The following are thoughts relating to my new Bible study, Comparing Notes; a companion piece to my forthcoming book, Notes from the Margins. Read through these thoughts and feel free to comment. Thanks!
God allows trials and suffering to strengthen our faith—to refine and purify it so our faith is more precious to us than gold. Why is this kind of faith essential? Genuine faith is important to God because it brings us closer to Him. I don’t think He loves handing us trials, but He does love it when we lean more heavily on Him and pursue the hope that there is purpose to our pain.
If my faith is based only on the good things God does for me, then it is conditional faith only. If I am faithful through my trials and I grow and learn, I become devoted to He who gives me the strength to endure. God wants our total devotion in good times and in bad and He wants our faith to be based on more than our condition.
Faith is simply trusting that God is right; that what He says is true and that what He does is righteous. I’ve mentioned before that for a time I stopped trusting God. I still relied on Him for my eternal salvation, but I stopped trusting that He was doing the right thing with me. Lies from the deceiver took over my thoughts and I began to doubt God’s righteousness. I was so hurt by my circumstances that I began to lose my faith (because it was conditional). But instead of burning with anger towards me, God used my weakness as an opportunity to purify my faith. He used it to prove to me that He cares about my life, not just my salvation.
With repeated doses of truth, God softened my heart with His word. I know, it sounds odd to say on the one hand I had lost my faith and on the other I was reading the Bible. It was the only place I could think that would have the answers I was seeking. Because I turned to God for my healing instead of away from Him in anger, my spirit made me yearn for the word. I needed to discover the truth and stop living on the fence of knowing God but not trusting Him.
Up until these fiery trials started my faith was based on what God was or wasn’t doing in my life. If good things were happening, I could easily say, “God is so good!” But if bad things were happening, I wasn’t so sure about God’s goodness. I was treating God as a genie in the sky, there to do my bidding: Grant me this, make that easy, do this for me. This is selfish and prideful. (God, after all created us—we didn’t create Him and have no right to boss him around.)
So God lovingly taught me about the kind of faith He wanted from me. Real faith. Refined faith. Faith based on the truth and righteousness of God and not on my circumstances. And I am so thankful.
