The Trial of Your Faith (Part 2)

 

The Comfort Zone
Jesus said, "You will know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free." This promise is predicated on the fact that we don't START OUT in Truth. We start out in error. Otherwise we would have no need to know the Truth, or get set free, and His promise would be nonsense.

 

The average Christian knows very little about God. Indeed, we are so blind to the reality of God that we don't know that we don't know! Some of us read the Bible and catalog doctrine and think we have it. But that is not knowing God. It is knowing what the Bible says about Him. To know God requires a relationship with Him that is real. It really requires BELONGING to Him, and living like it.

 

The trial of faith is geared to bringing us into a greater knowledge of God Himself, and to adjusting us so that we might live in harmony with Him. And what does it mean to live in harmony with God? To simply obey Him? Yes, but more. To live in harmony with God means that my entire life – both inward and outward – is so constituted that it is NORMAL for me to walk in harmony with Him. I belong to Him.

 

But of course, if I take these descriptions and think that merely knowing them AS descriptions equals BEING in the relationship with God which they describe, I will never get it. The fact is, none us of have a clue as to what any of this means by experience until we go through many trials of faith, and surrender ourselves to God. You cannot build a relationship with God by reading books about a relationship with God. You have to actually identify with Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection – and that takes the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit.

 

If you and I want to experience such an identification, we must say goodbye to our comfort zone – whatever that is for us. For when God takes people who are normal and comfortable in the dark, and brings us into some light, we will not be comfortable at first. In fact, there will arise CONTRADICTION IN US to the Truth. Not just in our thinking and understanding. But the Truth of God will, at first, contradict everything that makes us tick as religious people.

 

In this we see that the contradiction which arises in us during a trial of faith isn't something God, "does to us." No. Rather, it is the natural order of things. It is what happens when the REALITY of God meets this natural realm, and our natural thinking. This realm contradicts God, and we are geared to it – even if we are born again. Thus, when God begins to unfold to us the new realm into which we are born, we are going to get uncomfortable in a hurry. There will be, we might say, an, "spiritual disturbance." There will be a STORM. A trial of faith.

 

We must see this. WE – our thinking, our attitudes, our perception – already contradict God. Perhaps not deliberately or consciously. But they are not in harmony with God, for there is little about us that has any clue what it means to live and walk with God. Thus, when God begins to draw us into the relationship He wants with us, we will continue to try to operate on the old basis, in the old patterns – not sinful or rebellious patterns – but in our, "good and religious," patterns that we have walked in with God!! But these won't do. Thus, since God is drawing us to something new, and we are holding to that which is old, we are going to immediately meet contradiction. Often this is the reason for our trial of faith.

 

Excerpted from : THE TRIAL OF YOUR FAITH by David A. DePra at THE GOOD NEWS  © 1998-2005. All rights reserved. (Please include this line to forward the message).