There was a story told long ago about a certain wealthy man. He had
so much
wealth he struggled to remain alive because he did not want to
leave behind his wealth when he died. When that fatal day finally came,
the angels came for him, and he begged and pleaded to bring at least
some of his gold with him to Heaven. The angel tried to explain to him
that naked he came into the world and naked he would leave. But, his
gold had never let him down. He had always been able to open locked
doors with it and to build bridges to foreign lands with it. So after
vigorous pleading, the angels allowed him to pack a satchel with one
brick of gold to take with him. At the pearly gates, St. Peter took the
man’s satchel and said, “What have we here?” The man replied that he
needed to bring something from earth that had never failed to help him
in just about any situation. So Peter opened the bag and peered into its
depths, then chuckled and said, “Yes, but little man, why did you bring
pavement?”
As humans, we put our faith and trust in things that
we never realize we are trusting. I sit in a chair and know it will keep
me from falling on the floor. I know the sun will rise in the morning
and set in the evening. I turn the key in the ignition of my car and
expect it to start the engine and for it to take me where I need to go. I
don’t have quite as much faith in computers as some of them have failed
me more often than my car.
There is the key. My car, actually,
has never failed me, the one I have now. Other cars failed me and one in
particular I never had faith it would start. I would always pray and
hope it would start every time I slid into the driver’s seat.
We
often smile and shake our heads and say, ‘How could the disciples not
have had faith?’ Jesus spoke and the storm calmed, He reached out and
plucked Peter from sinking in the water, He cast out the demon from the
boy and the boy was well ever after that, He fed the five thousand and
the four thousand with baskets of food left over. When God shows Himself
in that glory, how could anyone not have faith? Jesus told them what
was going to happen, and yet they still scattered to the winds with the
Sanhedrin guards came for Him in the garden. How could that happen?
How indeed?
God has never failed me, and I know He has never failed you.
Why
is it, then, we sometimes have doubts? Is it our point of reference
like that wealthy man? We live so heartily in this physical world that
we have forgotten how great God is?
People have failed me; even
the ones that I never expected much from, failed me. It is not their
fault because they are human with human natures that are imperfect. We
do not have the capability to be perfect within our flesh. That is
impossible. God, on the other hand, is perfect and infallible.
But,
we gauge God through our human-ness. We think with our finite minds and
see God with our imperfect vision forgetting that we are made in God’s
image (not the other way around) and not in His perfect nature and
character. We have the potential and we will be perfect one day, just
not today. Therefore, we cannot see all that God sees or know all that
God knows and that makes for an imperfect understanding of our own
situations and future. It also makes for a very imperfect and perhaps
quite wobbly faith.
Just as a three-legged stool wobbles if all three legs are not of even length, faith and trust wobble when not of even strength. Wobbly faith makes repentance and forgiveness
difficult to accomplish because trust is the stabilizing leg in faith.
We must trust God that obeying Him will be in our own best interest.
Obedience means forgiving the unforgivable, and repenting all our sins,
even the secret sins we harbor in the wrinkles of our heart.
Here
is the tricky part. God is okay with the wobbly faith up to a point.
There comes a time when God expects trust no matter the cost, and
trusting Him can be quite costly from a secular worldly point of view.
Yet, it is our weakness that glorifies His strength. Our trust magnifies
His name. Our frailties in concert with God’s power make the angels
marvel.
God has never failed me.
I have to go with what I
know, regardless of the feelings of doubt, because those feelings are so
fleeting. So in the famous words of a song popular in the 1970s, I put
my hand in the hand of the Man that stilled the water because He kept
His promises no matter the cost. How, indeed, can my faith falter?
Faith
is the pivotal point in forgiveness. Like trust, our faith is not based
on feelings, but on our past experience with God our Father. We know
because He keeps all His promises, He will take care of us.
Understanding that, we can hope for vindication from false testimony,
but it may not happen until all the dust clears from our earthly clothes
falling from our glorified bodies. By then, it will all be small stuff.
Trying to understand that it is all small stuff now is harder to grasp.
My
sweet friend doesn’t mind me using her dream as an illustration for my
point. She dreamed she walked into a house that was filled with all
manner of buzzing saws and jagged-edged, sharp instruments designed to
slice easily through wood and steel, only this house was filled with
children of all ages. They were running and playing. Every so often a
child would come too close to the saw or knife and would lose an arm or
leg, and some even lost their heads. She was horrified and instantly
knelt at the foot of the throne.
“God why are you allowing such harm come to your children? How can you be so cruel?”
“My
dear beloved,” God replied to her, “these children are suffering no
permanent harm. I can heal them instantly. When they come to me, their
bodies are renewed into perfect form, and they draw upon My strength for
their health. This earthly walk is temporary, and the earthly life is
temporal. Live it, enjoy it, but there is so much more, and so much
better waiting for you with Me. Today you walk in shifting shadows of
all that is to come.”
All the sword stabs, all the knife slices,
and the bone crushing saws are truly nothing when compared to eternity.
God will restore His children to newness of life in glorified bodies
that have no blemish, scars, or wrinkles. It hurts now, but will merely
seem like shadows when we bask in God’s glory in the throne room of
Heaven.
When facing doubt, we should always consider the eternity factor.
[The above is an excerpt from my book
When Christians Hurt Christians that I am currenly working on, hopefully to publish soon.]
