not especially Peter's flesh and blood, poor fallible Peter, making as many mistakes as we do, this Peter, this flesh and blood Peter has not reached this recognition of Jesus and his true identity on his own, but only by, and truth, and because of the faith he has been assigned by God. So the faith you have is the faith you should have, are intended to have, it is the faith that will be enough, that will serve you well and honor God, that will help see and do the good and right thing, it is the faith that will comfort you and sustain you when you are sorrowing or regretful or apologetic or downcast. Paul goes even further than this sweet and tender reassurance, when he suggests that to think otherwise to assume otherwise, namely that faith depends on you and it no just there as a gift assigned by God, to think it is in anyway your faith, or your responsibility or your duty, that faith is up to you is to think too highly of yourself. You are not being responsible and caring and disciplined, you are being puffed up and grand and silly. "By the grace given to me I bid everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him."