| JULY / AUGUST 2010 -- This is the season of growth, both in our lives and in our gardens. When we plant we have faith that the seeds will sprout and mature to plants. So with our lives when we plant the seeds of faith and they come to maturity. Having faith means believing that there will be a particular outcome as a result of some influence or act. Consider a simple act that we perform each day. Each morning as you brush your teeth you go to the faucet expecting when you turn it the water will come. You do not wonder if the faucet will deliver water, you have faith that the water will be there the same as every other time you turned it.
Jesus wanted us to understand that the flow of God is as reliable as water from a faucet. It is not dependent on any act of ours other than a turn of the handle. This is the kind of unquestioning faith that he had in God, and he knew that if we were going to repeat what he did, then we needed the same type of faith.
Think about it; we do not get up in the morning and pray to our faucet for water. We do not tell the faucet that we will be good all day or ask for forgiveness from it. Yet we do these things hoping to find favor with God.
Faith is an expectation. We expect certain things in life based on what we have come to see as normal. We become so used to conditions that we do not question whether they can ever be or should be any different. Our expectations become as automatic as breathing, and it seems wrong to question things or to assume anything different.
Jesus radically challenged this practice. He knew that as long as we had faith in the limiting ideas that we believed were normal, we would never evolve to the point of being able to repeat what he did. He wanted us to break down the barriers which we place around us, barriers that keep God's forgiveness from us, so that we could expand our ideas of normal to include his vision of a rich, abundant life. He knew that this meant shattering our worn-out assumptions about life. |
