Faith: Don’t Leave Home Without It

“And He saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?  Then He arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm”.  Matthew 8:26

I suppose one of the most widespread emotions across the fruited plain and everywhere else is fear.  God gave us fear as a protective measure.  We are to fear things that can harm us, like poisonous snakes.  Walk through the woods in the south, and if you hear a rattling sound, you will fear.  Your adrenaline will rush through your body, and you will look for an escape.  Black widow and brown recluse spiders are to be left alone.  I fear poison ivy and am always on the lookout for it when working outdoors.  There are just some things that we must avoid.  Every time I use power tools or a lawnmower, I have a healthy fear of how easily that I could get hurt so I am always really cautious and careful when I use them.

We are not to fear people, though.  That doesn’t mean that we are to open our homes to anyone who knocks on our door.  We have to use discernment.  When we shop, we need to be aware of our surroundings.  Jesus said to “fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”.  It would be very difficult to not be fearful if someone is pointing a gun toward you, but, thankfully, that doesn’t happen to most people.  Even so, if a Christian is killed, he or she will go to paradise, whereas an unbeliever when he or she dies, ends up worse off than he or she was before.  I have often wondered about these mass shootings that happen at times.  The one who pulls the trigger and takes the life of so many people and then is himself killed by the police or by suicide would, by all indications, go to hell, but the really sad part is that some that he killed, if they didn’t know Christ, went with him.  It is a serious risk to travel around on this earth and not be saved.

All that is rather morbid, and folks fear many things, but Christians shouldn’t fear.  It is said that one can’t be faithful and fearful at the same time.  If you think about it, when we say that we have faith in Christ, isn’t that faith supposed to override any fear that we may have?  But we still fear.  We fear the future even though we acknowledge that God holds our future in His hand, and nothing will happen to us unless He allows it, but that doesn’t guarantee us from suffering and hardship.  This old world is nowhere near a perfect place.  In this passage of Matthew, Jesus and His disciples were in a ship when a violent storm arose.  The disciples were scared to death.  I would have been also because I can’t swim.  They had to awake Jesus, who was sleeping peacefully, to rescue them.  He saw how afraid that they were and pointed out the weakness of their faith.  He then calmed the storm, and everything was fine.

Fearing the storm, waking Jesus and expecting Him to do something about it, He did, and then they marveled about it.  That is what we do, though.  We pray for a particular need and then act surprised when Jesus fulfills that need.  He could certainly say to me, “Where is your faith?”  Our prayers aren’t always answered in the way we desire.  God doesn’t expect us to be happy about every outcome in our lives because some are very difficult to understand, but He does expect us to keep trusting Him.  I have said before that losing both my husband and son was devastating, but I had to accept it.  God always knows what He is doing.  Because both of them were followers of Christ, they are in heaven now and not having to deal with all of this craziness and ungodliness that is going on in the world.

Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as the confidence that what we hope for will actually occur even though we can’t see it up ahead.  Faith in Christ is knowing that He will live His life through us and take us to heaven when our time on earth is up.  For one who has repented of sin and trusted in Jesus Christ for forgiveness, salvation, justification, and sanctification, he or she is completely confident that the Lord will do just as He promised.  So why isn’t our faith in other matters with which we deal as confident as that?  If we are truly born again, we don’t fear that God will change His mind about our place in His family.  Most of the fears of believers is that things won’t turn out like we desire rather than trusting that the Lord will handle those things that we pray about in His perfect way.

One day this life in this sin-cursed world will be behind us and all of our heartaches will have been forgotten.  For now, though, we just need to keep on keeping on in faith and love for Christ and for others and give Jesus our fears and worries.