Some rambling thoughts and questions regarding faith in uncertain times:
- Please don’t read this as a checklist to pass some sort of test.
- Read this to identify what lives and stirs within you regarding your faith.
- Faith in uncertain times prays. Real faith avoids fatalistic thinking but trusts God’s sovereignty.
- We know people with real faith will get sick. Some won’t. God is sovereign.
- But this should not stop us from praying in faith for a move of God to minimize this disease. Do we think He can’t?
- Real faith might even pray for protection. Do I have weak faith if I’d rather not suffer through this disease as a guy who’s had lung issues in his life?
- Does God not have a history of protecting people? Let me encourage your faith to call out to God from your heart, not your fear.
- Real faith doesn’t fear. Real faith stands ready. Real faith confronts disease and calamity with something far more potent: the peace of Jesus Christ. Even if this disease infect our land and my body to the death, I relish the promise of eternity.
- Do I sound like I’m saying real faith sends different messages? Pray for protection on one hand but face suffering and/or death without fear?
- No. Real faith refuses to shove God into a corner. I’m waiting for some idiot Christian leader to pop off about what sin someone did or that the U.S. Church is guilty of that caused all this.
- Real faith avoids assigning the certainty of God’s judgment. Yes a virus as a tool of God remains a possibility; I’d never deny that. And surely, if a recognized man or woman of God with a consistent history of speaking truth of God’s work and judgment had something to say, I’d consider it. But like the Old Testament, those lie few and far between.
- I’d much more trust a Haitian pastor who in groups in 2010 prayed for God to (literally!) shake their nation to do whatever necessary to turn people back to Him, then saw a massive earthquake that did just that. That type of faith can speak to judgment. Beware someone with a name who runs their mouth about the virus and judgment and puts God’s name on it.
- Real faith looks and hopes for a greater purpose in God allowing suffering. Mind you, it doesn’t accurately know every detail, but why as students of Scripture would our hearts not burn for something greater?
- Do we not stand in our faith upon Christ who faced the horrors of a brutal and hate-filled execution? Did not the glory of the resurrection follow thereafter?
- Real faith takes and introspective approach. What in my heart, my routine, my “normal” might God speak to me about during this disruption? Zoom out. What about us as a church?
- Real faith approaches God with humility, seeking His work, His Word, His voice, His purpose, His intervention. But real faith comes to God not knowing or assuming what those really hold.
- May we navigate these times with deep, changing, real faith, ready to obey in any way God may call.