Unreasonable Faith
I like my faith to make sense.
Some of that’s my INTJ nature. Some of it is insecurity.
Some of it is a deep-seated belief that God gave us beautifully functioning minds so we could use them to reason through problems … sort good information from questionable inputs … find points of commonality, even in areas of disagreement. Because even people I dislike are sometimes right.
How to Overcome the World
But sometimes faith is about things I don’t understand and can’t explain. Yet:
“Whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world — our faith.”
— 1 John 5:4
Not my reason. Not my knowledge. Not my hard work. Not my approval of the plan.
My faith.
If Abraham had been stuck in that kind of thinking in Genesis 12, he never would have moved out from where he was.
Abraham was wealthy. Powerful. Among family. Living in a pretty good place.
Then God told him to “go forth … to the land which I will show you.” See — God didn’t even tell Abraham where he was supposed to go or what he was supposed to do once he got there. He just told him to go.
Unreasonable Faith
That’s something I have a hard time with. I get caught up in “being smart” or in being able to explain my well-reasoned plans in a way that someone else will get on board and think that’s a great idea.
But sometimes God wants to move me past my own abilities — to swim toward a shore I can’t see, in a fog that obscures my vision. In short, to trust him to bring me to the place I need to be.
To move me into the inexplicable, where he sees the plan, and I have to have faith that — because he is faithful and has been faithful in the past — he will guide me well and give me what I need to accomplish the task.
To trust that, like Abraham, even as I walk imperfectly, as I move forward in faith, he will not only bless me, but bless others through me.
Because in the end, it’s not about what I can do, what I can see, or what I can plan.
It’s about believing that God has known the whole plan from the beginning, and that he sees already what I can be available to do if I move in that direction.
Faith for the Unseen
This is one thing I like about the film Steps of Faith. In it, an occasionally churchgoing accountant named Faith senses God telling her to leave her well-settled life among family and friends, and go to a small-town farm providing horse therapy to children. The problem is that she’s afraid of animals and children.
But because God told her to go, she went. This turns on its head the idea of who God speaks to and how qualified we need to be to do his work.
Likewise, in the classic film The Last Crusade, Indiana Jones is confronted in his quest with a chasm that drops off into darkness. Although he’s not a person of great faith, a “leap of faith” is exactly what’s required to get from one side to the other, so he can find the Holy Grail and save his father.
And he knows there must be a way. So he steps out…
It would have been reasonable to stay on solid ground, where it’s safe. He finds the solid pathway only after he steps out.
As with Abraham or Faith or Indiana Jones — sometimes we have to step out in what seems like unreasonable faith to see the way ahead. And when we do, we begin to fulfill our purpose and grow beauty and blessing where it didn’t exist before.
Not because of our plan, but because we’ve had inexplicable faith in God’s.
