Has God told you something, or promised you something, either directly or through His Word, but you feel like you don’t have enough faith to believe it will come to pass? To make matters worse, you’ve probably heard a dozen sermons on the topic telling you that God isn’t answering you because of your weak faith.
And of course, adding fuel to your feeling of helplessness, there are all those stories from Jesus’ life where He praised people’s faith and then healed them completely or granted them their requests. Not to mention the times He walked away, unable to do any miracles because of their lack of faith.
Funny how the Enemy will bring up all those “faith” stories and pound you over the head with them until you feel like you’re the biggest Christian loser out there. A complete failure. I mean, why would God help someone like you?
Faith is important, but it doesn’t stand alone. There’s something else vitally important, equally important in fact, something that must come before faith.
Remember the story in Luke 5 where Jesus first meets Peter. He uses Peter’s boat to preach to the crowd. Afterward, he tells Peter to row out and cast his net into the deep. Now, Peter had been up all night fishing and hadn’t caught a thing. He knew full well that if he didn’t catch anything all night, he certainly wasn’t going to catch fish in the broad daylight. What Jesus was asking him to do was crazy! Yet, Peter hesitated only a second before he said, “Nevertheless, at your Word, I will let down the net.”
As it turns out, when Peter did as Jesus asked, he caught so many fish, his nets nearly broke. Now, I ask you, did Peter have faith that he would catch fish? No. He told Jesus as much. Then why did the Lord bless him with so much fish?
I believe it was two things: Obedience and reverence. I don’t know what Peter believed about Jesus at this point, but he must have believed Jesus was either a prophet or some holy man, perhaps even the Messiah. Because of that belief, he feared Jesus as one would fear God, in a reverential, awestruck way. That reverence led to obedience.
Obedience is better than sacrifice. Obedience is the beginning of faith. I urge you to search through all the examples in Scripture where Jesus preformed a miracle for someone. Some of those people may have had the faith to believe Jesus would grant their requests; others may not have. But I assure you, all of them worshiped Him and obeyed Him first.
Do you worship God? Revere him? Are you living in obedience? If so, then perhaps your faith isn’t as weak as you first thought. So, don’t let the Enemy tell you that you have no faith or that your faith is weak. The fact that he’s even attacking you with those doubts proves the opposite to be true. Faith is not a feeling. Faith is obedience. Believe that God loves you and that He is a good God, and that He rewards those who seek Him. In Peter’s case, that was enough.
So shove out into the deep, cast out your net, and see if God doesn’t fill it with fish!
MaryLu Tyndall