Soul Sister Time

                       One of the most perplexing realities for Jesus is why people who know Him lack faith in Him.  I really don’t blame Him.  That is an excellent question.  He repeatedly asked His disciples about their faith. There are a total of 13 references in which Jesus asks a question related to faith if you count the times the question was repeated in Gospel accounts. 1.        Matthew 6:30-- But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 2.        Matthew 8:26, Mark 4:40, Luke 8:25 (Jesus calms the storm)-- Why are you afraid, O you of little faith? 3.        Matthew 14:31 (walking on water)-- O you of little faith, why did you doubt? 4.     ...

            Why do people give up on God?  There are a variety of reasons.  He is real.  He is present.  He is good, but it is hard for us to see His goodness when we are faced with the evil that is in the world.  The evidence of evil shrieks from news on television or and from the microcosm of people we know.  Most of us use our own lives to determine if God is, whether he is good or that He cares.  We miss the fact that God is so real, generous and full of affection that He is in the midst of our fallen, broken world and reaches out with hope. His goodness is impossible to drive out of our world, and especially by our doubt of Him.             Still the majority of people find His goodness hard to see, or they have simply stopped looking, believing His goodness or His existence to be irrelevant to their own.  Souls in doubt are sou...

            Thomas Keating wrote: One who has this faith simply opens his eyes and, wherever he looks, finds God . Hebrews 11:6 describes what that means: And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him . Faith is a leap into the unknown, the invisible and the incomputable.   Faith is finding the light of God in the darkness of your circumstances.   There is a darkness of faith that is illuminated by experience.   Faith grows deeper when we learn how to see God where without faith all we see is darkness.   God asks us to accept Him for who He is.   This is where faith becomes faith.   When we can see our faith growing in the midst of the darkness of seemingly insurmountable circumstances, we are moving towards real faith.    Since God is infinite, perfect, and incomprehensib...

            They don’t call it faith for nothing .   My proof readers will want to change that sentence…but it is the best way to say what I need to say.   I’m not God, but even I’m a little fed up with the weak-willed faith I hear coming from the hearts of Christians.   Faith does not mean that you pray, and you get your own way!   Faith is not about getting the things you want out of life!   Where’s the faith in that?             Rather faith is trusting that what you can see isn’t all that is going on in any particular situation.   Faith is about believing what you can’t see. Hebrews 11:1 defines it:   Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.   It involves believing that when the opposite of what you prayed for happens that there is something hopeful going on in heaven that you cannot see....

              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 expectat...

Being a Christian is more than making a decision to accept Jesus as your Savior. Being a Christian is a decision to be conformed to the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself explained how seeds of faith that are planted sometimes show signs of growth that don't last. In Matthew 13, Jesus tells the Parable of the Sower, stating that it is only the seed that is planted on the good soil that bears fruit. In many Christian circles today, we have developed a one-dimensional Jesus. Jesus is presented to an unbeliever as a good deal . It may sound too good to be true, but all you need to do is make a decision for Christ and you will be saved. We focus on a one-time decision and ignore the long and tedious process of opening your heart, mind and spirit every day in deeper ways so that you move toward actually becoming indistinguishable from Jesus as the result of that decision. Jesus is much more than a ticket to heaven. We actually dumb ...