FAITH: ITS VITALITY AND WONDER

Faith is the robust power source of the human heart.  Its reach is both deep and stunning.  Why, one might inquire?  It is faith that legitimately reverses, may even implode, the discouraging things of the seen.  Faith isn't wishful thinking.  It is factual forward movement.  We walk by faith and not by sight, insisted the Apostle Paul.

I wish to perpetuate the message that believing God is stunning simply because of the meaningful, glorious, and radical factor known as hope.  The heart that believes God possesses an incurable hope even when all measurement of socially-accepted knowledge verifies, or at least portrays, the opposite.

How can there be a more fascinating tool for one's daily walk than to possess a deep faith in our active God who delivers for the believer two fundamental facts:

1. He makes dead situations, goals, hopes, and dreams come back to life.
2. He can make something out of nothing, from nothing, with nothing.

When we are faced with moments that appear to be "the end", we are free to imagine possibility and potential.  This is powerful for every relationship, each plan, and all goals.  God gives life to things which man could conclude as DOA.

And then...and then a trait of Him that I so find unfathomable, yet true, is God's ability to bring about wonder when there was no other sign that such remotely could be possible.  I would stand alone 40 years ago in a church auditorium and plead with God that He would help me to reach the whole world.  He immediately moved me to a congregation in the very center of America which happened to have a vast reach.  Too, God placed me over an annual workshop that continues to dream of inspiring world evangelism.  And more, He created at my fingertips a computer with email and Facebook, etc. that has a reach which goes....well....around the entire world.

This is who we are!  We are linked into a system that is never shut down by any visible distress; but is rather empowered by an invisible certainty called faith.  Faith isn't a term reserved for weak religiosity.  Rather, it is the hallmark of an individual daring to resist things as they are in order to actively seek the wonders that are not....yet.

May we have the courage to walk in the Jesus-arena where the Spirit of God lifts us higher than our best corporate imaginations.  From reading my Bible, I pick up that He isn't close to being done with the wow-factors!  Just because a dream has died it doesn't mean that it can't be resurrected.  And, just because there are matters that are yet to exist does not mean that they can't come into being if one would but believe with the hope of what God can create...from our nothing.

(as it is written, “A father of many nations have I made you”) in the presence of Him whom he believed, even God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.  In hope against hope he believed, so that he might become a father of many nations according to that which had been spoken, “So shall your descendants be." Without becoming weak in faith he contemplated his own body, now as good as dead since he was about a hundred years old, and the deadness of Sarah’s womb; yet, with respect to the promise of God, he did not waver in unbelief but grew strong in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform.