The Walk of Faith
“We live by faith and not by sight.” 2 Corinthians 5:7 (NIV)
Faith is an abstract noun just like words such as conscience, happiness, morality, and piety. We can’t see or touch them. Yet faith, like the other words I’ve cited, is real; moreover, it is essential to our Christian walk, because we have to trust even when we cannot see.
We exercise faith all the time. It can be a simple acceptance that something will happen following an action. For instance, we flip the light switch and expect the room to light up. That’s faith on a superficial level of expectation. But we grow in understanding and learn to exercise faith on a higher level in which God is essential to our belief. So then faith becomes not merely a matter of expectation but an abandonment of our preconceived notions and making a deliberate affirmation of trust in Jesus Christ’s ability to do anything and everything. This firm, confident faith doesn’t ask questions or pose what-if scenarios or seek for signs in order to believe. It is based on the assumption that God is, and that He knows everything and can do all things.
I had been reading through the Old Testament book of Second Kings when I came across an impressive faith-walk in Chapter 4 and had to stop to ponder the amazing demonstration of simple faith. A widow cries out for help to the prophet Elisha, telling him that her husband, a godly man, was dead, and the creditors are coming to take her two sons as slaves in payment for the debt. “How can I help you?” Elisha asks. She tells him she doesn’t have anything except a little oil. The prophet instructs her to go around to her neighbors and borrow all the containers she can. Then she is to sit in her house with the door shut and pour out all the oil she has into the borrowed vessels. She doesn’t ask the prophet any questions. She does just as he says. She pours out her little oil. It keeps coming. When all the vessels are full, she stops pouring. She now has enough oil to sell, as the prophet had told her to do, and pay off the entire debt. And her sons are saved from slavery. What a story!
Faith may be an abstract word, but in real life, it is concrete because we can see it in action as in the widow’s case. We can also see faith at work in our own lives as well as in in the lives of others. We have faith when we believe fully in the One who can do all things.
What impressed me most about the widow’s story is this: a simple, compliant faith yields results. May we all have her kind of faith.
Always,
Judith
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“Now faith is the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen. “
Hebrews 11:1