When someone says they struggle with the faith, what comes next could be a myriad of different issues. People may struggle with an intellectual aspect to the faith – perhaps it’s the reliability of the gospel, or philosophical questions regarding suffering and God’s sovereignty. Others may struggle to simply ‘feel it’ (coming from a Pentecostal background, I can easily recall people who no longer walk in God’s ways because they never ‘felt it’). Others struggle with the faith because the allures of the world are much too strong for them to handle, and they succumb.
In what way do you struggle with the faith?
I think we all have our struggles, and we each feel them in different ways. One that I haven’t mentioned yet is that we can struggle in the faith because we are not seeing God’s promises fulfilled (and I might add, fulfilled as we might expect them to be fulfilled).
Personally, this is one aspect that I find challenging in my own walk, and perhaps it’s the same for you.
God has promised many things. Some promises that come to mind are promises such as,
“And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Matt. 16:18)
And,
“For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.” (Rom. 6:20–22)
I don’t want to go too deeply into these two topics, but to summarise them, God will grow his church and God will sanctify his people.
These are just two things that I struggle with at times. Obviously if the church is in a season of growth, or I’m meeting with someone whose life is completely changed for the better, I’m not struggling very much to believe these promises. God is fulfilling them in front of my very eyes.
But more often than not (in my own experience), I fail to see these things (as I might expect to see them).
Now there is a lot to unpack here and I would readily expect to be misunderstood on these points so please read me right. I believe God is always fulfilling his promises. I believe that despite not seeing it at times or for a season. This is because my faith doesn’t rest on my experience of these matters. God has already accomplished them.
If I was to do some self-diagnosis, I would simply tell myself that I’m short-sighted and my memory doesn’t serve me very well. Not that this makes me feel any better when I just want to see people saved and changed before my eyes! But it does help.
So if you’re anything like me, be encouraged.
Our perspective on God’s work is often very limited, and even now many decades of life is a short span of time in the history of God’s growing kingdom. God may not do what we had hoped in the way that we had hoped. But it will far more often be the case that God has done so much more than we had hoped. Who of us has such a vast imagination that God’s wonderful grace does not surprise us? Our most fantastic dreams about God’s work and God’s kingdom are but mere watery reflections of his ability and his work. Were we to really see what and how the Lord is at work, I dare say we would feel ashamed for even having read such a post as this – let alone having written it!
Let us keep trusting in God’s promises despite our limited perspective and our troubled hearts. For there is always more than meets the eye when it comes to God. We would do well to remember that.
Bigvai and Shiphrah 