Skip to main content

Giving Up My Faith


 
            Sometimes you need to give up your faith to get faith.  What I don’t need is the kind of faith that is committed to what I believe is the right way for things to go.  I must constantly guard my heart, mind and spirit from clinging to my own rendition of faith.  For faith to be real, it has to be given by the Spirit of God, and not based on my own understanding.  Faith is sure of what is unseen.

            I can’t move forward in faith until I recognize that I carry unexamined expectations of where the road of faith will lead me.  My childish beliefs about faith must be laid aside if I am to grow in true faith.  Since God is always for me, my faith might cause me to believe that everything will work out well for me and therefore not so good for those who come against me.  When the opposite happens, my expectations reveal that I have faith in my plan—not true faith.  I will never grow to true faith as long as I cling to childish faith, unexamined and unquestioned regarding the harsh realities of this world.

            Hebrews 11:1 is the definition of faith.  Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.  Often it is the desire to see that creates the childish faith I am trying to give up, yet it cannot be faith if you can see it.  Thomas Keating even goes so far to say, The desire to feel God is a lack of faith because God, in fact, is already here.[i]  I must extend my soul beyond the boundaries of my faith if I have any hopes of experiencing true faith.  Faith is seeing God in everything that happens and knowing that He is not looking the other way but that He is exactly in the middle of everything.  If He is not acting, He is still giving me faith to believe in His purpose for His inaction.  Faith is at its deepest when I believe in spite of not seeing.

            I want to believe that the one thing I can bring to the table in my relationship with God is certainly my faith in Him.  Not even that is enough.  Philippians 2:13 always humbles me and drives this point home.  For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.  The times that I have real and genuine faith are because of God’s presence and God’s power.  I do not have the faith on my own.  I need faith to examine my lack of faith.

            I grow in faith as I give up my faith.  I move from a brownie point mentality with God that says if I do so many good things I am sure to get a bonus for the week, into a mysterious adventure with God who asks me to believe in His love even when nothing looks like He is loving me, is there for me, has got my back.

            This is the journey of faith. 

            As I let go of my faith, then I am able to experience the kind of supernatural faith that only God can offer to a soul.  It is only in letting go of my faith that it becomes true faith.  My mind can hinder my faith.  I must move beyond understanding and seeing to letting go and discovering the mysterious relationship and intimacy with God contained in an experience called faith.

Copyright © Deborah R. Newman www.teatimeforyoursoul.com  All Rights Reserved.


[i] S. Stephanie Iachetta Ed. By, The Daily Reader for Contemplative Living (Continuum: New York, 2005), p. 272.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fifth Monday in Lent through Palm Sunday

Fifth Monday in Lent: Righteousness Needed Jesus is all about bringing us righteousness yet we are too worldly focused to think we have much of a need for righteousness. Most of us think we need healing or exciting miracles. We might try to get a little righteousness by going to church on Sunday and giving some spare change to a beggar. God sees the bigger picture and knows that there is nothing which we are more bankrupt than righteousness. He sees that we are totally incapable of getting the righteousness we need through our own actions, so He sent Jesus to give us His righteousness through His sacrificial work on the cross. Lent is a season of repentance and preparation for the Easter celebration. No matter how sacrificial your Lenten fast, it could never be enough to earn your righteousness. I have been practicing Lent for   years, and every year at the end of my fast I come face to face with how far I am from righteousness. Some of the first recorded words of Jesus in th
Post a Comment
Read more

A Pilgrimage that Started with Tears

                Who would think I would shed tears deciding to set out on a wonderful journey that I have longed to take for many years?   Before I was ready to fully accept God’s invitation for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I had to journey to a place of agreement between what my soul wanted and what the Lord wanted for me.   For years I have been declining opportunities to travel to Israel—not because I didn’t want to go but because I wanted to go with my husband by my side.   I know that God could have arranged that for me, but instead He asked me to accept that He wanted me to be willing to go and leave everything behind.   When I was asked to make a decision about going on a Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, God gave me this verse in answer to my prayer -- Debi, observe therefore all the commands I am giving you today, so that you may have the strength to go in and take over the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess (Deuteronomy 11:8).   I decided through tears that I would go on
2 comments
Read more

The Troubled Christian Life

              When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country.  The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,   who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God .  I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23.  I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts.  I had my doubts too.  I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age.  I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness.  I was only helpful to them because I relied totally on the word of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit
Post a Comment
Read more