Is the object of our faith…
just a hope that a plane will get us to our destination?
Or do we place our faith in the pilot with his wisdom, training and experience…
to get us to where we are to go as safely as possible?
How often the child of God feels inadequate when it comes to faith. Our thinking seems to be—if we only could have more faith, then our doubts would dissipate completely. Actually many of us already have a great amount of faith. Jesus said, “…If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder [a distant] place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:20). Our problem is that the faith we already have does not have works. “…faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17). Therefore, it is ineffective.
Often we say we have faith, but the truth is we just really, really hope that the problem will solve itself! So we cringe; we strain; we agonize. Yet in the end, we either solve the problem some way ourselves, thinking that our faith worked, or, by sheer coincidence, the problem has gone away somehow on its own. Our idea is to make faith into the actual effort, instead of having faith in the One who can solve our problem at hand. But it is the faithfulness of God that brings godly results, never our faith alone. If we will put our faith in God’s son, Jesus, and His finished work on the cross, then our sinful self is taken out of the picture, and He is able to carry out the actual works needed, through us.
Father, help me to make my understanding of faith not according to my own works, but of believing solely in your Son. May Jesus be the object of my faith and never anything else. From this point forward, I will look to Him and what He has done on the cross as the means for my victory. Amen.
{Image credits: Image gallery (from top to bottom) photo by ssdg4773 on Freeimages.com; photo by Oleksandr Pidvalni on Pexels; photo by eastermar on Freeimages.com; photo by Tim Gouw on Pexels]
