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Dip Your Foot in the Water - Part 2 - Fully Assured in Your Heart

by Jerry Ousley  
8/30/2013 / Christian Living

Have you ever been in a situation in which you just weren't certain about what you were being asked to do? I have. Let me explain. When I was in high school during a certain art class, some friends pulled a stunt on me. They told me how to stretch paper. What really made it somewhat believable was that the art teacher, a big prankster himself, allowed them to do it and even backed them up in what they were saying. Here were the instructions to stretch paper: First one had to paint a water color picture. After allowing your painting to dry you then took a clean brush and thoroughly covered it with a coating of plain water. After letting that set for five minutes you repeated the process. By now you had a smeared mess but remember this was supposed to make the paper stretch. After five additional minutes a third coating of water was applied to the paper. This third application required ten minutes of waiting after which you grabbed both ends of the paper firmly and jerked with all your strength. This would make the paper stretch.

Of course what really happened was that the thoroughly soaked paper simply came apart in the middle and your arms were flung wide in opposite directions. This resulted in your face turning red as your "buddies" laughed till the cows came home. I have to admit; it was funny. It was so funny that I got my friends to help me pull the prank on another guy.

Sometimes faith can make us uncertain about things. Often faith requires people to trust in things that go against natural thinking. However, God isn't pulling a prank on us. The reason He sometimes requires things of us that may make us appear foolish is because in addition to having faith we generally have a lesson to learn about pride. You see, Jesus had people do some things that required them to give up their pride. Our Lord hA the power to just simply make things happen for us. But when He heals He wants to heal completely; when He blesses, He wants to give us a double portion. He wants to get at the root problem we often ignore.

There's an acrostic for faith: Faith is F ull A ssurance I n T he H eart. This teaches us that we must believe. That's what faith is. But there are times that going against the natural makes it very difficult to believe. When Joshua had the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant, step into the flooded river Jordan, it looked like a very foolish thing to do. I'm certain that many of their enemies had spies looking on, hidden in the bushes on the other side of the river. The Bible doesn't say that but it makes sense to me. If they were, what God was requiring them to do would certainly make them look foolish in the eyes of their enemies.

But when they obeyed, the Bible tells us that the river was stopped several miles upstream and the water quit flowing. What was left in the banks and what had over-spilled the banks continued its journey downstream and suddenly they had an empty riverbed in which to cross. It was nothing short of a miracle. But had they not trusted God and risked looking foolish they may have spent months trying to build a bridge to get to the other side of that river. God worked a mighty miracle for them because they were obedient to His word.

It's the same for us. Sometimes believing God and having faith in Him requires us to do something foolish. But when we are fully assured in our hearts that what God tells us to do in His word will bring us the answer we really need not just what we think we need then we can stand on the other side of the river we must cross and watch as God makes the way. And He will.

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.

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