Walking on Water

This whole weekend God was talking to me about faith and stepping out. Friday was a humbling time of realizing how much faith I used to work in, and realizing that I probably wouldn’t make the same insane decisions now. Saturday was reflection on how important faith was to a relationship with God, and Sunday was about walking on water.

In Matthew 14:22-31, Peter saw something Jesus was doing and understood something about discipleship that we often miss. If Jesus is doing it, it’s accessible to us - he is inviting us into it. Often we sit and wait to be called. Peter asked - “Lord, can I do the same thing?” He looked for it and understood that, as a disciple, he was called to live exactly as his master lived. What I find super interesting is that he was still chided for having little faith.

He started out okay, walking on the water and having his eyes fixed on Jesus. But when he started seeing what he was doing and seeing the issues around him, he started to sink.

What about the 11 other disciples that were still left in the boat? Yes, they joked with Peter afterwards, teasing him for almost drowning and having to have Jesus rescue him. But Jesus didn’t seem to mind, and Peter experienced the miracle of walking on water. If Peter had little faith, how much did the other disciples have?

We fit into these two categories as well. Some people are like Peter, able to jump out in faith but sustaining their initial passion and commitment is incredibly difficult. Others are like the 11, where their difficulty is getting started and understanding what their lives could be like in Christ. They are waiting for explicit orders from God before moving, even though there is a world of possibilities open for those who ask.

If you are a Peter, understand that walking on the water is not an instantaneous action but a commitment - you have to start strong and keep going strong. It’s not enough to have an outburst of faith but you have to live it out. And whatever you do, don’t look down! Keep your eyes focused on Jesus and walk toward Him. Let His words carry more weight than your own experiences, understanding, and even the laws of physics. If this is you, understand your weakness and know that your biggest battle won’t be in the getting started but the continuing in faith.

If you are one of the 11, don’t let life pass you by. You don’t want to live your life thinking “what would have happened if I had stepped out, or even just asked?” Don’t just be satisfied with miracles happening around you in others’ lives, but look for what God wants to do in yours. God is always at work - He is working in the poor, the rich, in systems and in homes. In fact, He’s doing so many things that sometimes He is just looking for the one part of the kingdom that you want to participate in. There is not a single thing Jesus did that He didn’t invite his disciples to participate in. Raising the dead, meetings with Moses and Elijah, baptizing, feeding thousands… Everything He did was open for his disciples to join and do the same thing. All you have to do is ask.

 

Reflection on Romans 12:2

 

Romans 12:2 “To not be conformed to the ways of this world; rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Nothing works the way the world thinks it does. Relationships ala a world don’t work. Finances don’t work. Families don’t work. We grow up understanding so many things wrong.

The good news is there’s an opportunity to change it all. The Bible is full of wisdom for every aspect of life, and every time we read it we have the opportunity to either stick with our old way of doing things or take the Bible route. The struggle is that, often times, we see few people doing it the right way, and it’s difficult to see that it works if you’ve never seen it done well. It takes faith.

Even with my family who loved and served God, there was a lot to faith that I had never understood and hadn’t seen modeled. The level of trust God asks us to have in him, the often extreme ways He provides for us, and the whole concept of adventure was absent in how I grew up. We served God but our lives looked fairly normal.  

Compare that to our lives now… I had no experience and no training in how to serve God off the grid - how to serve outside of the traditional church or missions environment. I found myself searching the scriptures for answers to the problems I was having. Often God would bring others around me to more clearly explain a biblical way of doing something. But in everything God was moving.

In a major way, I was really lucky. I knew our call was different and I didn’t have anything to compare it to, so I looked for the answer in scripture. Would I have done the same thing if I had been called to a more traditional position? Would I have chosen transformation and renewal as opposed to tradition and the way we’ve always done it? Maybe that’s the very reason God often calls people outside of the traditional church / Bible school structure.

 

Love is Having Difficult Conversations

Be on guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be courageous. Be strong. And do everything in love. -1 Corinthians 16:13-14

The thing that immediately hits me is that you need to be firm in your faith, courageous, and strong in order to love. It’s like the first part is preparing you for the second. Once you are grounded and strong, you can love more.

Love is risk. Love is having difficult conversations with people when they don’t want to hear it. Love is courageous because you don’t know if you’ll be loved back. You are sticking your emotions out there and don’t know if it will be returned.

As the boss, love is having those difficult conversations when the situation is small and before it gets out of hand and their job is on the line. I have to meet with a team member this week because he is showing too many signs of pride and isn’t getting along with the rest of the team. I don’t want to, but love is pointing out what I see now and giving him the opportunity to change rather than waiting for it to get bad enough to fire him.

As a ministry partner, love is standing in the gap and speaking the truth even when I don’t want to. To really show love, I have to stand up, against the other missionaries and on behalf of the Mozambicans. We have a train-wreck of a situation that’s about to happen with the school we are starting - there is a high possibility we’ll start in January with just 8 kids unless a massive shift happens in the core team’s thinking. I don’t want to fight the rest of the team, but in this situation, love looks like calling out the situation for what it is and fighting for the poorest before the problem metastasizes. Running away or staying silent is easy and it won’t work. What is difficult is prayerfully building relationships and finding what I can say to each person to make them realize the situation.

God, give me strength today. Teach me courage, for I want to show real love.

 

Be Ready

 Be dressed for service and keep your lamps burning, as though you were waiting for your master to return from the wedding feast. Then you will be ready to open the door and let him in the moment he arrives and knocks. The servants who are ready and waiting for his return will be rewarded. I tell you the truth, he himself will seat them, put on an apron, and serve them as they sit and eat! He may come in the middle of the night or just before dawn. But whenever he comes, he will reward the servants who are ready. -Luke 12:35-38

The servants who are ready will be rewarded… This is such an interesting passage. How would the people at the time have taken it? Servants, when their master isn’t around, typically act like the house is theirs… They watch TV, hang out, sometimes eat food from the kitchen or generally do what they want when they don’t have any specific task to do. But Jesus is saying there is a reward for those who are attentive, who are always looking for when Jesus will come back.

I think this applies to our daily life as well, not just when Jesus comes back. It’s important to be ready and waiting for God, whenever He wants to give us orders. God shouldn’t need to wait for us to be prepared - we need to already be prepared and waiting to follow His lead at a moment’s notice.

“He may come in the middle of the night or just before dawn” - I have rarely had God speak to me about doing something when it was the ideal time for me. Often when God places a burden in my heart, I am in the grocery store and it’s for another person, or I am really tired. Other times I just don’t feel like it. But that doesn’t stop the call of God - we always need to be ready to respond to His calling.

 

Faith

 And it is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him. -Hebrews 11:6

I think every big concept in Christianity can be simplified looking through the lenses of relationship. Many concepts that make no sense when looking doctrinally seem simple when applied to relationships. Jesus taught like that, constantly using imagery of fathers, sons, brides, bridegrooms, mothers etc. I think we in the west prefer Paul’s theology because it fits better with our way of thinking but the beauty of how Jesus taught is its universalness - it transcends culture because we all have fathers and mothers and brothers. Logic varies by location and mindset but there are always relationships, and in each other them God has baked in golden nuggets of truth.

“Without faith”... What would a relationship without faith look like? Where your spouse says something but because you don’t see it you don’t believe it? When they say “trust me” and you don’t? I would think you can make a corollary - “without faith, it’s impossible to please your spouse!”

You can just as easily tie trust in - trust is the unseen, the belief where faith is action based on that faith. When I say I’ll be home at 5:30, trust is Carla believing it and faith is her prepping dinner for then and telling the kids to wait by the gate. When she says she’ll pay the electric bill, trust is not worrying about it. If I don’t have trust, I still very much feel the weight of the unpaid electric bill until I have proof that it’s taken care of.

Faith gives us the ability to live in the future now. Like with the electric bill, I have the opportunity to live as if my concerns are already resolved and if God has already come through. Actually, thinking about this some of the more insane aspects of Pentecostal faith are starting to come into focus for me. The declaring something as if it already happened, for me, smacked of a lack of integrity and was used as such, saying you’re healed when you are clearly not. However, I can see the original sentiment before the doublespeak crept in.

What kind of things can I do today to show my faith in God? How can I act in complete confidence that God will do what He has promised?  

Lord, show me today my weaknesses and the places I don’t trust in you. Help my unbelief and guide me into a life of even more faith.

 

Faith

Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen. It gives us assurance about things we cannot see. Through faith, the people in the days of old earned a good reputation. -Hebrews 11:1-2

Faith. One of Jesus’s favorite topics and something I think is often misused. In the evangelical community it is often ephemeral, fleeting, and more akin to hope. Faith is in the Bible, in the creation, and in doctrine, but it has little to no impact on your daily walk. The Bible is clear it means more:

• Faith is never talked about when discussing whether the Bible is true or not. Rather faith is something much deeper - believing that the God of the Bible is true and that He can act in your situation.
• Faith is always expressed as action. Journeying to see Jesus or yelling for him against his disciple’s orders. The model of everything written in Hebrews is, “By faith, ____ did _____”.
• Often the difficulty in the Evangelical community doesn’t come at whether God can but whether He wants to. The community echoes the leper saying “If you are willing, you can make me whole.” He knew God could, but he wasn’t sure if God was willing.
• This kind of belief can look weak, especially in cultures accustomed to displays of power accompanying their belief. Also, you don’t need a relationship with God for it to work, which is what I would consider the main flaw.
• The promises in the Bible are to be taken in context but are not for you personally unless God says they are.

In the Pentecostal community it’s seen as a way to get God to do your bidding. “I have faith so it must happen” is the general attitude. Promises are seen as binding no matter who they were given to or the context. There are a couple problems with this:

• We were never supposed to do miracles outside of relationship with God, but it’s clear in the scriptures this can happen. Such as with the 7 sons of Sceva or Matt 7:22-23 where Jesus says you can do miracles in His name but not enter heaven.
• There is an unhealthy focus on the external gifts of the Spirit verses the internal fruits of the Spirit. Gifts of the Spirit are taken as signs that you are approved by God, which is not consistent with the rest of scripture.
• Faith is 1 dimensional - in victory alone. The faith in difficult times - of Job or Hebrews 11:35-38 are discounted or seen as less than the faith of the powerful and victorious.
• This look on faith again, doesn’t need God.

When you read the Bible, it takes faith. You are reading something that looks nothing like your everyday life. The world has different rules - often times Jesus says something the complete opposite of what you know from your experiences. Lead by serving? Treat your enemies kindly? Forgiveness in a world that says never forget? Each of these is a choice - either your life and experiences are true or the Bible is true. Belief is choosing to believe the Bible over your circumstances, and faith is acting on that belief.

I believe faith was never meant to be a siloed experience; it is always meant to draw you into a relationship with God. Every time you see something in the Bible that you don’t see in your life, God is asking, “Do you want to do this with me?” It’s an invitation to a deeper level of relationship and understanding. When you read something in the Bible and the Spirit within you burns, it’s time for a personal change.

God, show me your ways. Help me walk in faith, and let me see every disconnect between my life and the Bible as an opportunity for growth.