Friday June 23, 2017

 

In mathematics, if you do not first learn how to count you will never be able to add or subtract and in grammar, if you do not learn the alphabet, you will never be able to read or write. If you are going to use web mapping in order to get to a specific destination, the app must first know where your starting point is before it can give you directions. The same is true with faith, if you do not know where you started it is hard to get to where you are going.

 

It is sad but most believers do not know the origins of their faith. For many, their beliefs have been shaped by their personal experiences but outside of the framework of the origins of their faith. It is similar to trying to add or subtract without knowing how to count or trying to read without knowing the alphabet. There is nothing wrong with learning from our experiences but the more you understand the beginnings of your faith the easier it will be to walk in your faith.

 

In the beginning, mankind chose to distrust and therefore disobey God’s one and only law. “Do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” As you probably already know, due to Adam and Eve’s distrust, sin was introduced into the world for the first time. This created a mess so big that no person or amount of persons was able to clean it up. God had a problem on his hands, allow mankind to fall into total death and destruction, or roll up his sleeves and start cleaning up the mess we created. God chose the latter; God decided to pick Abraham as the person through which he would begin the cleanup process; this became the starting point of our faith experience.

 

God did not choose Abraham because of his amazing qualities, after all, Abraham was as messed up by sin as everyone else was. This was God’s working and God chose Abraham to start undoing the mess mankind had created. Distrust led us to this mess and trust would become the starting point for the cleanup process. God went through a series of promises that he asked Abraham to believe concerning his future. He asked him to believe that he would become a great nation, a famous man, and that all the peoples of the world would be blessed though him. There was one problem however, when God made these promises to Abraham, he was a young man, but now he was old and had no children. Abraham was in the latter stages of his life with no children much less with a nation or fame, and he had not blessed anyone.

 

God however fulfilled His promises to Abraham. Four thousand years later, Abraham is the father of many nations, he is perhaps the most famous person of all times, and is a blessing to three of the predominant religions of the world each of which claim Abraham as the father of their faith. This all happened because in an impossible situation, Abraham chose to TRUST God.

 

Genesis 15:6 NIV

And Abram believed the Lord, and the Lord counted him as righteous because of his faith.

Abraham trusted God to do something he knew he could not do; Abraham trusted God to do the impossible. Leave it to God to make the starting point of our faith so simple to understand, yet at times so difficult to execute, trusting God to do for us what we have not been able to do for ourselves. Sadly, most believers are unaware that the starting point of their faith is trust. Distrust was the starting point of the mess and trusting God is the starting point for the cleanup process and our faith.