Learning to Walk by Faith

What do you want from your relationship with God? Are you hoping it will result in eternity in heaven? Perhaps your desire is to experience life to the fullest? It may be that you want your life to have purpose, direction, and guidance from a source beyond our limited earthly view? Could it be that you are looking to mature in a way that your life demonstrates the fruit of the Spirit and reflects the shekinah glory of God Himself? Or, are your sights set upon developing a healthy family with relationship skills that lead to better friendships and other interpersonal bonds that are fruitful and uplifting?

These all sound like good things, however, there is a serious problem with this thinking! Our faith walk with God should never be about what we want. When this is how we determine what is best we are thinking according to the flesh! Does this mean that the things listed above are bad—of course not! However, what makes them truly good is they are things God wants for us!!! By walking with Him, He leads us to these things!!! So often, our own attempts at striving for these things winds up in disaster or heartache or frustration because our perspective is limited and our motives are not pure. The real question is whether we have the trust in Him to get beyond what we want to allow him to bring about what He wants!

The Scriptures call us to live a life of faith in God. However, what does this look like? How do we develop faith? Fortunately, God provides an example to follow in the life of Abraham. This morning we will begin the last three weeks of our series on Who is God and What Does He Want by looking at the development of faith. By considering the struggles of Abraham from his call by God in Genesis 12 to the offering of his son as a sacrifice in Genesis 22, we will see that faith involves our ability to surrender to God our past, our present, and our future. These things are very hard to surrender when we are trying to be in control!

Several times in the story of Abraham we see how following his own ingenuity to achieve the types of things listed in the first paragraph of this article actually led to pain and frustration for him and his family, and even separation from God. Even the part of his calling in which God said all the families of the earth would be blessed in him was hindered or forfeited when he tried to walk by his own sight instead of trusting in the guidance of God. These provide painful lessons, however, recognize that God never gave up on him! This is because God wants all these good things for us, even more than we think we do! So, how is your own faith walk going? Are you still holding the reins? Consider surrendering your past, present and future to Him and see where that leads you. I know Abraham is glad he did! Will you be a true child of his and walk by faith?

To listen to sermon, click Developing Faith: Surrendering Our Past.