Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, "My father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." And he said, "Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? Gen. 22:7
Hi Dear…….
Just wanted to pen a key thought for you from our chat yesterday just because it has been such an important one to me.
Results in this life do not necessarily validate our faith. We want them to. And at times they do, often more with some than with others. But often they do not. And when they do not, we have to ask ourselves if we will still continue to believe in what we believed for—even if it is something past possibility any longer because of the shifts of life we don’t understand from behind the veil.
Faith is not a matter of being right. It is a matter of being faithful to what our hearts know we have been given, and otherwise faithful to the Lord when our hearts are not absolutely sure about what we have been given. This is true for everything that requires the exercise of faith, whether prayer, or prophecy or healing….
All of us want to see the results here and now. We want our faith validated. That is only right and desirable. But there are so many factors and conditions hidden to us from beyond the veil that affect results in their timing and manifestation for which we cannot give account and about which the Lord does not tell us when we first step out to believe.
If God said something, it is true, regardless of what it looks like to us otherwise at any given time. God is not limited by time or mortality. If God said we could ask anything in His name that the Father might be glorified, and He would do it, then it is true, regardless of whether it appears to us He did not do it. All the prayers of faith that do not manifest in time or under mortality are nevertheless stored up with the Lord to our account for some kind of fulfillment, and are accounted to us for righteousness if we do not turn our backs on them. There is no such thing as a wasted prayer of faith.
God knows that we do not know everything about what we are asking for or believing for. He knows that we do not know the time or the conditions that affect manifestation of what we are asking for. Yet strangely He never qualified His statement to us to believe. He never told us we first had to have our understanding lined up right. He simply said to believe, and to endure in that believing—to be as a child in our faith. A child does not know theology. A child only believes.
What does it mean then to be “wrong” or to “believe wrongly” when it comes to faith? To believe wrongly is to not believe despite the clear inner conviction and vision of the Lord. To believe wrongly is to believe in something from God despite inner conviction or nudging of the Spirit (not human doubt) against it. To believe wrongly is to believe for something out of compromised motives. It is falsity of motives (such as consuming upon our lusts and self-vindication), not lack of understanding or knowledge that indicates we have believed wrongly.
The lessons of life bringing me to these understandings have been many and painful. There is much for which I believed in my lifetime that I never saw fulfilled and could never be fulfilled now. Life moves on, rendering many prayers of faith to a place of quiet relinquishment in this life, awaiting another day, another time under conditions of immortality to be realized.
But the Lord taught me in those times of pain never to second guess my faith over the past, when it became clear it was time to yield active faith for a certain thing God was not manifesting. He taught me to never renounce my faith. He taught me to believe that all faith either is now or will be rewarded, if we do not turn to deny it. It has never been about being right. It has always only been about being faithful.
In all this, true faith endures the adversity of self-doubt and the doubt of others based in failed results. Faith does receive the genuine correction of the Lord. But unless the Lord is behind the conviction and the correction that we believed amiss, we must hold to our faith, and await the Father’s verdict in all things.
We went through a hard journey these last years. And it is still hard. It was a journey based in a faith that did not manifest for us. And it brought great emotional pain and suffering as a result. Our minds would tell us that those results prove the invalidity of our faith. And had I not passed through my previous lessons in this regard, I might be struggling with that issue as you are now. But because of what I have already passed through before this, in my heart, I know it to be otherwise. Our faith was not in vain, and is not in vain while it is still called “today.”
Love,
Dad
Chris Anderson
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org5/15
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