Not All Believing Is The Same

Have you made a decision to believe in Jesus?  Are you ready to commit yourself to Him?  This is very different than believing in a good outcome, a certain view you hold about Him or the way He should deal with your circumstances.  Jesus Christ is not a doctrine or a weaver of fairy tales put together in our minds.  He is the real Son of God and Son of Man and He is completely free to be precisely who He is and not who we think He should be.  Our disappointments come when we believe in something about Christ rather than Christ.  We get discombobulated spiritually if we try to make a pet thought about Christ and how we think He should do things what we believe.    Even great men and women of God waste much time trying to prove some doctrine they hold rather than build the bond with Christ and let Him "show the doctrines" to us.  Leaders throughout the ages have broken with God to pursue a "work of God".  Rather than operating out of Christ and His life coming through them, they live with the strength and wisdom of the flesh, not realizing how far they have strayed from the Lord.  Christ is never less than what we have revealed of Him to us in Scripture and what He shows us of Himself for all time will never contradict what has been said of Him in the Bible.  We may misunderstand what we find in Scripture and believe something we shouldn't about Christ but we are never wrong in believing in Christ.  He is forever our Savior and the keeper of our souls and that very love of Christ we see in Him dying for us on the Cross will never be less than that and later we will discover  in fits and starts just how much grander His love for us is than we have realized.  You may need to give up your beliefs about Christ but do not give up an ounce of your belief in Christ.   Believe in Him during the bleak and dreary nights and as the sun rises at the break of day, continue to believe in Him.

"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.   John 17:20-21 NIV

Today See God

Is it a crazy assumption that God will do now as has been described of Him doing in the past?  Nothing unsettles our sensibilities quite like the long wait for God to act today as we have heard He did before.  Every rational thought argues against willful  anticipation of supernatural entries into our fussy world.  It seems absurd to the common mind that the Lord still operates within the same paradigm as records indicate He once did.  And yet that is precisely what we are expected to believe when we take even the most casual glance at the Scriptures.  The" Fairy Tale" motif swirls about within the interpretive dance steps of  the normal Christian's take on life lived out daily.  In fact what is "Christian" today is generally not what once was Christian when everything said about God in Scripture was believed.  The Church assumed rightly God acted in their today as He had during the today of Moses or Elijah.  They realized the Lord would grip them relentlessly "now" even when they went through the fire, even when they fell into the water.  It did not come easily.  Peter had to first get wet and Silas had to wait in twitching pain for his prison midnight but eventually they came around.  Personal experience made the difference for them just as it does here for us.  The prayer had to be uttered, the cry bellowed, the worship to the God of heaven offered.  It was only then that Elijah saw things just as Moses had, Peter saw things as Elijah had and Paul saw things as Peter had.  The skeptic does not die peacefully but in fits and starts and with loud moans and lusty screams.  The man without God is a hollow shell.  But add the Lord Jesus Christ to him and He lives vivaciously, vividly, like a bright beam of sunlight piercing the night sky.  You, joined with the Lord will see all that Elijah did, all that James did and not feebly either but decidedly, firmly.    We stumble over little unseen miracles because we live with meager faith; we grip the majesty of God with the loosest of holds because we are  more content to hear about God than we are to know Him.  "Taste and see that the Lord is good", implies that you must do something about your hunger and thirst if you are ever to gain the smallest sense of God.  The historical documents have been given us not that we might dream of days gone by but that we might do the very things the saints of the past did.  Stay in the shallows of common faith and you will merely read the tales of God; go out of the harbor where storms threaten to dump you in the sea and the Majesty of the Almighty will find you .  You will no longer make your way through the shadow lands of legendary ghosts;  you will instead enter the actual world where Christ reigns and you join with Him in His Glory.  Stop making so much of the God of ancient times if you don't intend on taking hold of the Christ who today stands before you and whispers, "Come".

Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, "You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread?  Matthew 16: 8 NIV