Yet, true Faith is not knowing ABOUT God. True Faith is KNOWING God, encountering the Person of Jesus, and for our Faith to stay alive and deep, we need to encounter Him daily. That encounter, like any encounter with a Person, is real, upfront, full of love, conversation, quiet listening, questioning, pain, and times of transcendent joy.
Faith is fragile, indeed. But since Faith is a relationship, we build it like we build any relationship. We can talk about losing our Faith, but would we lose our child at Wegman's? No, because we talk to our child constantly about staying close to us. Do we constantly ask God, the other Half of our Faith relationship, to stay close to us? We can say we are searching for Faith. Do we know that God is searching for us, that God began the search first, wanting a personal relationship with us, an opportunity to express His love for us?
The faith between husbands and wives takes time to build. At the beginning, perhaps we say, "Sometimes I believe in him, and sometimes I don't." But then, at some point, we realize that we have to choose to have faith in that person, choose to commit to the relationship. At some point, we have to choose to commit ourselves to our Faith relationship with God. And then we trust that God is in a relationship with us for the long haul, all the way into eternity with us.
Every human relationship in our lives brings pain with it, because we are weak, we are sinners, we disappoint each other, we hurt each other. Then the faith between two people is strained to the breaking point. It takes time, conversation, the choice to have faith again for healing to begin. There are times of tragedy in our lives when our faith in God is stretched to the breaking point. It takes time, conversation, a choice to believe that God always loves us and is walking us through our pain before we can begin to heal.
Look at these beautiful words of the prophet Jeremiah, speaking to us with God's words: "For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, not your woe! Plans to give you a future full of hope. When you call Me, when you go to pray to Me, I will listen to you. When you look for Me, you will find Me. Yes, when you seek Me with all your heart, you will find Me with you, says the Lord, and I will change your lot;." (Jeremiah 29: 11-14).
God is talking about a relationship with us: He has plans for each of us, plans for our welfare, plans to give us hope; when we call Him to talk to Him, He promises to always listen to us. And when we seek Him with all our hearts, we will find that He is already with us! But, we have to seek Him with all our hearts; we have to WANT to find Him. Doubting God's Presence can sometimes result from fearing to find Him. From fearing the commitment that a relationship with God demands. Or fearing that God will hurt us if we trust Him too deeply. Yet, God is the One Who strengthens us, gives us peace in our darkest hours.
God says that if we seek Him, we will find He has searched for us and is with us already, and that He will change our lot! (life.) The one constant with God is Change - the moment we begin to believe in God, He begins to change our lives. Every deep relationship requires that we reveal who we are to the other. God chooses to reveal Who He is to us is by showing us His Face, Jesus. And Jesus truly changes us, transforms us with His infinite love.
Meeting Jesus, Son of God should be a revelation to us. The first day that Andrew and John saw Jesus, Jesus saw them following Him and asked "What are you looking for?" They answered "Rabbi, where are you staying?" He replied, "Come, and you will see." So they went and, as followers of Rabbis (teachers) did, saw where He was staying and chose to stay with Him. And, their lives were so transformed by Jesus that they always remembered that this first encounter with Him happened at about four in the afternoon. (John 1:35 -39.)
I can remember vividly the first night that I met the man who would become my husband; I remember vividly the day when we chose to stay in each others' lives because we gave each other life. In our relationship with Jesus, if we choose to believe in Him, if we choose to follow Him and "stay with Him" so that He is always in our lives, change will happen: we will faithfully savor His words and deeds in the Gospels, over and over; we will faithfully savor His influence in our lives, His ever-new encounters with us, His powerful Presence that transforms us and makes us more of who we are, more than we ever dreamed we could be. We will know that Faith is, above all, knowing God and knowing Jesus Whom God sent to us to set us free and give us eternal life.
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