EXPRESSIONS OF FAITH ©2008, Vicki Hinze
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
WARNING: This is a no-edit zone…
Have you ever considered how we express faith?
It’s been on my mind a great deal lately, though perhaps not in the traditional sense. Expressions of faith like prayer and obedience and respect for the authority and Word of God are givens. But we express our faith in other ways, too, and those are the expressions on my mind this morning.
We worry.
We fret.
We doubt.
We question motives.
We make mountains out of molehills.
We make assumptions–usually, for the worst rather than the better.
We handicap.
We limit.
We restrict and restrain.
Those don’t sound like expressions of faith, but they really are. They express an absence of faith, or a minimization of faith. And that got me to wondering how God would look at those reactions in us and how He would regard them.
We say we trust God. Yet we doubt that He’s listening, hearing, aware.
We say we know God will never forsake us, yet we doubt the outcomes of our challenges.
We say we take on faith and yet attribute motives to others that are fact only in our own imaginations.
We assume based on what we see, hear, expect, and often we’re wrong.
I’m not talking about common sense calls. I’m talking about things like when we’re on fire with a dream that is bigger than us and we’re struggling along to make it real but we doubt it can ever be brought to pass. That’s an expression of faith. Well, a lack of faith in God’s ability to bring it about.
These expressions, the ones that bring doubt and negativity into our lives, aren’t honoring God. Okay, so our dream is bigger than our vision of how it can come to pass. That limited perspective is typically what slams us into doubt and sends our faith sliding down that slippery slope.
But what if we check it. What if we turn that around in the same way God turns bad intended against us for good? What if we say, you know, I can’t see how this dream is going to manifest. But I believe it will because God sees more than me.
What if we go a step further, take a little bigger leap? What if we say, you know, God planted that dream in me, and He wouldn’t do that if He didn’t already have a way to bring it to pass. All I have to do is my part. I just have to keep plugging away at it, doing what I can do and believe that He’ll handle the rest.
That’s an expression of faith. One that doesn’t just say, “I trust” but actually trusts.
This seems like such a simple thing. But worry and fear and doubt and assumptions and all those things are a very real part of our daily lives. That makes those expressions significant, and how we deal with them even more so.
Expressing faith isn’t just in our words or even in just our actions. It’s belief in the absence of evidence we should. It’s in trust.
That’s constructive, positive, empowering. That’s a worthy expression of faith…
Blessings,
Vicki
VICKI HINZE
©2008, Vicki Hinze
