the things you cant see

Sometimes it is the most mundane of moments that seize you the hardest. You may be doing an ordinary task when the epiphany strikes and leaves you reeling. So it was a bit of a surprise to hear God challenge me during my walk from the restroom to my holding pen cubicle at work. I had been reflecting on faith. Thinking of how when a seed is planted in the ground, you can’t see it doing anything until it finally breaks the soil’s surface. That seed, while underneath the soil, is completely out of the planters control. It cannot be made to germinate before the appropriate time and processes have passed. Just the same, sometimes when God begins to reveal and work out His plans in and through your life, the results are not always instant. Sometimes I struggle with this.

Anyway, on my way back to my cubby-hole, I felt encouraged and convicted by the words God spoke into me. The word was that there is a real difference in believing that God can, and believing that God will. God is calling us to believe that He will – and he wants to!

Let me explain. I think that believing God can is the step we first take. When God captures our attention, we see throughout scripture and the lives of others that He is able to do all things. God can stop time, He can part seas, He can control the environment. The first step of faith is understanding that God can do all these things, and he can use ordinary people to do it. Unfortunately, far too many followers of Christ stop here, short of where they belong. It is relatively easy to let faith stop at believing in what God has done. This is not enough. God wants more from us.

The next step is much harder.

Next, God calls us to leave our safety nets, and believe that He will. It is God’s intention not to merely see us look at His past acts and say “wow”. I believe He wants to give us dreams and expectation that make us look to the future and say “wow”. This is the kind of life-changing faith that will cause you to invest in what you believe. To step into the unknown. To face the potential of falling flat on your face. To EXPECT God to move in every circumstance. This is the kind of faith referred to in Hebrews 11.1

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

 

 

What is the difference between the two? To believe that God can is believing from your head. It uses past experiences, thought, and reason (or the closest you can get to reason when contemplating the things of God). To believe that God will is faith that comes from your heart. This is something I am learning comes from the deepest, innermost parts of you. Psalm 142.7 says

“Deep calls to deep
       in the roar of your waterfalls;
       all your waves and breakers
       have swept over me.”

The line “deep calls out to deep” in the original context is said to speak of the deepest parts of our souls crying out to the deep thoughts and plans of God. Have you ever had a feeling inside of you that you couldn’t vocalize, but just made you want to yell to let it out? It’s like that.

In the book of Hebrews, specifically chapter 11, the author describes a history filled with people who believed that God would and changed the world around them. Think about it. If these people thought rationally about some of their actions, and didn’t believe that God would come through, I suppose that Hebrews 11 may never have been written. So as I read, I believe more that God can. But in order to believe that God will, it is necessary to step out – to go for it, to take a risk. God not only will, but he wants to. He says that we will see greater things in our time than in the days when Jesus was on the earth.

So for me, it is time to stop settling for what God can do, and live expecting that God will do even more. And I can’t wait to see those seeds sprout.

Blue jeans?

Who decided the default color for jeans should be blue?! What about all the other colors out there? I have been told recently that white jeans are not for me and to purchase them would equate an instant donation to the local Value Village. What if, by fate, the standard color was white? Would I then be persecuted and mocked for my thoughts to wear blue jeans? It is interesting how our perceptions of the world around us are commonly shaped entirely by habit and happenstance rather than by informed decision or actual original thought. I suppose by now you realize this post has more to it than just the color of pants.

I believe that as a society, we have lost a lot of the creative spirit God has placed in us. We are satisfied with what is “normal” around us and we don’t seek to question why things are the way they are. The Israelites would fall into this time and time again. They would hear from God, but over time they would begin to bog down in the cultures around them, taking up idols, false worship, and thinking all the while that things were dandy, because it was all they knew. They had forgotten God. They had forgotten his commands and his faithfulness. It would take a prophet or catastrophe to get them out of their small-mindedness and into living the big life that God wanted them to live. We do the same thing. It is not unlike in the movie Wall-E, where the humans start out on their space cruise as fit, active, people looking forward to a new life on their restored planet. Over time, those expectations fade as they forget the purpose of their journey, and they devolve into lazy, obese sluggards who scarcely understand there is anything outside their hovering entertainment chairs, let alone entire galaxies outside the windows of their ship! Hello! The ship’s captain is living in the same way until the day when a message on his computer calls him into a life of revolution, and he is willing to do whatever it takes to see that hope can be restored. Enter Jesus.

Jesus came that we could have life, and have it to the fullest. He did not come so we could go on living the status quo, satisfied with the ordinary, worn out, broken down world we live in. It is God’s desire for us to live knowing that He is the source of our abilities, our dreams, our creativity. By this, we can change the world. Jesus calls us to a revolution of not accepting the current state. In the sermon Jesus preaches on the mount, he frequently begins a topic with “You’ve heard it said”, then goes on to refute the common wisdom of he day. In striving to be like Jesus, we are called to actively stand against the things in our world that go against the message of Christ, and against His plans for our lives.

So let us begin to use our minds. Let’s quit being defined by what is normal, by what that magazine says, by what our favorite song tells us is ok, by what our coolest myspace friend does. Let’s open our ears and learn what God has to say about the issues we face as a culture and a generation.