A "Guest Post": The Trial of Faith

Let me be very clear. This is a devotional I copied and pasted from My Utmost for His Highest. Calling it a guest post is stretching the truth to the breaking point. It's almost certainly illegal for me to repost it like this, but since I have about eight readers, I don't think it will be a problem. This is the original link: http://utmost.org/the-trial-of-faith/I found this incredibly helpful, even worth breaking the law for. Enjoy:

We have the idea that God rewards us for our faith, and it may be so in the initial stages. But we do not earn anything through faith— faith brings us into the right relationship with God and gives Him His opportunity to work. Yet God frequently has to knock the bottom out of your experience as His saint to get you in direct contact with Himself. God wants you to understand that it is a life of faith, not a life of emotional enjoyment of His blessings. The beginning of your life of faith was very narrow and intense, centered around a small amount of experience that had as much emotion as faith in it, and it was full of light and sweetness. Then God withdrew His conscious blessings to teach you to “walk by faith” (2 Corinthians 5:7). And you are worth much more to Him now than you were in your days of conscious delight with your thrilling testimony.

Faith by its very nature must be tested and tried. And the real trial of faith is not that we find it difficult to trust God, but that God’s character must be proven as trustworthy in our own minds. Faith being worked out into reality must experience times of unbroken isolation. Never confuse the trial of faith with the ordinary discipline of life, because a great deal of what we call the trial of faith is the inevitable result of being alive. Faith, as the Bible teaches it, is faith in God coming against everything that contradicts Him— a faith that says, “I will remain true to God’s character whatever He may do.” The highest and the greatest expression of faith in the whole Bible is— “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).

Cain and Abel used to bother me.

Yesterday in church I realized it bugged me that God seemed to accept Abel and reject Cain. Doesn't Acts 10:34-35 tell us that he's "no respecter of persons" (depending on your translation)? Doesn't 1 Peter 1:17 say the Father judges impartially, and are we not instructed to imitate God by doing "nothing out of favoritism" in 1 Timothy 5:21? And in James 3:17 the wisdom that comes from heaven is lots of things, and one of them is impartial.

But before I had even had time to think of those (I mean, who needs references to know God is fair, right?) I realized that I was overlooking part of the story. Genesis 4:4-5 says, "The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor." Not just Abel and Cain themselves. So Cain gets mad and sad (my paraphrase of Genesis 4:5b) and God, being a considerate person, asks him why. "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?"

I admit there's a lot going on in the original story that I don't understand, because I don't know if there's some significance to the difference between offering animals and plants (one has blood and includes death?) and I know that Abel kept flocks for a living, and Cain grew stuff, so what does that say about 2 Corinthians 8:12 "For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have"? But I think I know the answer already. It specifies right in the passage, "if the willingness is there."

The reading of the Cain and Abel story that does not bother me is as follows: Cain's and Abel's offerings have modern-day parallels that I can understand. Another word for offering in this case will be sacrifice. Modern-day sacrifices include all sorts of things. Like:

- sacrificing your right to speak up and defend yourself all the time (Jesus set us an example of this in 1 Peter 2:23, and it is every bit as relevant today as ever);

- sacrificing whatever amount of time you set aside daily for prayer, listening to God and reading Scripture;

- sacrificing watching movies or TV or listening to music that feels really good but also sort of tears apart your soul a little bit by setting a bad example (okay, I am referring to Gossip Girl);

- sacrificing the unlimited free music you could be having by choosing to pay out of respect for musicians;

- sacrificing your American Dream to pursue something less glam and impressive for Jesus' sake and the sake of the broken (example: doing that thing where you put a cap on your earnings and give the rest away);

- sacrificing a tenth of your dinero to give to church;

- sacrificing making out too much or at the wrong time in the interest of purity and showing you trust God that He's better than making out out of season.

and.. the examples are probably infinite, but those are what I came up with on the spot. If you were wondering, the making out one is my favorite example, lol. And I'd consider those to all be pretty good sacrifices. Sacrifices that are supernaturally motivated when you decide you want to honor God and ask Him for the strength to make them. I realize there are way bigger things to give up, and also way smaller. But I think the listed examples all require faith that there's more to life than what we can see. Hebrews 11:4 says that, "By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did." So I can believe that in my modern-day parallel story, Abel's sacrifice, his offering, was something like one of those or better. And as for Cain, well, his offering was probably more like the day you forgot to bring lunch with you and there's nowhere you can buy it so you realize halfway through being hungry that technically it could probably be referred to as a fast, and that's what you offer. Cain's sacrifice was probably like giving your last leftovers to God instead of the firstfruits He both wants and deserves way more than you, anyway. It doesn't take faith, because you didn't really do anything differently in your life because of it.

Frankly, I often have trouble with the binaries, or lack thereof, in the world. It's far easier to understand life in black and white. But God is a person, and like any person, doesn't fit into any kind of formula or predictability. So it's His divine right (and in this case, who could blame Him anyway?) to look favorably upon some offerings and not upon others. Some offerings are better, some come from a deeper place in the heart and thus contain more of us. More of our will, because they reflect more of the giver's intention (if I didn't already tell you, I think will and intention are the deepest part of someone's being). To use a dumb example, think of the difference between someone giving you store-bought cookies and home-baked ones. Sure, they are both cookies. And even if they taste the same (I think we all know the home-baked ones would be better in a non-hypothetical situation), heck, even if the home ones are worse, you will probably look more favorably on the ones that someone took time to plan and bake for you, which they did not have to do (evidenced by the fact that there is such a thing as store-bought cookies).

The rough part for me is that I can easily imagine myself in Cain's place: someone else totally spends more time with God, and I am jealous that they seem to be receiving more from Him. Well, should I be surprised by this? If I gave up what they have to pursue Jesus, would I not receive the riches I see them with?

Lastly, there's a verse somewhere (thought it was in James or Corinthians, but couldn't find it, and Google didn't help at all) about how we kill people or are mean to them or something not because of how bad they are, but how bad we are (awful, awful paraphrase I know). And this seemed relevant, and I would've added it if I could've.

Not by what he sees with his eyes...

Isaiah 11:3 says, "...and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears." I think we assume this is referring to Jesus, but even if somehow it were not, we know this is a good guy because he delights in the fear of the Lord. That = the right thing to do.

Hebrews 11:27 is talking about Moses leaving Egypt and it says, "...he persevered, because he saw him who is invisible."

As an ENFP, a big thing about me is my passion for possibilities. I tend to see things as they could be, and get really excited about what is not, but what could be. As I've been visiting many of the rooms of Fischer and some in Mac for my summer job, I really see this. My eyes see that each room is blank, stripped completely bare, but my mind sees adorable room setups and unlimited potential. I wish I had lived in a triple anywhere because they are so cute, but more specifically, I wish I had been a boy so I could have lived in one of the triples on the end of the east wing of Fischer, or on T7, where you can see everything from up high and it's beautiful. I wish I had lived in Mac seven times so I could try out each of the different kinds of rooms and each different possible view from the windows, which are all shapes and sizes and look out over different buildings in different directions. Don't get me started on Williston.

I think a person misses a lot of life, and a lot of what's important, when they don't acknowledge the unseen. I do need to be clear and say that the "unseen but real" is not exactly the same thing as "the possible," but they do overlap.

The Bible teaches us that the wise person is the person who does not make decisions based on present circumstances, which flare away like dry paper in a fire, but instead makes their decisions based on God, who is changeless and everlastingly loving. We're allowed to dream big because of God; he always dreams bigger anyway.

I don't always see my dreams come to fruition, but as cheesy as it sounds, I honestly believe that's because God's dreams are bigger/more awesome than mine, and it's His that I get to live out instead whenever I am willing to let mine go.

I'm pleased that wisdom means seeing beyond what's visible, sometimes even beyond what's really there. I can't help but do that already. Too bad there is more to wisdom than that.

One more thing:

"If you treat an individual how he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be." -Johann Wolfgang von Goeth

I don't know where this quote is from, but I think Mr. von Goeth is right, and furthermore, I think this can apply to all kinds of things, even whole situations. This is kind of the whole deal with faith, right? Believing for something brings it into being. We've all seen too many examples of this idea seeming to fail to believe the power of believing is limitless. But I think it should be and maybe can be.