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Crawling or Walking
by Jerry Ousley There's a story about a traveler many years ago before the invention of the automobile (if you can imagine that). The man was walking when he came to a frozen river. It was early in the winter season so he wondered if the ice was thick enough for him to walk on. He was afraid to take a chance so he came up with the idea of crawling across the ice so that his weight would be a little more evenly spread. So here he was inching his way across the ice when all of a sudden he heard someone whistling. He looked to his right just in time to see a man driving a horse drawn wagon loaded with coal going right across the frozen river and past him. I bet he felt silly right about then! The fact is many of us are doing that very same thing. In 2 Peter 1:3-4 the Bible talks about the many precious promises of God. We've heard the old hymn "Standing on the Promises of God." But many of us seem to be doing just like this man trying to cross the ice over the river. We aren't certain that we can make it so we find ourselves crawling along just making it inch by inch. But God wants us to stand on His promises. There are so many promises in the Bible that apply to each of us. God wants us to be happy people. He wants us to have victory in our lives. The problem is that so many times it seems like we've been dealt a bad hand. We find life just like this unsure traveler did, early on, not sure if the ice is thick enough to hold us up, wondering if we can really trust that promise or not. We find ourselves crawling along wanting to believe; wanting to have victory but so many things have happened that we're just not sure that we can. There have been financial crises take place that leave us rocking and reeling. Some have lost their homes due to the major fore-closures that have left our country in a terrifying grip. Others have lost their health or have received bad news about loved ones. We find ourselves tempted by all these daily blows of doubt, to just forget about it. Maybe we think that the promises were true once but aren't for us today. But I want to tell you that just about the time we begin to think like this, along comes someone who knows. This person is whistling as they go along carefree not giving a second thought to the ice. They're experienced enough to know that it will hold them up and so they just go along with a horse drawn wagon full of coal and it doesn't seem like they have a care in the world. You see, faith isn't something that we get as a gift except that first measure given to us when we come to the Lord. From there on it is something we build. Faith isn't increased by asking for more but like muscles; the more we exercise them the bigger they get. The more we trust the ice the more we know about when it is stable and how much weight it will take. The more we stand on the promises of God and trust them the stronger they become to us. We also need to understand just what faith is. Many teach that faith is like a protective shield against bad things happening to us. Just when we want to start believing this we see someone we know as a strong Christian getting a major disease like cancer and it makes us to wonder. But faith is really trusting God no matter what comes our way, what the enemy of our souls throws at us or how thick the ice really is. Faith means that we are fully assured that God will take care of us no matter what comes. I've often thought about Daniel in the den of lions. God protected him and he wasn't even scratched by one of those big cats. But in the early days of the Church many Christians were thrown to the lions in the Roman arenas. Those lions tore them to bits. Didn't they have faith? I believe that it took the same faith to die by the lions as it did for Daniel to live in spite of them. Protection from the lions had nothing to do with faith. Faith meant that both Daniel and those early Christians believed in God and were committed no matter what the lions did. God chose to spare Daniel but not those early Christians. I don't know why but I'll tell you one thing: They weren't crawling but standing on God's promises! Jerry D. Ousley is the author of ?Soul Challenge?, ?Soul Journey?, ?Ordeal?, ?The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional and his first novel ?The Shoe Tree.? Visit our website at spiritbread.com to download these and more completely free of charge. Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com |