Growing in Faith
Written by Jennifer P.

 

 

We’ve all heard sermons from Hebrews 11, the Bible’s “Hall of Faith.” We have all read biographies of missionaries who have taken the step of faith to go out and serve the rest of their lives on a foreign mission field. We have even read devotional style books on the topic. But I am sure that each of you has found that reading about faith and applying it to our daily lives are two different things. I seriously think this month’s topic of “Developing Eyes of Faith” could make or break your life this coming year. And I will start this article by asking what you are doing this year to develop stronger faith in God?

Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The most basic example of pure faith is our belief in God as our Savior. We have not seen Him, yet we believe that He is and that He can save us from our sin. From that basic start all other Christian faith grows. Faith is easy to have, yet we often say, “It is so hard to have faith. I am just not as strong as other people.” Let me put it to you this way. It is not hard to have faith. We have faith in things everyday. We sit down in a chair believing that it will support our weight. We open the refrigerator believing that there will be food to suffice our hunger. We live in daily faith that the things around us are and will be what we have always known them to be. But we have become so accustomed to their being there that we take their existence for granted.

With this thought in mind, I like to say that everyone has faith. But it is the testing of our faith that we struggle with, not the possession of faith. We are fine in our daily lives until God tests our faith in Him. He will take away our “security blanket” (i.e. we lose our job, Dad did not get paid and where is our food coming from, the school bill comes and we do not have the sufficient funds to pay for it nor any idea where they will come from, etc.) and see if we have faith that He will supply our needs. It is not cruelty on His part to take those things away, no No more than it is for a father to set his little child up on a table and tell him to jump. God wants us to develop that “need” for Him, that faith that if we jump off of our “table” He will catch us. God supports every minute detail of our lives including the breath that we take each moment. Without Him we would not exist. Yet we like to do things our own way. We want to have specific things and as we go through life we begin to lose our focus on God’s providing these things and start thinking that we are in control of our own lives. “If we get a better job, we could afford more things.” “I am a strong enough person to handle this; I will save asking God’s help until I really need Him.” The more we move in this direction, the more we forget our purpose for being created. God made Man to glorify Himself. Thus it is fitting to God’s purpose to make us turn to Him for our life’s provision. Here in America, everything has become so easily attainable and common place that we have lost focus of God’s hand in our daily provisions. And thus we think that faith is so hard to obtain because we are accustomed to getting everything so easily.

I got a reality check in this area when God sent me to Cambodia for four months this last year to help out a missionary family. The mother had hurt her back and was unable to care completely for her three young children. Before this opportunity was placed before me, God had already started testing my faith. He had removed my job and all of my future plans and brought me home from the camp I was working at to prepare me for I knew not what. Those months of looking for work and dealing with the loss of something I had held very dear, made me take a step back to see how much I was really trusting in God to provide. I am afraid I failed miserably in many areas. Yet God was patient with me and suddenly took me in a direction I had never dreamed possible. He sent me to a little town in Cambodia. I did not have a passport or a visa and nowhere near enough money for the trip. God gave me my passport in one and a half weeks, I was able to get my visa at the airport when I arrived in Cambodia, and my mission provided the needed finances for the plane tickets.  From the time I found out I was going, to the time I landed in Cambodia, was a space of about two and a half weeks. When I landed in the capital city, I thought I had just learned a mountain of truth about my faith in God. But my sweet Heavenly Father had even more for me to learn. It is not a vastly wealthy province and most of the people live in poverty. You say, “Yeah, that is a third-world country, you should expect that.” But there in that little town I saw evidences of faith that far belittled any of my problems I thought I had. In the three small churches that the missionaries worked with, most of the members were poverty-stricken and several had no idea where each meal was coming from. These simple people were likewise being tested by God in their faith for His provision. and it struck my heart as well as my pride to hear them rejoicing over His blessings of just one meal. Most of them were struggling to find or keep jobs, and they lived in simple houses with only the basic necessities. Suddenly my concerns were no longer so big.

I am back home now in my nice heated and air-conditioned home, with my parents paying for my food, and providing all of my other basic needs with a plenty of un-necessary extras for my enjoyment. I am back in the search for a job, but I am no longer worried about being able to find a good enough paying job. I know that God has something out there that is perfect for me and will lead me to it in His time. As for my future, well, He has already planned that out for me as well. Have I learned all there is for me to learn about faith in God? NO! And a thousand times NO!

God will continue to test my faith in new ways and sometimes even old ways that by the trying of my faith I shall be changed and purified. Gold does not come out of the mine perfect. It must first go through the fire to remove all of its impurities and it will pass through that fire repeatedly before it is completely pure. What will make the difference in my life will be how I come out from these times of testing. I want to respond by letting God do His work and trusting in Him for each outcome. I want to believe that God will bring about His purpose in my life. (and that everything He does, including trials, is for my good) in His time and not worry about the things I do not understand. I will fail. But God is good and will help me get back up and set me on a Rock which will not crumble out from underneath me.

Now, how do I (and how can you) do this? First off, I need to spend more time in God’s Word learning about Him. We trust based on a scale of how much we know a person. That child will jump off of the table because he has known his father intimately and knows he will not let him get hurt. We believe that the chair will hold us up because it always has. We believe that there will be food in that refrigerator because our parents do not want their children to go hungry. Why then should we doubt that God will provide our needs? Because we have not come to know Him personally. We read our Bible for the sole purpose of getting it done or skip it completely because we think we do not have time for God. Not have time for the One who gives us each breath we take? That would be like saying to our mother, “I know that you brought me into this world, but I have so many things to do for myself that I just don’t have time to talk with you for a few minutes out of each day.” Our family members, roommates, and friends would be incensed (not to mention we would only have a few in the category of friends!) if we did not spend some time getting to know them. Just so, we need to spend more time “getting to know” our heavenly Father that we may be able to cast on Him all our cares and have faith that he will do what He has promised. We also need to read His Word to familiarize ourselves with exactly what He has promised. Many people put God to the test by asking something of Him “in faith” then get upset because God does not give it to them. God said that if we ask anything in His name (meaning according to His will, not ours) we shall receive what we have asked. And sometimes the answer is just no because God does not have that in His plan for us. Our faith will become stronger if we learn to accept the “No’s” as God’s will.

God also helps us to grow in our faith by making us wait for some things. I would love to be married and out in the world serving the Lord by raising a family that would love Him. But I am 23 going on 24 and even though most of my friends are already married or seem to have found their special someone, I am still single. That is not easy. I am having to learn to wait on my God. That is stretching my faith farther than I could ever have gone, but it is not in my own strength. I break down sometimes, but I keep telling myself that God has something special for me, and I take that and believe on that to help me get through sometimes a day at a time. Faith takes patience and I need to work on developing that.

Lastly, growing in faith takes prayer. It is true that God already knows our needs and everything about us, but He wants that personal interaction with us. He wants us to come to Him and share our hearts with him. He wants us to ask, to be dependent upon Him, to acknowledge that He is the center and source of all that is in existence. Prayer is our time for talking with God and sharing with Him what we have learned about Him from reading His word. It is also our time to thank Him for His past, present and future provision for our lives. I will never grow in my faith if I do not spend more time praying to my Father, our Jehovah Jireh (God Provides).

Faith is learning to sit and wait on the Lord’s timing. Faith is believing that He who has begun a good work in us will perform it to the end of our lives, that when we stand before His throne we will be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. Faith is giving God control of our lives and giving Him praise for each little thing. Faith is getting back up when we have fallen. Faith is God working in us.

I pray that in the year ahead, we will each be blessed by seeing an increase in our faith. I pray that we all will “grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” May God bless you as you seek to come forth as gold.

 

 

 

  Visitors on page since June 21, 2007

This page was last modified on Thursday, September 02, 2010