GodReflection:
Think about it, how many times have you heard the word faith? For most of us, it is a word we have heard so often that we hardly even take notice. We humans love to tailor make faith to fit us. Faith becomes a word without meaning. My faith, your faith—unfortunately, we have a tendency to define and design it within our own comfort zone.
Might it be one of our greatest mistakes not to examine more closely what seems to be Gods desire for us—that it is planted by the Holy within and grows and radiates from who we are as we reflect Father, Son, and Spirit? Isn’t it God who defines faith and not us?
Paul, the apostle, writes to Christians in the cities of Corinth, Colossae, and Thessalonica, where he cites FAITH, hope, and love, as the identifiers of a disciple of Jesus (1 Corinthians 13:13, Colossians 1:5, 1 Thessalonians 1:3 and 5:8).
I suppose each of us who places our faith in Father, Son, and Spirit, arrived at faith (belief) by different avenues and experiences. Dissimilar or similar, not another soul on earth experienced the exact identical situation that brought me to follow the Holy.
Just as my life experiences were unique to me—never to be repeated by another person—so are your experiences unique to you. For some the battle to claim faith as profoundly heart indwelt was long and difficult. For others not so much.
The more intense battle for all may be on another front. After seven decades of life in God’s family I find my arrival at faith was the easy part. The hard part is what faith demands.
It will always be a challenge to live and grow in my trust of God when faced with opportunity clothed in the unknown. Is it possible to live faith with a consistency that will allow full-out trust in God to become a lifestyle? To be confident that my faith is authentic.
I don’t remember exactly when it came about, but at some point, I claimed the combined two words Tenacious and Trust as the descriptor for my journey to learn to live authentic faith.
I have come to believe tenacious trust describes more than arrival at belief in God and more than any attempt on my part to keep faith alive in my inner core. It can only be a reality if I allow The Holy to grow it.
It has to do with guts and courage to walk by faith. It has to do with a “bulldog” tenacity that comes from feeling the call of God so deeply that causes action despite the odds.
There are many more times than I would like to admit when I’ve failed miserably in my willingness to step out on faith and exhibit the guts and the trust to act when I knew the proposed action aligned with God’s redemptive purposes.
My failure to act was because I could only envision resources for steps one, two, and three, but failed to trust God to provide for steps four, five, and six. Will my faith ever show the tenacity to trust God EVERY time?
May each of us grow in our Holy trust factor. Let’s pause once again to consider how our own unique wiring aids or hinders our faith to become our identity that causes us to trust God in every situation.
Let’s look to creation, to resurrection, and to our promises from the Holy to provide faith-nutrition so that trust in The Holy is integral to our identity.
May we hear Jesus’s story about the birds and the flowers and apply it to our daily faith walk. Even as we are aware of our own humanity, we learn to trust him more each day for his care. Isn’t that a part of faith’s metamorphosis into who we are?
What do you think? Doesn’t authentic faith sound different from the way we humans tailor make it to fit us? Isn’t authentic faith more than the word without meaning that passes so lightly across the narrative of our daily culture.
Let’s proclaim that authentic faith gives a resounding “no-way” to our culture-claim that we each have the right to design our faith within our own comfort zone.
Let’s thirst for authentic faith.
Stay tuned.
Dr. Gary J. Sorrells
A GodReflection on Let’s Thirst for Authentic Faith.
God Reflection 