Faith: Think different

It’s been a couple of days since I last wrote an article for the blog.

I’m now sitting in my little room in the retreat centre where the Arrow residential is being held. This week is focussed on developing personal vision, developing leaders and building teams.

I’m looking forward to the week.

It comes at an important time for me as I move towards finishing up the current leadership role I have with Fusion and explore with God what is next.

I’ll probably share more as the week unfolds, but for the moment I’m keen to keep reflecting on Ephesians 6 and the very practical approach Paul seems to take to spiritual warfare.

The pieces of armor I have already mentioned seemed to be about a general attitude or life position, whereas Paul now talks directly about dealing with attack:

In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. (Ephesians 6:16)

As I have mentioned previously, each time Jesus tells the disciples off for not having enough faith it seems to do with how they are actually seeing the world and responding to it.

Romans 10:17 says:

Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ.

The word there for “word”, is the Greek word Rhema, which means “God’s specific Word for this moment”. Faith seems to be about being willing to respond to God’s reality in the moment, rather than your own.

No wonder we end up in trouble. If it is the shield of Faith that we need to counter the devil’s attacks, then it seems as though his main weapon will be to try to move us to a belief system not based on God’s view.

The most important thing in our lives is how we see the world because all our actions come from that.

One of the quotes mentioned in Arrow today was from Evelyn Underhill:

The most important thing for you is your vision, your sense of God. The richer, deeper, wider your vision of the Divine Reality, the more rich, real, deeper and fruitful your work will be….

What of how you see the world isn’t true?

It’s a great question, but it’s a question you can’t answer because you can only see the world through your own eyes, and so much of how you see the world is affected by so many different factors.

We are in a battle of belief. By my reckoning, the world has three main belief systems that most of us tend to pick one of without too much encouragement, however the Devil wants to ensure we keep traveling these paths. The three belief systems are:

1. If it feels good, do it
2. He who dies with the most toys, wins
3. If we can understand it we can control it, fix it and ultimately live forever.

A.W. Tozer said:

Faith creates nothing; it simply reckons upon that which is already there. God and the spiritual world are real. We can reckon upon them with as much assurance as we reckon upon the familiar world around us. Our trouble is we have established bad thought patterns. We habitually think of the visible world as real and doubt the reality of any other. The root of the Christian life lies in belief in the invisible. The object of the Christian’s faith is unseen reality.

It was Francis of Assisi who said:

Don’t seek to understand that you might believe, but believe that you might understand

Faith thinks different