"Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven'; or to say, 'Get up, and pick up your pallet and walk'? "But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins" -- He said to the paralytic, "I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home." (Mark 2:9-11)Which is easier?
I've noticed a difference in my faith in Christ's saving me and my faith in Christ in the day-to-day. Believing that Christ has saved is ... well ... fairly simple. I mean, there's nothing to see, nothing to look for. I can't verify it, go to a doctor and say, "Are my sins forgiven?" So I take it ... on faith. Nothing to prove it; nothing to refute it. But on that day-to-day stuff, it's different. It's much harder. Because, you see, we think that if God is managing everything, keeping His promises to supply our needs, giving us peace and joy and all that, filling us with His Spirit ... all those promises we know of, then life would be ... better. It would be peachy. Smooth. Trouble-free. And it's not. And when it's not, we question. Is God trustworthy here? Is He at work? Is He really in charge? Can I have confidence in Him?
It's kind of like that encounter from the roof. We can trust Him with forgiveness, but will we trust Him with healing? It's easy to say, "Your sins are forgiven," and with no contrary events to refute it, we can take that. How about the "real" stuff? The down-to-earth stuff? How much faith do you have? Just the easy part, where you can believe you're saved without any need for proof or performance? What about those other things? What about trusting Him for His providence, His empowerment, His meeting your needs? All that? Why don't we step out in bold faith far more often? Is it just that we don't trust Him enough? And whose fault is that? Certainly not His.
2 comments:
This is one of the things I like about Calvinism over Arminianism. We can be bold in our faith because it is God working in us, not our effort alone to convince others.
These are good thoughts for reflection today. The God who grants me salvation is the very same one who keeps me every moment of every day until I enter His presence (Phil. 1:6). Unlike a human spouse who might make solemn promises at the altar only to abandon those vows sometime after the ceremony [not my spouse!], God is trustworthy and unfailing for all eternity, never wavering for a moment. And just as I can trust my spouse to an ever-growing degree the more I know him and observe his behavior [now that’s my spouse!], the more I can know that God will not fail me. As I commented at the post to which you linked in your first line, “greater knowledge of God = greater faith.” Happily, we can know God and grow that faith which we need so badly for this life.
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