For many years I have been taught and heard and yearned to be a man of faith and walk in it as one approved by God. I have studied and prayed and continually asked for more faith, and while seeking to exercise it, have often been disappointed.
It seems that there is some mystery between asking what I think is of God, and hoping that He actually intends to answer my request. After enough disappointments and seemingly unreturned or unheard request...I often feel my faith is more like a stubbed toe on furniture in the dark than a clarion call as a Patriarch of Christianity.
If you've ever gotten up to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water in the middle of the night, then you know what I'm talking about. Somehow the inanimate furniture seems to have crept across your path and is waiting, bated with evil intent as you come clumsily along in the dark down a path that is seemingly well known. The next step is fatal - ouch! You run headlong into the coffee table, the corner of the dresser, or heaven forbid the doorjamb. Suddenly that which you thought you knew all too well comes to a startlingly painful end.
Remember the time after that time when you got out of bed in the middle of the night? Every step was painfully slow, every move calculated, muscles tense and aware of even the slightest shadow that may indicate a deadly blow to your toes. After a journey that usually takes fifteen seconds has now take forty-five, you finally reach the bathroom, flip on the switch and deeply exhale a well-earned breath of relief. You wiggle your toes and snicker just a little. All's well, no damage done, you've beaten the odds.
That is how my faith has often seemed for years. I set out to do what I believe is the path along His will. A route I presume all too simple and familiar - at least that's how it sounded in Sunday School and the other books I've read. Somewhere along the way I find an obstacle - a pitfall, a relationship, a conversation, something that says I've gotten it all wrong, and my belief suddenly feels train-wrecked against the iron circumstance at hand. Or if otherwise, having seen my request answered, I take deep breath of relief and let out a sigh...phew it worked that time.
I've been wrong.
Faith is not a matter of exercising enough sheer willpower to move things in the spiritual realm. Faith is yielded obedience to the character of God. I cannot trust hard enough. I cannot muster enough belief to bring about change. I cannot grit my teeth and slug my way to success. Oswald Chamber says of the human will in My Utmost For His Highest, "The preaching of today tends to point out a person's strength of will... The statement that we so often hear, 'Make a decision for Jesus Christ', places the emphasis on something our Lord never trusted. He never asks us to decide for Him, but to yield to Him." And what yielding to Him really means is yielding to His character.
God is not the finicky spiritual being we sometimes make him out to be. We imagine him totally unpredictable like a little child happily playing one moment and throwing a tantrum the next. Are we really to believe that the same God who set planets in motion so perfectly that we can predict their exact location a thousand years from now, is not so perfectly calculated when it comes to matters of responding to His own children?
Faith is confidence in the character of God. The more that we know God, the more that we ask of Him according to His character. The less we know of Him, the more our faith looks like stumbling around furniture in the dark - it's only a matter of time before we're severely disappointed. And the devastating outcome of that experience is that we move away from God in our hearts. Then, because we do not understand, we rationalize our experience and say something spiritual like, "well, God just moves in mysterious ways". No, there are reasons. There are always reasons. Our digress lies in one of two things; we do not know His character, or other circumstances are at play. But we must never allow ourselves to arrive at the conclusion that God is ultimately unpredictable, incongruent or otherwise temperamental in His ways. In fact He says that He has exalted His word (the consistent integrity of His creative power being released) even above His name. And those are the most predictable things in all of creation.
All of us have been met with disappointments in our faith, and usually our reasoning leads us to believe that we simply didn't have enough faith to begin with. But the emphasis is all wrong; while we're looking to amass a greater degree of willpower, He's beckoning us to meditate on the steady unchangingness of His character. While we cannot choose to mandate His ways or even understand - at times - the temporal outcomes, this we know; there is no one more pure, just, wise or good than He. In fact these are merely attributes that we're humanly acquainted with and then elevate them to the N'th degree and call them God. It is not true. He is wholly other and beyond even what those words can ascribe to Him.
Even when I do not fully understand - or even have the strength in my own mind or body to do something - I can still choose to yield to Him. And faith is yielded obedience to the character of God - even when we cannot understand His ways.
Lord Jesus, help me be renewed in the knowledge of my Creator - in His character and trusting in His wisdom and goodness. I want to walk in yielded obedience to you. Help me to know and obey you and to share in the sweet intimacy of laboring with you in your kingdom.
No comments:
Post a Comment