Lie #10: God is waiting on you to have more faith.

Last year some friends of ours took in a teen with some tough family turmoil occurring. When my wife, Kristy, told me about our friends taking the girl in I felt intimidated by such faith. I feel like this often, when I see some person living incredibly sacrificially. It shines a light on my selfish spirituality and hesitancy to live with such love.

The Apostle Paul also makes me feel like my faith is disappointing as most of his words are bold and his life backed them up. Paul received beatings and imprisonment and joyfully accepted all things under God’s sovereign control. Yet there is one passage that gives my measly faith hope, “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9). So moments before resting in the knowledge of God’s great reliability Paul despaired of life and shuttered at the reality of death. So Paul didn’t always have massive faith. [Sigh of relief by each of us] At times he was like most of us.

Yet I still worry that I don’t have enough faith, that my faith disappoints God. Its in those times I try to think back to when my friend Jim Reimann (editor of My Utmost for His Highest, Streams in the Desert, and his new book Look Unto Me) walked up to me and held a mustard seed in his hand, a speck, half the size of a grand of sand. And my heart rested in Jesus’ words, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:20).

So it seems the quantity of one’s faith doesn’t matter as much as where that faith is placed.

Tags: faith, God's sufficiency, lies

The Snow is Fake

We went to Orlando last week where my wife, Kristy’s, parents have a house. While there my mother-in-law mentioned it would be snowing at one particular neighorhood village. My nieces and nephews got excited. My little girl, Josie, got excited. Even I got excited. I imagined snow, fake snow, yes, but at least soft flakes filling the sky and landing on my face. In the 1.3 seconds we’d have before the snow melted I planned on making a snow ball, pelting my brother-in-law in the face.

So we got there with a few minutes before the hourly snow, ran through the side streets and into the snow.

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The ground was solid white, the sky filled with snow. Sort of. It took about 3 seconds to realize the ground wasn’t covered with snow. It was white soap suds. And the white stuff flying in the air wasn’t snow either – it was soap bubbles. (Yes those are my daughter, Josie’s, darling legs with pink Chuck Taylors.)

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A street full of people, promised snow, wanting snow, and settling for soap. It wasn’t mesmerizing as it floated down and you couldn’t make any sort of ball. Around the corner you could ice skate. We walked over there to find people skating on a hard white plastic surface with shoes that mimicked skates.

The snow people, whoever those evil people are, promised one thing and delivered another.

A right commentary on our culture of materialism which promises joy with stuff, but then when we get the stuff – the shirt or car or bag – we discover it’s just soap.

Jesus knew this: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:13-14, NIV)

Tags: consumerism, culture, family