Keeping one’s faith can be difficult. Believing in the unseen, believing in goodness in the midst of darkness. It is hard to keep your faith. It is especially difficult when we don’t see things happen the way we expect things to happen. Faith dwindles because it seems our prayers are unanswered. Strong faith becomes questionable faith, small becomes little faith, and if we are not careful, we can even lose our faith.
How then do we hold onto faith? How then do we fight for our faith? One of the ways I have learned is to focus on the God who is in heaven.
There was a man named Moses in the Old Testament. He had led the Israelites out of slavery, out of Egypt, into the hot, dry, sandy desert. And it was in this desert the Israelites complained that there was no water. By faith Moses had led them out of Egypt and towards the promised land, by faith Moses trusted that the Lord would provide. Yet in a moment of great thirst and no solution in sight, faith begins to dwindle. Everything Moses sees with his physical eyes is dryness and drought. He is surrounded by the desert, there is no oasis in site, no clouds from above to bring relief, there is simply no water or solution in sight. But God, who is in heaven, speaks to Moses – have you considered the rock. THE ROCK?! The rock has never been a source of water, at no point in history has rocks ever provided water, why would Moses even consider the rock to be the solution to thirst?
When Jesus teaches the disciples to pray, he teaches them a simple but powerful line, “… who is in heaven”. Because God is in heaven, He does not play by the rules and constraints of this world. He does not need rain clouds, an oasis, or other normal means to provide. God operates outside of the rules of this earth and sees solutions and ways that we do not see. This means His answers, His ways, His thoughts are far greater than our answers, our ways, our thoughts. What is impossible for us – is very possible for Him.
It is in the unknown we are challenged in our faith. But from a Kingdom perspective, it is an opportunity for our faith to increase. When we see only with your own eyes and own ears, we forget Who holds the whole earth in the palm of His hands.
Fighting for your faith is a daily reminder that God’s ways are greater than our ways and His thoughts beyond our thoughts. Fighting for your faith is a daily reminder of who your faith is in – He is beyond the constraints of this world, He is beyond the circumstances we can see. We fight for our faith, we increase our faith by believing that God can do the miraculous, that He can do more than we can even ask or imagine.