Author: dpatrickcollins

Essayist, poet and author of fiction providing unique insights into the Christian experience.

The Limits of Faith

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We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith

Romans 12:6 (NIV)

As we have been discussing, faith is ultimately something God supplies. Not that we have no role in cultivating a lifestyle of faith, but recognizing faith is not something we can manufacture ourselves, and that it is ultimately a gift from God, will save us a lot of needless striving (and no small degree of emotional distress). The faith we need to move mountains and see answered prayer is ultimately a gift from God.

But why then does God tell us to have faith? For the same reason He tells us to be perfectly righteous. When Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven1,” He is in fact telling us to possess what He alone can provide. It is the same with faith. Our part is to cultivate both through relationship. By coming into relationship with Jesus by receiving His forgiveness purchased by His own death at the Cross, we become perfectly righteous. By cultivating a lifestyle of intimacy with Jesus, we become filled with faith to move the very mountains God is moving.

This distinction is really important because it means we are not ultimately in control of the level of faith we have: God is. Again, we are not trying to manufacture faith; we are learning to operate in the faith God has already given us. This is why the apostle Paul in the opening scripture (above) encourages us to operate in the grace given to us according to our faith. Where grace exists, faith is present. And God ultimately controls both: He gives us the faith to operate in the gifts He has given to us and to fulfill our God-given destiny. He also gives us the faith to cooperate with Him in the soul’s transformation. He is not in other words standing far off expecting us to muster up faith; rather, He leads us by faith.

And this means there are limits to faith. Not in the sense of what faith can accomplish, but in the sense of where faith can be found in our lives at any given point of our journey. That is, faith will always be present in the areas where God is at work in our lives. We do grow in faith, but not by trying to have more faith. We grow in faith by being faithful to partner with God with the faith He has already given to us.

In saying this, I am challenging the whole idea that faith is a super-power that lets us do whatever we want. That faith is an alternate path to perfection that does not require partnering with God at all, really: we just crank up the faith engine through our own effort and we are free to do whatever we want. This whole notion is in actuality a perception of faith from an orphan lens. In many ways it is an attempt to reap the benefits of faith without the cost involved, which is intimacy with God.

Which is not possible. Whether we are talking about romantic love or our relationship with God, intimacy costs you something. In fact, it ultimately costs you everything. But those who have participated in either know the cost is worth it. The path to life is limited by the narrow gate of intimacy. But once we enter, we find God and His goodness to be, well, quite limitless.2

  1. Matthew 5:20 ↩︎
  2. Matthew 7:13 ↩︎

Having Faith like a Child

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And Jesus said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

Matthew 18:3 (NIV)

Yesterday I discussed the folly of trying to practice faith through a faith-factory lens in which we think Jesus is expecting us to generate faith through the raw materials of our intellect and human effort alone, instead of through the only thing that can, honestly, generate true faith: intimacy with God. It is our intimate connection with Him that reveals to us who He is and what He is doing, both of which supply us with the very faith we need for every situation.

Which, coming from a faith-based culture, seems a bit wrong-headed. We may believe God speaks, and that He often tells us what He is doing. But isn’t the task of having enough faith our responsibility? To suggest God is ultimately the one who supplies us the very faith we need sounds a lot like God doing our job for us. Doesn’t it?

Well, it does – if we are viewing Christianity from an orphan mindset. If we think God’s ultimate objective is to make us independent creatures who rely on our own abilities to accomplish great things on our own and forge our own destiny, then God supplying the faith we need will sound a lot like God doing our job for us. But if God’s real objective is a life of intimacy, characterized by our utter dependence on Him (like a child has with a Father or a Bride with a Bridegroom) then God being the one to supply the faith we need, indeed the One to supply all we need, is not God doing our job for us but instead His job description. He longs to be our everything.

When Jesus says “Have faith in God,” He is not telling us to try harder: He’s telling us to go deeper. He is not giving us a job; He is inviting us into a life of such close intimacy with Himself that we find ourselves commanding the very mountains He Himself is moving, being moved by the very compassion and hope He Himself is feeling, even the very anger at the injustice the Evil One has unleashed upon the world.

The endgame is a life of intimacy. Anything short of this will not only tie us in emotional knots but also lead to a whole lot of spiritual striving. The tragedy in all of this is not just that we are unhappy or unproductive, but rather we are not ourselves. We are alienated from who we truly are. For like a child or a Bride, we were created for intimacy.

Faith is a Lot Like Dating

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Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Mark 11:24 (NIV)

The claims Jesus makes about faith are astounding. But how exactly does one go about living a life of faith? How does one believe in a way that we receive what we ask for?

This is an important question because without a good answer, we can find ourselves tied up in all sorts of emotional knots. A visiting speaker at Elevation Church made the observation that the evangelical church in particular has created a culture where it is believed “bright and shiny” emotions – such as joy and hope – are the only ones God wants us to have, and this belief finds it roots in a poor understanding of faith. That if we are feeling hopeless and sorrowful, we are somehow denying God’s goodness and operating in unbelief. Which of course can only lead to a culture of people doing their best to hopelessly deny their emotions. And, as a part of what we might call a faith-based culture, I see this all the time.

But what then is faith if not controlling our emotions? Better yet, how does one have it? Here, it is helpful for us to have the right paradigm. When it comes to faith, most of us see ourselves as faith factories; that is, we think it is our job to produce faith by working with the raw materials we have at hand, like intellect and human effort. But faith is more like a woman on a first date. She may be hopeful, but she knows very little about the man on the other side of the table. And – here’s the rub – she has no idea whether he will come through for her till she gets to know him.

That is the true paradigm of faith. Faith is inescapably relational, and our ability to have faith in God for any situation is directly proportional to our intimate knowledge of Him. It is not something we can possess without knowing Him intimately any more than a woman can possess confidence in the man without getting to know him. Which is why cultivating a life of intimacy with God – one where we come into supernatural contact with His love – is so vital. God’s love is not just the fringe benefit of our salvation; it is the life force that empowers all else in the Christian life. As we come to know God’s love, our confidence He will come through for us in any situation we face will increase.

But this is not all there is to faith. For the life of faith is a relationship, just like a dating relationship, and our faith depends on what is going on in that relationship. For example, a woman who has gotten to know a man and who has earned her trust will believe him when he says, “I will meet you at the restaurant by the pier this Saturday at seven.” But her confidence will not only rest on what she knows about him. It will also rest on the simple if not obvious fact he has just told her what he intends to do. In the same way, our faith in God showing up in a way we expect is not simply based on what we know about Him. It is also based on Him revealing to us what He intends to do.

Many believers are driving themselves nuts trying to muster the faith God will show up in a specific way in their lives without God revealing to them what He intends to do. The reason for this is the faith-factory paradigm: when Jesus encourages us to have faith, we think He means from thin air. Granted, there are many instances in life where we can ask God for things with confidence on the basis of His character alone. But our tendency to think faith takes place outside relationship, as though God is requiring us to know precisely what He intends to do in any given situation without letting us draw close enough to Him to know what He is doing, is neither biblical nor rational. Nor relational, I would add: it is the breeding ground for emotional knots.

But if faith rests on God telling us in advance what he intends to do, doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose of faith? Not really. At least, Abraham, the father of faith, did not think so, who believed precisely because God told him what He was about to do. Nor did Jesus, who only did what He saw The Father doing. The endgame of faith, as with dating, is not control or wild predictions; it is relational intimacy.

My Champion

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When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

Colossians 2:13-14 (NIV)

Last Sunday during church our pastor mentioned he felt there were many who had made Jesus their Savior but not necessarily their Lord, and he welcome those who felt God speaking to them about this to come to the front for prayer. But as soon as he said it, I felt God say to me, “There are also many who have made Me their Lord but not their Savior. Because they believe it is their job to save themselves.”

This was relevant to me. Earlier that week, I found myself praying a well-known passage from Revelation (I often “pray” the Bible): “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.”1 As I asked God to come in and eat with me, I immediately got this impression of Jesus trying to make His way through my doorway but something getting in the way. When I asked the Lord about this, I felt Him say to me, “I can only come as your Savior. But you are trying to save yourself.”2

And then I had one of those “life flash before my eyes” moments in which I saw myself trying so hard to be a good person in order to please Him. I saw how I learned from an early age that it was my job to be good and led to believe I actually was capable of being good. God was putting his finger on these things, showing me how they made me resistant to the idea I needed a Savior, not just for my eternal destiny but also for life. Ironically, God also showed me in that moment all my moral and relational failures throughout life, clearly undermining the idea I was capable of being truly good at anything! I felt in that moment there was nothing good in me.3

We do not mean to save ourselves; it is just normal to think we owe God something, and that something is our own goodness. But the kingdom of God does not work that way. Instead, we bring him the worst part of ourselves and say, “This is all I got. Please help!” We bring Him our crisis, and He becomes our intervention. We bring Him our ashes, and He becomes our beauty. We bring Him our heaviness, and He becomes our joy. We bring Him our desert, and He becomes our streams of living water. We bring Him our nakedness and He clothes us in white. And He does it again and again and again.

Another name for Savior is Champion. Jesus is the one who fights for me. May I learn to be vulnerable enough to bring to Him the battles worth fighting for — that is, the ones I could not possible fight on my own.

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

  1. Revelation 3:20 (NIV) ↩︎
  2. I should probably do a blog post on hearing God’s voice at some point, but suffice it to say: God is really good at speaking to us in a variety of ways when we set our hearts to listen. ↩︎
  3. Romans 7:18. God has a way of showing us these things without any condemnation, which was the case here. ↩︎

Seeking the Kingdom

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From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.

Matthew 11:12-13 (NKJV)

According to the Author of all life, life requires us taking the kingdom of heaven by force. All that is precious, sacred, eternal and of any worth requires intentionality and perseverance to possess. When it comes to the kingdom of heaven (that is, God), passivity simply will not do. Unlike other uses of force, however, the force required to apprehend the kingdom of heaven is not force used against others but rather against ourselves. For the thing that stands in the way of us and the kingdom is our own hearts.

The late theologian Dallas Willard argued the place of greatest darkness in all of creation is the human soul. Creation itself is filled with the glory of God, but not necessarily filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, for the human soul is the place where our knowledge of God’s glory is most absent. Granted, the darkness that inhabits the human soul has actually affected the rest of creation.1 But Willard’s comment underscores the point I am making here: the battleground for establishing what is right, just and good in this world begins and ends with the human heart.

But I must be quick to clarify the force I have in mind (that is, what I believe Jesus has in mind) is a gentle force. It is the force that chooses to seek Him. It is the force that chooses to lose one’s life for Him. It is the force that chooses to allow His Holy Spirit full control of our lives without condition, permitting Him to operate outside the box of our own making concerning what God can and cannot do, allowing him into the place we have learned to keep ourselves safe from all that He might wish to do. It is the force of humility and surrender, arguably the most powerful force in the world –– certainly the most powerful force we possess.

  1. Romans 8:20 ↩︎