Wrestling with faith these past couple weeks, looking at our slippery trend toward Self-reliance and feeling hard all the ways mistrust gets in the way of knowing God is Enough. When God starts pointing at the same truths different places in the Scriptures, and small groups begin to intersect, discussing the same issues in many different contexts, I can’t think it is pure coincidence. It is almost like a spiritual spotlight: pay attention, there is something to learn here.
Someone pointed out last week that when God meets the tangible need we feel most strongly, it is easy to land there, and maybe miss the deeper point He wants to make. Like in the narrative from ancient Zarephath, a village by the sea growing desperate for water, when daily bread seemed a big-enough miracle of life for a starving widow and her son. How could she predict that God wanted to raise that boy from the dead in her own home, to prove Himself Lord over Life and Death? When she accepted the prophet Elijah into her home for the sake of a bottomless flour bin, did she ever think that someday she would be saying, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth”? (1 Kings 17:24) I wonder how often my answered prayer is only the beginning; while I am ready to close the doors, check this lesson off the list and start celebrating, His Spirit is merely laying the groundwork of faith, preparing to shake the house down around my ears and stretch me in ways I never dreamed. It makes me think that the problem is not so much with my faith as it is with my image of God.
Maybe when I limit God to what I can understand or accept, I am also limiting the size of the faith I can have. A self-crippling act of short-sighted Self-sufficiency, defining God in terms of what I see and know. But if I have cut my view of God down to manageable human proportions, then what else is left but human-sized strength to face the complex unpredictablitiy of the world we live in? No wonder Self gets so wrung-out, trying to be enough to handle everything that concerns me. I see how the opposite works itself out, too– that the more I learn of His greatness and power, the sturdier my faith becomes. The more I practice putting the weight of everyday experience on the leg of what I believe, the larger my expectations grow. Elijah’s response to the widow’s unexpected tragedy was to carry the problem bodily before God and implore Him to intervene, never mind that no one had ever raised the dead before, or even thought of it, as far as we can tell. After shutting up the rain and being fed by scavenger birds and desperate widows for months, maybe redefining the impossible was becoming rather second-nature to the prophet who lived in the presence of the Lord.
(Interesting how the bigger and more accurate my view of God, the more my view of Self adjusts to more realistic proportions, as well. Dependency on the Creator is the only right and sensible response of the created, after all.)
It’s definitely not a straight line of progress in my own life, though…more like round and round in well-worn tracks through the underbrush, like a beagle hunting up a rabbit. But He promises, “You will seek Me and find Me, when you seek Me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13) So I will keep practicing this dependent faith, and holding onto His promises, and let Him shake down the walls I have built, watch His light pour in more and more.
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“You open Your hand; You satisfy the desire of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His works. The Lord is near to all who call on Him, to all who call on Him in truth.” (Psalm 145:16-18)
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“I have made You too small in my eyes–
Oh Lord, forgive me.
And I have believed in a lie
That You are unable to help me.
But now, Oh Lord, I see my wrong;
Heal my heart and show Yourself strong,
And in my eyes and with my song,
Oh Lord, be magnified.”
(Be Magnified, Fred Hammond)