The just “shall” live by faith! Most of us in here have heard at one time or another in our life, “Fake it until you make it”. I’m not sure who started it, but, stop the madness! If it is impossible to please God without faith, we as sons and daughters need to repent.
Every day we make decisions displaying our belief or trust in things and people. We get into elevators and push buttons believing it will take us to the floor of choice. We sit in chairs we know nothing about, trust what manufactures say about their products, follow instructions (most of us anyway), thinking it will do what they said it will do. We take medications written by the doctors, because they said so. How is it, that we believe in everybody but God? I’m waiting on a response, because I want to know what you think. How do you choose what to believe?
What did they say that convinced us to buy that product, that it will work? Take that prescription, it will remove the pain. Fly on a plane, it’s safe. Drive our car, it runs smoothly. Sit on the pew on Sunday, confident that it will not only hold us, but others, without folding. Something in us just believes. We do these things without thinking twice.
May I ask, “Why is it that we all of a sudden have a hesitation when it comes to the things that God said”? Now we have to have a come to Jesus meeting to believe what He has spoken. While in Egypt, the death angel passed over the homes that had blood over their door post. Those who didn’t, their first-born sons died. The plagues affected their enemy, but caused them no harm. They crossed the Red Sea on dry land and saw their foes destroyed by water. They were fed with manna from heaven and won battles — their faith meter in God should have been off the scale!
No one in that party should have been able to say anty thing about their God. But, that was not the case. Just as it was in Jesus’ day, He said many times in scripture, “Oh ye of little faith”, or “According to your faith be it unto you”. And I cannot tell you how excited I am that He put that choice in the hand of the individual. Not a group faith or the doctor’s faith. The outcome is contingent on “our” faith, our choice.
When we get a bad report from the doctor and they say there is nothing else they can do, what do we do? We also have a report that says,“By His stripes you were healed”. Whose report will “we” believe? “Now” our faith in whatever report we believe is going to kick in. Since we can feel and see the sickness physically, we tend to trust the words of the doctor. This is why we can’t imitate faith and what I mean by that is we speak the word (I am healed), but we don’t believe what we are saying. This is faith without works. We are saying we have faith but there are no actions behind it, therefore it’s dead.
Abraham put faith to work, when he was willing to offer his son Isaac to God. Rahab exemplified faith, when she hid the messengers and led them out of the town so they wouldn’t be captured. At the word of Jesus, the fishermen let their nets down and caught many fish.
I found out a long time ago, it is one thing to read something. But what makes it come alive or make it real is, when what we read about happens to us. In our Constitution, we read about how Jesus healed the sick; but when sickness visits our temple and He heals us, now we know know it’s real. We got proof, we are a bona fide witness and our faith bulb should come on. He gave us all a measure.
It is written, “A double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways”. It is also written, when we ask and we have doubt, don’t expect to receive anything.
Let’s face it: we either believe or we don’t. Stop playing!