Obedience, The First Step of Faith

There are several acts and steps of faith that I am going to write about. The first one is obedience. My reasoning for discussing this first is that the first visible action of faith that we have to show is obedience. The very first thing that is asked of us as Christians is to tell someone that we believe. Often we do this in the form of walking down an aisle at church, the bigger step after that is baptism. I talked to one person about baptism, she said she was a Christian, knew all the reasons for it, but simply had not felt like being baptized yet. I did not know what to say then, and I still am unsure about what to say now. To me, if you do not follow a command, or request, you have no desire to please or obey that authority. From there, my question turns to, how can you believe in what God did for us and not want to show him love in return by obeying his wishes?

Let me back up for a minute. Before we can obey, we need to understand what obedience is and what it means to us individually. So, what is obedience? When I started thinking about this, two words came to mind and they are a little scary, yet seemingly appropriate. The definition that I have learned is that obedience is Sacrifice and Submission. Like I said, a little scary. What I have learned is that in order to obey a command we have to submit to another’s authority. In order to obey a request, which can often be a command as well, we have to sacrifice our desires and our will to fulfill the will of someone else.

Now, how does this relate to faith? When we have faith in someone, we trust them, and when they ask us to do something we probably will want to do what they ask. We are not going to want to do it every time, but more often than not we will want to. When God asks us to do something, what is our response? We constantly show how much faith we have in God in our obedience, or lack of obedience. The hardest thing about obeying a command or request is that we often do not have the full picture and therefore we have to trust that the person in charge does know the big picture and is not leading us astray.

An example of obedience without question is Abraham, in Genesis 22. God tells Abraham to take Isaac, his only son, and sacrifice him. Abraham starts the journey with Isaac, and at one point when Isaac says to him “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? Abraham replies,  “God himself will provide the lamb.”  Abraham trusted God to provide because God had already made promises to Abraham and he had kept them. When they got to the mountaintop and Abraham tied Isaac down and was raising the knife to kill Isaac when an angel called out to him and told him to stop. When Abraham looked up a ram was caught by its horns so he took the ram and sacrificed it instead. He called the place “The Lord Will Provide.” Without hesitation or question of the request, Abraham trusted and obeyed God.

When was the last time we stepped out, completely in faith and obeyed the command God had given us? The things that God can ask of us range from small to large, insignificant to life changing. It can be something as small as telling someone else who you believe in, or it could be walking away from something you want but is wrong. Now, I am a big picture person, I like knowing all the details and puzzle pieces before I start putting the pieces together. I understand wanting all of that before making a decision but I do not always get to do that, because God is above me. His ways are higher than mine and I have to learn to trust him. When I am trusting God completely and I have faith that he knows what he is doing and he will always be there for me, I can do anything he asks because I know him, I trust him. In order to obey, we have to establish knowledge and trust in who God is, as our authority and as our friend.

Having said all that, here is the question that I want to leave you with, what is holding you back from what God is asking you to do?  

The Question of Faith

What is faith? It seems like an easy question to answer, but maybe it’s not. Lately I have been contemplating it and it seems a little more difficult to answer than what it appears at first glance.

In order to help answer here are a couple of definitions:

Faith is trusting in a person – Be it friend, family or acquaintance, we have knowledge that leads us to believe that we can trust in this person.

Faith is trusting common sense, or knowledge – The idea that you know a stool has four legs and a seat, it is put together with glue, screws and/or nails and therefore, it should hold your weight if you sit on it.

Faith is also trusting in the unseen – Whether it is the wind or the smell of cookies hot out of the oven, we often believe in things that we cannot see. Sometimes, we can see the cause or effect of something, but not always. Whatever the case might be, we trust that our senses know what is around us and therefore believe in things that we cannot see.

To sum it up: Faith is a belief based on trust in a point of knowledge.

The faith that I have been thinking about lately is faith in God and how it requires the same faith that trusting a person does, yet, we make it a lot harder on ourselves to trust him. To have faith in God as a person, we have to have some knowledge of him, the more knowledge we have the more we can trust. So, how do we find knowledge on God? We can talk to other people, we can talk to him ourselves and we can learn about him in the Bible. Which brings us to trusting in common knowledge. In order to trust what the Bible tells us, we have to trust that it tells us the truth, and that it is the Word of God. We also have to trust in the unseen. This seems like it should be the hardest thing to trust. Yet, we believe there’s wind because the leaves in trees move when it blows through them. Why is it harder to believe in a God that when he moves, miracles happen, people change, people move? I think in some cases it’s easier to believe that there’s an unseen God then it is to believe in a God that we can trust as a person. We can see the evidence of God in many things, but often we do not trust enough to take him up on his offer of friendship and fatherhood.

So, here is my question for you: At what point do you say, “This is the point of knowledge that I trust in and therefore, this is why I believe”? If you can answer that, I think you have a strong grip on the first step of trusting God completely.

Now, as I said, I have been contemplating faith a lot lately and I wanted to just do a short post about it, but it has turned into a bit of a series. So, this is the first installment and below is a preview of the next couple of posts, which I hope to post in the next week or two. Please feel free to leave some feedback, ask questions, start a discussion, whatever you would like to do. If I take too long in posting the next installment, send me a reminder! Thanks for reading!

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Faith in Action

Obedience: What is God waiting on you to do?

-       How to take the step that God is asking you to take.

The Orphan’s Cry

-       Trusting God enough to cry out with our needs and know that he will hear us and respond.

Above the Influence

-       Showing daily faith in an environment that is contradictory and detrimental to your faith.

Time Flies By

Things have changed a lot since the last time I posted. One reason it has been awhile is because I lost my username and password but recently found them and decided to get back to writing.

I could take the time to go back and reflect on the past year and everything that has happened but I think that would take far to long to actually do. So, I'm just going to pick up here and see what starts coming as I start writing again.

Hope to post again soon!