Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Unwavering Faith


When God says to come to Him as little children, He’s talking about faith. Children are totally trusting when it comes to being taken care of and they never stop for one minute to worry about what tomorrow will bring. Even though most of us claim to have a lot of faith, how many of us actually have the faith of a child?


One of the areas in which we need to be more child-like is our study of scripture. If we were to read the Bible simply, as a child would, instead of tearing apart words and sentences the way we do, maybe scripture wouldn’t seem so difficult to understand!


I know it’s not easy to be all grown up and try to think like a child again, so I’m going to give an example of how a child perceives a simple sentence. If you say to a child, “Grandma is coming to see you on Thursday and will be bringing you a basket of treats,” he immediately grasps the idea that Grandma’s coming on Thursday, bringing treats!


Now I’m going to repeat the same sentence, but this time, we grown-ups are going to do a little in-depth study of it. I know it sounds silly, but that’s pretty much what we do in our bible studying, so let’s see how it works with a regular old sentence.


Let’s start with the word “grandma.” Since the definition of “grandma” in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “grandmother,” maybe we should pull it apart and look up the words “grand” and “mother,” so we can have an even deeper understanding.


The word “grand” means “having more importance than others,” and the word “mother” means “a female parent.” Now instead of “grandma” we have “a female parent having more importance than others.” I can see how a lot of debates could grow from that!


Other words in the sentence mean as follows:

Coming – “the act of arriving.”

Bringing – “leading, carrying, or causing to come along.”

Basket – “receptacle.”

Treats – “an especially unexpected source of joy.”


Now we can truly understand the in-depth meaning of the whole sentence:

“Someone, having more importance than a female parent, in the act of arriving, will be carrying a receptacle of an especially unexpected source of joy.


Try telling that to a child!


I know all this sounds silly, but the point I’m trying to make is, it’s perfectly fine to look up a word here and there to clarify the meaning of a noun or a verb, but too many people go to extremes, digging and delving into just about every word they can find, until they finally end up destroying the whole meaning of the sentence or scripture verse. If we would just look at the sentence simply, in the way it was intended we could save ourselves a lot of confusion.


What is it that makes us have this need to find hidden messages behind everything written in scripture? It’s because the flesh is constantly seeking to have its own way! We think we have all the answers, or can find them all on our own, and that’s what we do. Believe me, if there are any hidden messages God wants us to know about, the Holy Spirit will reveal it to us when He feels we’re ready.


A child trusts, unwaveringly, because he instinctively knows there is someone bigger and stronger who is watching out for him and is there to take care of him. We instinctively know this too, but our grown-up sophistication gets in the way. A child knows he's small and helpless, but we need to remind ourselves that we are too, without God!


As we learn to rely on God for all things, instead of leaning to our own understanding, we will regain the confidence of knowing there’s always someone there watching over us and taking care of us. We will trust in Him with all our hearts, and our faith will be as a child’s, unwavering!

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