Hebrews 11:1 tells us, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” So, what do we hope for? Certainly, we hope for good weather at times and, since we live in West Texas, we hope for rain quite often. We hope for good health for our kids and ourselves because we know in this fallen world many things can and will happen not the least of which is time marching on causing all sorts of old-age maladies. We hope for a good day in the sense that we know our attitudes and moods can change depending on whom we meet during the day and what we encounter from their attitudes and moods. But all of those “hopes” and many others are out of our control for the most part. We must observe and react properly, biblically, as things progress.
There are “hopes” however that are certainties, sureties that we know that we know will come to pass regardless of our circumstances or our opinions or anyone else’s. Things like the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to rule and reign over the entire Earth during the Millennium. Or when we die or are Raptured, we will instantly be in the very Presence of our Lord and Savior. We cannot see these things, yet we know that we know that they will come to pass just as God’s Word assures us.
Life is a gift from God. We are here because God has a plan for each of us. We are not alive by accident or chance or some cosmic disturbance that somehow caused all things to just appear and evolve to the present incomprehensible complexity. We are part of God’s Design, God’s Plan of Redemption to restore, to reconcile us as His creations to Himself so that we can have full and forever fellowship with the Living God, the Creator God, the King of kings and the Lord of lords.
Life becomes the opportunity for each of us to discover just what God has designed each of us to uniquely accomplish for His Glory to complete His Plan. How do we do that after, of course, having accepted God’s Son as Lord and Savior? We study God’s Word to learn His Will for our lives, research God’s Word to realize our spiritual gift with the indwelling Holy Spirit’s guidance, and meditate day and night on God’s Word to fully incorporate and actualize what we glean into our behavior, conscience, morals, emotions, thinking, attitudes, demeanor, etc.
The Old Testament has words of encouragement to all of us about God’s Word. Joshua 1:8 says, “This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.” Psalm 1:2 says, “But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.” Then, the New Testament gives us the reason why we should study God’s Word in 2 Timothy 2:15, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”
But life gets in the way, doesn’t it? Our minds wander, circumstances change, challenges arise, habits are broken, and we stray from what is best. It happens to all of us. Our moods vary because life varies. But we are to control our moods. One of the nine-fold Fruit of the Spirit, the veritable culmination of the Fruit of the Spirit, is self-control (Galatians 5:22,23). Why the culmination? Because God gives us love, joy and peace when we accept His Son as Lord and Savior and we are indwelt with all of the Holy Spirit. When we grasp this marvelous reality in our dreary and unfulfilled lives, everything changes. We grow, we advance, our outlook improves, we know the difference between fleeting happiness and true joy. Our peace with ourselves, our families, our circumstances, our world passes all human understanding. This incredible realization allows us to know that the next three parts of the Fruit of the Spirit (patience, kindness, and goodness) are already ours – all we need to do is act upon them, accept them, use them, rely upon them because they come from God Himself. And when we learn to practice those three, we can then culminate our mastery of what God has already given us, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Those are attitude controllers, mood changers and mood solidifiers, life-style anchors which come from God’s love, joy, and peace.
Habits are a good thing and a bad thing, all at the same time. Good habits range from good eating habits, exercising habits, and hygiene habits to proper language use, proper body language, and proper etiquette. Bad habits are legion, as we all know, from physical to mental to emotional to spiritual. To establish a habit takes effort in most cases and lack of effort in others. To establish a new habit takes time because we need to set the habit into our behavior and mental processes. We then can maintain that habit with decreased effort. But, if the new habit is something that goes against our very human nature, our ingrained and natural selfishness, our sinfulness even if we are established Christians, it must be trained, maintained, and unending. Such is faith.
The reading of God’s Word, daily prayer, and church attendance are all part of the good Christian life. When our habits go against our fallen human natures, which we all retain as long as we are alive in our present bodies (only our spirits are already eternally holy – not our bodies or our minds), we must be continually reminded, trained daily, continually fed and nurtured. So it is with reading, studying, meditating, and acting upon God’s Word. Jesus told Peter after the Resurrection in John 21 to “feed My lambs, feed My sheep, feed My sheep.” Jesus was replacing the memory of Peter’s three-fold denial of Him before the crucifixion by reminding him to feed the Word of God to believers. We also see at least one distinction in lambs and sheep indicating the milk of the Word so that even the new believers, the lambs, can feed, and the solid food of the Word for the sheep, the more mature believers.
To maintain our habit of being in God’s Word and learning our part in God’s Plan, we must be in the Word daily. We must train daily as a professional athlete trains daily to maintain his competitive edge. We must train daily to maintain the habit or the world, our circumstances, our daily lives will cause us to stray away from God. Satan can interfere in this easily by introducing distractions, hollering out “squirrel” when we are intent on meditating on God’s Word. We have to be continually reminded, brought back to what really matters, to maintain the proper perspective on life and our goals to please and glorify God. We must be fed, and that feeding must be challenging, must be upsetting to get our attention, must be pointed and clear to give us direction and timing, and all of that comes directly from reading, studying, meditating, and dwelling on God’s Word continually.
We live in a time when we get a lot of useful and not-so-useful information from surveys and polls. Most of the time we need to take these with a grain of salt because surveys can be manipulated to give results that align with some biased position. But sometimes we get data from Christian sources that can affect us dramatically. One of the latest concerning pieces of information is that 70% of teens leave the church after graduating high school. Some return, but most do not. The question to ask is why? Part of the reason is they just “drift away” by being distracted by “life”. So, what do we do with teenagers or anyone for that matter who drifts away and loses their faith? We stand up, we engage, we challenge, we exhort, we encourage, we persist. One life is worth the effort. And our lives are certainly worth the effort. 2 Timothy 4:2-4 tells us to, “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.”
We must stand firm in the faith. How do we do that? We feed our faith. We continually train our faith. We study to maintain our faith. We challenge our knowledge of God by striving to understand what we have always thought to be hard to understand. The Holy Spirit loves to open our eyes and our hearts to understanding. Ask for His Wisdom to understand God’s Word. He is talking to us. We should listen and learn. We should maintain our faith by effort, sacrificial effort to show ourselves approved. Maranatha!