Living Out Our Faith

As Christians we are called to live out our faith. It is easy to become overly interested what living our our faith entail. It as as if living our our faith is a complicated formula we must figure out before we begin to live out our faith.

The reality is that if we are seeking to love God we often are best suited by simply acting on opportunities which exist around us. It is not that thinking about living out of faith is of no use. Thinking about living out our faith is often of use, but often we spend so much time thinking about living out our faith that we fail to act.

If we truly seek to live out our faith we should not hesitate to grasp the opportunities which present themselves around us. Questions of if the opportunities are the best fit for us are often of little use.

God uses those of willing hearts. It is ultimately not us, but God who brings success to us as we work out our faith in the world.

Doing Something Definite

Doing something definite is almost always to be preferred than planning something grand. Often in life both in work and religion we pass over good opportunities which seem a bit mundane in search of the grand.

There is no shame in dreaming big. Often it is easy to fail by dreaming to small. But often when we dream big and fail frequently we should set our sites on the definite albeit small opportunities around us.

It is easy to get so caught up in doing something big that we do nothing at all. Maybe we could volunteer at an organization for a few hours here and there but we see it as small. We look for something bit and accomplish nothing.

Maybe we have a certain dream career we wish to have and it never seems to work. We prefer to sit at home and keep pursuing the dream which is not working instead of taking that which is practical and realistic.

Often we need to have a bit of a sober viewpoint of ourselves. Maybe we are held back in life at times because our plans for ourselves are too grand. It is certain that there a people whose plans are too small, but it seems more people fail because of plans which are too grand rather than too small.

Doing something definite in the world in whatever we do is to be preferred to unrealistic dreams and doing nothing. Everything in the world is God's. Whatever we do we should do to the glory of God.

God does not see the way in men do. He does not view obedience to his will in terms of how prestigious a man's work is or how much recognition he receives for it. He looks at man's faithfulness in life.

We can be faithful in small thing. Sometimes we must first be faithful in small things before we can be faithful in large things.

Self Knowledge and Sanctification

Often in churches you see this great discomfort when people express what they struggle with. It is as if pastors fear that church attenders expressing their sins give credence that the sin is alright.

I personally do not think this tendency is correct. There is certainly an over sharing which is possible, but a knowledge of sin is necessary for growth.

I always find it far more concerning when you find church members whose lives are so perfectly together and seem to have no awareness of their sin. It is often just not true.

It is more often that their is a lack of awareness or a fakeness to the person than a lack of sin. We all need to grow and are all at different points in our journey. Some of us have started in worse places than others.

But all of us need grace daily and a lack of awareness of sin is always quite concerning. We cannot grow if we do not see that we need to grow.

It is difficult to solve a problem that one cannot see exists. And sometimes this is why God confronts us with ourselves.

We cannot grow in issues we do not see. And sometimes God purposely brings opportunities for issues to come to the surface for this reason.

Small Things

One issue in the Christian life is that we often want to make a difference, but we don't know how. So we do nothing.

I think the issue at times is we think too big. We are busy working or being a student or a parent or doing this or that. And we compare ourselves to people with great ability and great time.

Comparison is often not helpful. You see we don't have to do something huge to make a difference. There are thousands of small options.

Sometimes we just need to pick something and go with it. Sometimes small things lead to bigger things and sometimes they don't.

But we can be faithful in living our Christian faith by looking for small opportunities to make a difference. Small changes add up and are meaningful.

It is pride to think that being a positive influence in a small way is not meaningful. It is doing nothing which is not meaningful.

God created man to be in community. With the reality of a fallen world man in community needs to attempt to make a difference.

It is often that we simply do not make a difference because we devalue the small things we can do. Another issue is that some people simply overlook what they have done.

They make a difference but they cannot accept it. So they never see any difference made because they cannot believe they have made a difference.

This tends to inhibit their effort because they never see results even when the results exist.

Sometimes we need to be humble to see we have made a change! It can be pride which blinds us from accepting we have made a small but real difference.

Sometimes self doubt blinds us from seeing the difference we have made. Here we need to realize that God uses broken man to do his will in the world. Everyone is weak and God uses us anyway.

Many people think they are strong but ultimately the strongest person in this world is weak. Death shows that in the end we are all weak. Some people are stronger than others but we are all weak whether we accept it or not.