Recently I've been increasingly convinced that a great scheme of the Devil is to direct our gaze away from Christ and towards our own faith. It is a very subtle scheme and has trapped me at many different times in my small, three year walk with God. I know in my own life there are a couple of ways this comes up. I thought I might share these things that God's shown me, so that we could serve Him more.
One way is that I begin to think of verses that talk about how great of faith certain men had like the Roman centurion. I also think about great men of God like George Muller, Hudson Taylor, Charles Spurgeon, etc, who trusted in God in many more ways than I do. After thinking of how "great" their faith is, I begin to think about how "great" my faith isn't! Given that I think that my faith is small, I then begin to wonder if my faith is worth anything. What if my faith isn't up to God's standards for salvation? What if it doesn't live up to "saving faith"? Compared to George Muller's faith, my faith can't be worth anything. I have trouble reading and praying every morning, I have trouble talking to other Christians about Christ at times, I struggle with fear when it comes to evangelism, so how could my faith be real? And so, I ultimately begin to doubt whether I'm a Christian at all! That's the progression (some of you might relate).
Another way is specific to prayer. We know from the book of James that when we pray we ought not to doubt. This is a great verse, and praise God for it! My struggle comes when I'm trying to work this out practically though. I pray for a family member to be saved, or for myself to walk in love for the day, and I think about that verse and so the thought comes, "well, God must answer because of my faith". I've prayed, I trust that my faith is without doubting, and so I must receive it.
In both of these examples there is the theme of looking away from God, looking away from Christ, and looking towards my faith. This is always dangerous, and in my opinion is a big reason why many true Christians doubt their salvation. They stop trusting in God and start trusting in their faith. Faith apart from God fails and doesn't make sense. Faith always has to have an object related to it, you can't just have "faith", you have to have faith in something, or someone. The point in which we take our eyes off of Christ and on to our faith is when we turn our faith into a work. We say, "Yes! We're not under the old Mosaic Law, we're under grace, we're under this new covenant of Christ.", but then we turn our faith into another law, another work that will please God.
The thing I've learned is to never stop looking at Christ! The moment you do is when you begin to look at other things that are worthless. Don't rely on your faith by itself to save you, don't rely on faith by itself to have your prayers answered. God saves a person because of Christ, and He answers because He says He will.
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