Fables or Faith?

Francis Chan has always made me think. Over last Summer I did one of his Bible studies with my church life group. There were quite a few thoughts that he expounded that shook me. His concepts of God and how we view God as well as Jesus were profound.

One of the key concepts was that the God in the Bible is often not the God we pray to or believe in. The God of the Bible was all powerful, omnipresent, all knowing, able to consume offerings  drowned in water with a fire from heaven, able to bring down walls and move mountains. That's the God of the Old Testament. There was such a fear and awe of who God was and what He could do. The same could be said of Jesus. The Jesus of the New Testament was able to perform miracles, and bring back life into death.

These concepts of God and Jesus are often distant from our modern view of them. Somewhere we have lost the translation that these are the same regardless of time. The Bible is not a book of fables about some distant history. It is a living breathing account of history and actual accounts of how God and Jesus interacted with us.

There are several people who I know that are facing situations that are bleak and their future does not seem very bright. I had a radical audacious thought. If I began seeing human circumstances through the lens of the Old Testament God and the New Testament Jesus there isn't any way that I could have despair or depression about what these friends face. If I believe that God can literally do the things in the Bible and have that type of faith then present problems give way to hope. If I believe that Jesus can raise the dead then I have to have faith that in the face of death He can speak life into bodies ravaged with cancer.

Faith in God and Jesus isn't about a present focus on current circumstances. It is about a belief in the future. Living each moment as if there is intentional focus on how does God see my future. Living is faith in action. Every breath and every plan we make comes with a degree of faith in the next breath we breathe. Most research notes that if you go into a situation with the belief that you can overcome you are more likely to do so. I think as an addendum to that thought is that if we go into situations with faith in God that isn't diminished by our human limitations there's nothing that He can't do.

We never know who God places in our path regardless of location that needs to see someone with audacious faith. I'm not believing in fables... I choose to stand on faith!

jamie