Sometimes it seems as though faith in God comes easier for some then it does for others. It puzzles me. One person readily accepts the mystery of faith and embraces the truth of God’s Word, another spends years wrestling with questions and can’t sense the presence of God.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjqvYVVW_sg
Friends, very close friends to me, struggle in this way. Yet, I’ve personally never struggled to believe God is real. I, personally, experience many intimate moments where God and I converse with each other and He confirms it by speaking through someone else totally uncontrolled by me. It’s not that I have never gone through periods where God was silent. I have. And those times are hard. But I don’t recall ever wondering if He ever existed.
But life . . . and faith . . . aren’t as simple as one man’s story.
And you know, I can’t find anywhere in scripture where it indicates that if you feel God more intimately then another person you are more spiritual, or “connected” with God than that person. In fact, I find more evidence for the opposite.
Take Job. The most righteous man to walk the earth. He spent a period of time feeling intensely distant from God. While Mary Magdalene, an adulterer, appears to have had incredible experiences with God. Elijah felt alone, while even the thief on the cross visibly experienced God. Christ, Himself, spent time separated from His Father.
So it’s really pointless for me to try to write a list of steps that I’ve taken for “experiencing the presence of God,” because it could be the person I’m most tempted to teach it to may actually be more righteous than I am.
So what is faith? What does it really mean to believe?
We sit in groups and share what God is doing in our lives. Confess sin. Delight in miracles. Sing songs. Pray for each other. And at the end of the day it’s the one that shared the most, confessed the clearest, and prayed most profoundly that is looked upon to have the most faith.
At least that’s how I’m tempted to look at it.
But I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t the soul that feels all but stretched to its limits that has the most faith. The guy that doesn’t feel passionate because he can’t share with as much zeal and glee as the others. The one that believes by simple child-like faith. Perhaps it’s him that lives by faith because he continually pursues knowing God even though he doesn’t have vision for Him.
Maybe the rest of us have but tasted a lick of what it truly means to experience God personally.
God yearns to be known by us far more than we want to know Him, and his great work in us is to increase our passion for knowing Him until it is stronger than all other passions. Developing that passion in our hearts is a long, difficult process to which God is relentlessly committed. The way is hard, the road less traveled than others, but the journey is worth it. (Finding God – Crabb)
