It might take longer than we would like and so we give up.
I'll never get to do that, I'll never get there, it will never happen.
This is something we talked about in church yesterday. It is called a crisis of faith. When we lose hope that God will ever fulfill His promises, so we do it our own way.
There are so many examples in the Bible where this happens!
Abraham and Sarah: God promises them a child, but they get restless and Sarah gives her servant to Abraham, so that through her, they could have a child. That ended up with jealously and hurt.
The Israelites (many times): After a bad scouting report from 10 out of 12 spies, they wanted to turn around and go back to slavery in Egypt instead of walking forward in victory into the land the Lord had been promised. For that they got to wander in the wilderness for 40 more years, until the people who were 20+ years old had died (with the exception of Joshua and Caleb).
Judas: All of Jesus' disciples thought that Jesus would bring a political revolution. They thought he would rule as a king on the earth (and they would be his rich, powerful buddies). They didn't understand why he was really on earth (at least until after his resurrection). Judas got tired of waiting, to him Jesus was just another average human. He let unbelief creep in, which opened the door for him to be enticed into betraying Jesus (which worked for the best, Jesus' death and resurrection did bring salvation). He ended up killing himself, lonely and miserable.
Those are just a few examples.
We are imperfect, unreliable humans. We lose hope, or worse yet, we put our hope in ourselves. We strive on our own strength.
Striving is exhausting. It can feel like we are physically trying to move a mountain on our own to reach what we dream.
But it doesn't have to be that way. It is called faith.
"Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." -Hebrews 11: 1
"Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God'.” -Mark 10: 27
To see more posts in this series just click on the label "31 Days" under the title of each post in this series, or go back to Day 1 here and choose from the list of days listed at the bottom of the post.
No comments:
Post a Comment