The Faith To See

“”I believe! Help my lack of faith.”  Mark 9:24

This was the desperate cry of a father who brought his son to Jesus and his disciples for healing. The boy was “possessed by a spirit that won’t let him talk. Whenever the spirit brings on a seizure, it throws him to the ground. Then he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes exhausted.”  (Mark 9:14-29) The disciples were not able to heal the boy. When Jesus asked how long the boy has been sick, the father responded in frustration:

“He has been this way since he was a child. The demon has often thrown him into fire or into water to destroy him. If it’s possible for you, put yourself in our place, and help us!”

Jesus then said to him, “As far as possibilities go, everything is possible for the person who believes.”

In our modern medically advanced society, it is difficult for us to appreciate this miracle of healing. From the story, the boy might have a brain tumour that affects his speech and causing epilepsy. It would be negligence for a doctor to send such a patient to a priest for exorcism instead of sending him to the neurosurgeon. In our modern society we have more faith in medicine and doctors than in God.

Recently, I saw a man with liver cancer who developed a stroke and was paralysed in his right upper and lower limbs. He was found to have a big blood clot in the left side of his brain. He received no surgery and was only given rehabilitation but he recovered completely. I was reminded that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and that it is God who heals.

Jesus came, died and rose from the dead to give us the gift of faith to live our lives as the children of God. We not called to live a life of blind faith but we need to be healed of our blindness to the love of God. Faith is not a matter of the mind but of the heart. We believe with our minds but we need faith to commit our wills and desires to God.

It is our lack of faith in God’s providential care that keeps us from living the truly abundant life of agape love, unspeakable joy and the peace that is beyond human understanding in the Kingdom of God.  We are, to quote John Barry, walking in circles looking for home. We do not realise that we are already home for our home is in Christ.

We have a lack of faith when we do not have a personal relationship with God as our Heavenly Father. God will give us the desires of our heart when we delight in Him. John Barry noted that if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t really want to know what God wants. In our hearts, we’re certain that knowing will mean uncomfortable change.  For our human nature drives us to seek pleasure and to avoid pain.  We fail to see that the problems in life and suffering can be our ladders to God’s throne of grace so that we can find strength for our weaknesses and forgiveness for our sinfulness. It is through the power of the Holy Spirit that we can “overcome whoever we are, wherever we have been and whatever we will do.”

Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit - we cannot strive to earn or to gain faith. It is a gift that we can only receive by emptying our hearts of our egos. Our egos seek to Edge God Out of the throne of our hearts. We need the spirit of repentance to confess our need for God’s power of love in our lives. As Sarah Young reminds us, faltering steps of dependence are the links to Christ’s presence.  Confessing our needs, our failings and our weaknesses is not a reflection of our lack of faith.  It is an affirmation of our need for God’s grace in our lives so that we can Exalt God Only with our lives.

Faith is also the fruit of the Spirit. We cannot try to get more faith through our bible study or church worship or good works. We can only grow in faith as we meditate on and live out the truths that God has revealed to us through His Word and in our worship. We need the faith to see what God can do or will do as well as our desperate need for God to fill our hearts with the resurrection power of Christ. Only then will we be able to see our life, problems and blessings from His perspective. Only then can we grow in faith in God’s faithfulness so that when the storms of life strike us, we will find peace in the eye of the storm.

Be Sinless to sin less in a sinful world

 "I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said.”  1 Corinthians 15:3

A man was walking up a hill when he saw a boy on a bicycle. He was pedalling up the hill against the wind, strenuously and painfully when he saw a trolley car going up the hill. The boy rode to the back of the trolley car and laid hold of the bar at the back. And he went up the hill like a bird!

Like the boy, we so often struggle against problems and temptations, trying to sin less to please God. We lost the important message that Christ had already died for our sins. We can only succeed in sinning less when we put on the robe of righteousness of Christ and remember that we are sinless in God’s eyes. We can only live as new creations in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Sin is our separation from God. As long as we are not in communion with God, we will sin as we are living in a fallen world. We will sin as long as we feed ourselves with a spiritually unhealthy diet of bad news in the world and do not take time to feed on the Word of God and keep our thoughts on whatever is right or deserves praise: things that are true, honourable, fair, pure, acceptable, or commendable.” (Philippians 4:8)

Martin Luther struggled to overcome his guilt and terror of death by his spiritual performance of the medieval rites and practices of his Catholic faith. He shared his struggles:

“Although I lived a blameless life as a monk, I felt that I was a sinner with an uneasy conscience before God. I could also not believe that I had pleased him with my works……. I was a good monk, and kept my order so strictly that if ever a monk could get to heaven by monastic discipline, I was that monk.  All my companions in the monastery would confirm this….

And yet my conscience did not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, “You didn’t do that right. You weren’t contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.”

As he studied Paul’s letter to the Romans, he found a profound and liberating revelation in the truth of Romans 1:17: “The just man lives by faith.” He was set free from the obsession with his spiritual practices. He came to the realisation that the performance of good deeds and religious rituals cannot restore our relationship with God. It is only though our faith that Christ will clothe us with his own righteousness. This was also John Wesley’s “heart strangely warmed” experience on Aldersgate day that filled him with the fire of love to share the gospel of God's love with much power in the United Kingdom and beyond.

Jesus died to set us free from our performance anxiety by showing us the Love of God. Understanding the meaning of the resurrection of Christ gives us the power to transform our lives and our struggles. This was the testimony of a man who was stricken with cancer and had to endure months of treatments and major surgeries as well as the death of his father. His wife thought that that must have been the worst year of his life. However, he realised that he had been comforted with a profound sense of Christ’s presence throughout those difficult days. So he told his wife, “You know, it may have been the best.”

To be a Christian is not trying to sin less but to live the sinless life of Christ who is in us. We do so by faith as we commit our lives to Christ and enthrone Him as King in our lives. Only then can we be free from guilt when we fail to be more loving in the eyes of others and from self-righteousness when we think we have been more loving than others. Only then will our good deeds be the fruit of the Holy Spirit rather than our selfish and self-centred attempts to win God’s  favour.

Let us live our lives rooted in the good news that God loves and accepts us as we are. We are called to live as ambassadors for Christ and children of God for we are sinless when we put on the robe of righteousness of Christ. So let us proclaim the good news:

“I am precious in God’s eyes and so are you!”

FROM DEATH TO LIFE

The Good News of Easter is that Jesus Christ died on the cross so that we may not only live the abundant life in the here and now but to move on to an eternal life when we die. We are spiritually dead when we live our lives only in the dimension of the space and time of our earthly lives. We live in fear of death when we have not come to terms with the reality of evil and God’s judgment against sin and evil. We live in denial of old age, pain and suffering when we put our hope in modern medicine and worship the idols of wealth, health and longevity.

The Greeks worshipped an “unknown God” as they sought to find the true meaning of life and death. Philosophy was seen as a way of training for dying to reduce their fear of death. St Paul reminded them that God has set a day for judging the world with justice by Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead. (Acts 17:31)

We need to understand, appreciate and gratefully respond to God’s amazing gift of grace through Jesus Christ so that we can be delivered from the deadly existence of a worldly life to the deathless existence of a life in and with Christ. To do so, we need to face the reality of God’s judgment against sin and evil. It is strange that human beings demand justice for crimes committed against them but are unable to accept God’s judgment against the evil powers and principalities of the spiritual realm. But when we are able to do so we have the blessed assurance that God will be our hiding place at such a time:

“For You are my hiding place; You protect me from trouble. You surround me with songs of victory.” (Psalm 32:7)

The writer of an Upper Room devotional on 14^th April 2013 made the very important observation that “the resurrection is not another ancient story with a good moral to be remembered on Easter Sunday. The resurrection is the reality that sustains our faith and anchors our reasoning.”

Faith is not just believing in God for even demons believe and tremble with fear (James 2:19). Faith is the commitment to live our lives centered on God with Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives. This is not something that we do with our human effort but a gift of grace that we receive from God when we empty our hearts of all that is not of God.

We will always be tempted to use God’s blessings for our personal gain. There is nothing wrong with enjoying what God has given us – the problem is when these blessings become idols in our hearts and draw us away from what God wants to do in our lives. We need to practice the spiritual disciplines of prayer to wait on God and biblical meditation for God’s revelation of His love and grace in Jesus Christ.

To be in the world but not to be of the world does not mean that we will not have problems and tribulations. When our focus is on Christ and on Christ alone, even when things seem so wrong, we can be sure that God is in control and that He will lead us to be in the right place and to do the right thing at the right time. We will not see our problems as God’s punishment but as God’s training and equipping us for the tasks He has planned for us. The bible is full of stories of extraordinary things happening to extraordinary people with extraordinary destinies.

When we are tempted to worry, or to doubt or to fear, we can turn to the cross and remember that God holds all our tomorrows. When we are sick, in pain or suffering, we can call upon the name of our Lord and remember that by His stripes we are healed. When we have been hurt by others, we can remember that Jesus has borne our hurts on the cross so that we can forgive in the power of His grace and remembering that God alone has the right to take revenge (Romans 12:19)

Let us encourage one another to live lives of victories by sharing the Presence of the Living Christ through the problems we face in our lives. This is the gospel of God's amazing grace that should move us to sing songs of victory such as:

We acclaim Your life, O Jesus,

Now we sing Your victory;

Sin or hell may seek to seize us

But Your conquest keeps us free.

Stand in triumph, stand in triumph,

Worship Christ, the Risen King!