{"id":2038,"date":"2015-11-23T18:43:55","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T18:43:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/?p=2038"},"modified":"2015-11-23T18:43:55","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T18:43:55","slug":"faith-and-flour-bins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/?p=2038","title":{"rendered":"Faith and Flour Bins"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wrestling with faith these past couple weeks, looking at our slippery trend toward Self-reliance and feeling hard all the ways mistrust gets in the way of knowing\u00a0God\u00a0is Enough<\/em>. When God starts pointing at the same truths different places in the Scriptures, and small groups begin to intersect,\u00a0discussing the same issues in many different contexts, I can’t think it is pure coincidence. It is almost like a spiritual spotlight: pay attention, there is something to learn here.<\/p>\n

Someone pointed out last week that when God meets the tangible need we feel most strongly, it is easy to land there, and maybe miss the deeper point He wants to make. Like in the narrative from ancient Zarephath,\u00a0a village by the sea growing desperate for water, when\u00a0daily bread\u00a0seemed\u00a0a big-enough miracle of life for a starving widow and her son. How could she predict that God wanted to raise that boy from the dead\u00a0in her own home,\u00a0to prove Himself Lord over\u00a0Life and Death? When she accepted the prophet Elijah into her home for the sake of a bottomless flour bin, did she ever think that someday she would be saying,\u00a0\u201cNow I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth”<\/em>? (1 Kings 17:24)<\/em>\u00a0I wonder how often my answered prayer\u00a0is only the beginning;\u00a0while I am\u00a0ready to close the doors, check this lesson off the list and start celebrating, His Spirit is merely laying the groundwork of faith, preparing\u00a0to shake the house down around my\u00a0ears and stretch me\u00a0in ways I never dreamed.\u00a0It makes me think that the problem is not so much with my faith as it is with my image of God.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Maybe when I limit God to what I can understand or accept, I am also limiting the size of the faith I can have. A self-crippling act of short-sighted Self-sufficiency, defining God in terms of what I see and\u00a0know. But if I have cut my view of God down to manageable human proportions, then what else is\u00a0left but human-sized strength\u00a0to face the complex\u00a0unpredictablitiy of the world we live in?\u00a0No wonder\u00a0Self gets so\u00a0wrung-out, trying to be enough to handle everything\u00a0that concerns me. I see how the opposite works itself out, too–\u00a0that the more I learn\u00a0of His greatness and power, the sturdier\u00a0my faith becomes.\u00a0The more I practice putting the weight of everyday experience on the leg of what I believe, the larger my expectations grow. Elijah’s response to the widow’s unexpected tragedy was to carry the problem bodily before God and implore Him to intervene, never mind that no one had ever raised the dead before, or even thought of it, as far as we can tell. After shutting up the rain and being fed by scavenger birds and desperate widows for months, maybe redefining the impossible\u00a0was becoming rather second-nature\u00a0to the prophet\u00a0who lived\u00a0in the presence of\u00a0the\u00a0Lord.<\/p>\n

(Interesting\u00a0how\u00a0the bigger and more accurate my view of God, the more my view of Self adjusts to more realistic proportions, as well. Dependency on the Creator is the only right and\u00a0sensible\u00a0response of the created, after all.)<\/p>\n

It’s definitely not a straight line of progress in my own life, though…more like round and round in well-worn tracks through the underbrush, like a beagle\u00a0hunting up a rabbit. But He promises,\u00a0“You will seek Me and find Me, when you seek Me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13)\u00a0<\/em>So I will keep practicing this dependent\u00a0faith, and holding onto His promises, and let Him shake down the walls I have built, watch\u00a0His light pour in more and more.<\/p>\n

~~~~~~~<\/p>\n

“You open Your hand; You satisfy the desire of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His works. The Lord is near to all who call on Him, to all who call on Him in truth.” (Psalm 145:16-18)<\/em><\/p>\n

~~~~~~~<\/p>\n

“I have made You too small in my eyes–<\/em>
\nOh Lord, forgive me.<\/em>
\nAnd I have believed in a lie<\/em>
\nThat You are unable to help me.<\/em>
\nBut now, Oh Lord, I see my wrong;<\/em>
\nHeal my heart and show Yourself strong,<\/em>
\nAnd in my eyes and with my song,<\/em>
\nOh Lord, be magnified.”<\/em>
\n(Be Magnified, Fred Hammond)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wrestling with faith these past couple weeks, looking at our slippery trend toward Self-reliance and feeling hard all the ways mistrust gets in the way of knowing\u00a0God\u00a0is Enough. When God starts pointing at the same truths different places in the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god-is-enough"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9XvNH-wS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2038"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2052,"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions\/2052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curwensvillealliance.org\/laurel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}