Thought for the Day:
“Faith is predicated on a strong relationship with God. In fact, it is a natural by-product of the
relationship. My pastor is fond of
saying that it is difficult to trust someone you do not know. It is his way of admonishing the congregation
to continually seek the presence of God.”
[Shundrawn Thomas, Ridiculous Faith].
I had a conversation with someone just the other day about the
difficulty of knowing if what a stranger told you about their situation was
true or not. It is much easier to “read”
our friends and acquaintances. We have a
frame of reference from which to evaluate their story. We know if they have a tendency to exaggerate
of put a positive spin upon what they are saying. We’re
better able to read their body language, giving us clues about the validity of their
account. We have often shared enough
life with them that our “baloney meter” is pretty well calibrated.
But a stranger is usually a tougher read. Especially if they have good acting and
communication skills, they might easily pull the wool over our eyes and get
away with a fabricated story.
All you need is to be burned a few times by being sucked into someone’s
story (which you later find to be untrue) to develop a distrust or suspicion of
people you don’t know. After finding out
you’ve been lied to a number of times; you just assume that everyone is lying
to you every time. It is a protective
measure that is hardwired into most of our brains.
We’ve all heard the saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” After you’ve been disappointed a number of
times, you develop a thick skin towards trusting anyone ever again.
That also happens with God. If
you don’t have a close, personal relationship with Him, you don’t really know
Him. You may know stuff about Him; but if
most of your knowledge about God and His ways comes secondhand and is only
hearsay; that isn’t much of a relationship on which to base your trust and
faith upon. In fact, you may really have
a poor understanding about who God is and how He does things. If you base your evaluation of how
trustworthy God on your faulty assumptions, God will never come out looking too
good.
Have you ever really enjoyed an actor in a long-term role? It becomes easy to believe that the actor is
just like your beloved character that they portray. It is quite a shock to see an interview or
read something about the actor that seems out of character to you. For example they may portray a sweet,
sensitive, loving person with all the right answers; but in the interview you
find out they really are foul-mouthed, obnoxious, and rather vapid. What happened? You based your evaluation on some false
assumptions about the person.
The same thing happens with God.
People assume that God would act and think a certain way and are
disappointed in Him when He does or says something very different. The problem is that they don’t really know
Him.
So how do you get to know God?
It is more than going to church weekly and going to Sunday School or
joining a small group. Those things are
a start but aren’t really enough. It
takes daily time spent together communicating with one another over a period of
time. It comes from hanging around with
other people who really know Him and learning from them as well. It is going through a number of life events
together so that you learn from personal experience what He is like. If you learn to trust Him in smaller events,
it really helps you trust Him when something big comes along.
“It is difficult to trust someone that you do not know.” So if you want greater faith, then seek a
deeper relationship. If you just aren’t
certain that He is trustworthy, then spend more time getting to know Him.
James
4:8 “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to
you...”
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