How Faith Grows

Before the first Sunday morning service at Harvest Christian Fellowship, we have a time of prayer and worship with our volunteers. One morning we asked some of them to share what they were thankful to God for.

I was very surprised by one woman’s answer. She said, “I’m thankful to God that I’m going through a trial.”

What? Who says that? She did. And she went on to say, “Job says, ‘When He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.’”

Now there’s someone who understands why God allows trials in her life.

Do you want your faith to grow? I hate to break this to you, but if you said yes, then you just said, “Lord, I want some trials.”

We want our faith to grow in the sunshine and the good times. And it does to some degree. But real faith grows in the valleys when the storm clouds are forming, when things are not making sense. And why does it grow? Because we hang on to God.

We hang on to God because we have nowhere else to go. And that is not a bad place to be, by the way. Sometimes we’ll have lapses of faith, and as a result, we think we’ve failed. But everyone has lapses of faith. Everyone. So just come to God with as much faith as you have.

Also, faith doesn’t mean that we check our brains at the door. Christians use logic. Christians think things through. Most importantly, Christians think things through biblically.

Faith is not opposed to reason, but sometimes it’s opposed to feelings and appearances. That means we refuse to let our emotions rule us. We refuse to let circumstances rule us. Instead, we resolve to have faith, regardless of circumstances.

Faith is not the absence of thinking. Faith is focused on thinking on God’s Word.