Today’s coffee with God was about having faith in God and what that really means. What does it mean to have faith in God? What does having faith in anything mean?
Faith can mean having confidence or trust in a person or thing. We make decisions regularly based on the confidence or trust we have in that thing or person. When I pull a chair to sit in it, I don’t the first test it to see if it will hold something else of my comparable weight. I just sit in the chair. The faith I have in chairs has come from an accumulation of experiences that have demonstrated that I can trust to sit in a structure that looks like a chair.
So what about faith in God? Faith defined as confidence or trust in a person still fits. However, unlike the chair which we can see, faith in God requires that we have trust and confidence in a person we can’t see. Many people struggle to have trust and confidence in something they can’t readily see with their eyes or observe with any of their other senses (i.e. smell, sound, feel with their hands, etc.) Additionally, my trust and confidence in a chair is based on lifelong experiences with using chairs. Faith in God based on past experiences also leaves many people disillusioned or struggling because they have no log of “God events” that provide past experiences with God. Sometimes people attribute all the bad things that have occurred to them as proof that God doesn’t exist or God is indifferent to their pain and suffering.
For most of my life, I didn’t struggle with God’s existence or that He was omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. My struggle was coming to know who Jesus was and the significance of His life, death, and resurrection.
As a Christ follower, I have faith in God and that faith is directly tied to an active trust in God and his Word. But my faith in God is still tested when I feel called to do something I feel completely inept or uncomfortable doing. Believers in Christ are not immune to struggling with faith in God. We saw the disciples of Jesus struggle with their faith and they literally walked with Jesus and witnessed numerous miracles.
When I pray for help in something and the answer seems improbable or even impossible, that is God asking me to step out in faith in Him. How I respond to that answered prayer or calling is an indication of the presence or absence of my faith in God. Obeying God is an opportunity to experience God do amazing things we would otherwise never experience. Obeying God then experiencing God over and over again grows our faith in God.
What many people miss is that faith is a gift from God (Ephesians 2:8) and “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6).
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