One of the things that the Lord has been teaching me as we
are preparing to leave and patiently waiting on the Lord’s provision is about
Faith. Most of us say we have Faith in something but the Lord has been
revealing to me a much fuller understanding of the word. Much of it was summed
up in the main verse from a church service a few weeks ago.
Now faith is the assurance of
things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1
As I have been meditating upon this verse it has brought
together two facets of Faith. One of them is obedience to authority (most
importantly Divine authority), the Lord has taught me a lot about this through
John Bevere’s book, Under Cover. The
other facet is God capturing our complete attention, the Lord has taught me a
lot about this through A.W. Tozer’s book, The
Pursuit of God. Both of these have married this passage in Hebrews.
The first thing that He began to teach me was that obedience
to authority is of utmost importance to God. Throughout the Bible the
faithfulness of people hinged upon whether they were obedient to the things
that God called them to, and more importantly than that is their submission to
the complete authority that God has in all of our lives. The whole chapter
following to the verse above talks about Men (and Women) of Faith in the Bible,
and in all of them it was because of obedience to the things God had called
them to not just a belief in God. In the book Bevere also talks about the
blessings for being obedient and also the serious consequences for being
disobedient. We live in a culture where rebellion is celebrated, almost to the
point where it is just expected. We must break this rebellious spirit in us if
we are going to truly say we have faith in God.
The other part of Faith that the Lord has been teaching me
about is what Tozer calls “the gaze of the soul”. He says it is very similar to
the story in Numbers 21 where the Israelites, after being bitten by poisonous
snakes, must look to the bronze serpent that God told Moses to make to be
saved. Tozer describes faith as a turning of the eyes of our soul from focusing
on ourselves to focusing on God. “Faith is the least self-regarding of the
virtues. It is by its very nature scarcely conscious of its own existence. Like
the eye which sees everything in front of it and never sees itself, faith is
occupied with the Object upon which it rests and pays no attention to itself at
all. While looking at God we do not see ourselves - blessed riddance.”
Now back to the definition of faith given in Hebrews. It
seems to me that this definition perfectly sums up the two parts of Faith that
I have been learning:
Faith is the assurance
of things hoped for - Obedience and submission are being sure that the plan
God has for us is the best one and walking in obedience to that plan knowing
that God will bring it to fruition. What do any of us as Christians hope for
besides to please our Heavenly Father? We can be sure of fulfilling our hopes
if we are obedient to Him.
..and the certainty(or conviction) of things not seen. - As we
set the gaze of our souls on the invisible God we become more and more
intimately acquainted with Him that is unseen and reality of the spiritual
world that is going on all around us. And the more that we focus on Him the more
that we begin to realize that our God is far more than an idea or concept. He
is far more real than you or I or anything we could see with these physical
eyes.
I know that this is only the beginning of the Lord teaching
me about Faith, but as I continue to seek to walk out this new, fuller
understanding of Faith, I am sure the Lord will continue to teach me more.
I will leave you with this challenge to walk these ideas
out, also from the book of Hebrews:
..let us also lay aside every
weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race
that is set before us (OBEDIENCE), looking
to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith (FOCUS), who for the joy that
was set before him endured the cross (OBEDIENCE),
despising the shame , and is seated
at the right hand of the throne of God (FOCUS).
Hebrews 12:1-2
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