10/23/09

Where do you go for faith when yours is lacking?

I once asked a good friend of mine the following: "Where do you find faith if you do not have it?" I asked this question as a Christian that was facing a valley so low that my very core was being shaken. His response was as follows: "In the Bible!"

I know that this is the right answer, and I understand that if you read the Word of God He will increase your faith. I believe, though, that there is a very thin line between disobedience and true opression. For months I have been in a very "interesting" place with the Lord. My convictions about the doctrines I embrace have been shaken a couple of times and I am not sure exactly where to stand anymore. On one hand I have (or at least had) this PASSIONATE love for Christ that led me to believe in Him and to trust Him almost blindly. I have experienced such a REAL God that even if He does not make sense, I can still believe.

Through the years this blind faith has been challenged by those that believe in God in a mental way: those that claim they understand the Scriptures and in fear of being caught all the way towards the Pentecostal side of things, they rather believe in God almost from afar. They live lives that make sense to the world because anything "supernatural" could not possibly be. If the Lord chooses to perform a radical miracle, I would dare to say that many of these people would attribute it to an exception that God chose to make and not as a norm based on how GREAT the Lord is.

With this said, I once again ask: "Where do you go to find the faith you have lost?" I stand in such a sad state of mind and state of "spirit". I want to love the Lord with all my heart and all my might! I want to be bold about the faith He has given me; the child-like faith that leads me to obey even the wildest things to tell others about Him! I so desire to go back to my first love, yet I feel as though am trapped in the prison of my own mind, where every pull of the Spirit is second guessed because: "Is this something that matches an incident in Scripture?", "Can God really "speak" to me and tell me to do small things?" "Should I really tell that person that the Lord put in my heart that He loves them?"

How do I know what is right?!?! In my Bible I see a God that is ALIVE and that moves and breathes and has His being through those that believed that He could do just that! In my Bible I see a God that would command to His children the wildest things and when they obeyed they encountered the wildest results! In my Bible I see God despising those that felt understood everything about Him and embracing those that admitted their lack of knowledge!

With this I am not saying that knowledge is not important, for the Lord commands that we would seek wisdom, but our knowledge should lead us to further our RELATIONSHIP with Him. In the Bible there is a verse where Jesus tells the pharisees: "You search the Scriptures looking for wisdom, yet you don't come to me for life". (I know that this is a bad paraphrase of this verse.) I wonder how much of a pharisee I have become in trying to conform to the way others think I should believe? I wonder how far away my fears will take me from God? I wonder, where can I go to regain my faith?

In Christ,

Nana

2 comments:

Psalm's Canvas said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Remy said...

I love this short essay you wrote Nana. It really speaks to me. I have also faced similar things, and think about these things similarly. And even now, with the difficulties in my marriage and my desire to see Desiree happy, I have been seeing that God is still supernatural, that He still performs miracles. I believe in the gifts of the Spirit. And I don't find any verse that says that they have stopped or were only for a certain group of believers. And I have experientially discovered that they are still for us.

1 Corinthians 12:1
Now about spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant

Remy