Eternal Perspectives: God Wants Us to Keep the Faith
May the seeds of faith within you grow daily, hourly, through your praises to our faithful God and through your study and meditation upon His reliable Word. May your seeds of faith grow into flowers of love and joy, peace, and righteousness.
ETERNAL PERSPECTIVES by Sally Bair
Keep the faith
Most farmers believe in the success of their endeavors. They plow and disc and plant with eternal optimism as they await the harvest.
We non-farmers also have faith in the success of our “plantings.” We expect a paycheck for our work, and we count on our furnaces and vehicles to keep working with hardly a thought of an accident or breakdown. When things do go wrong, we believe they can be fixed, if not by us then by someone else. We’re sometimes told to “keep the faith” through our trials.
Most of us have confidence in other people, trusting them to do what is right. We see evidence of trust everywhere. For some, it becomes a religion and worship of money, status, power, and a host of other things. Yet we can’t rely totally on anyone or anything.
There is only one person on whom we can rely totally, proven throughout history to be faithful, loving, and holy. His name is Jesus. His Father is the eternal God. His Spirit dwells among us. Yet many refuse to worship the God of the Bible because they can’t see His physical form. Those who truly know Him, however, can see Him by spirit, in His Word, and in His creation. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1)
Called the “faith chapter” by many, Hebrews 11 accounts examples of people who, against all odds, believed God’s promises. Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Rahab, Gideon and Barak, Samson, David, Samuel, and the prophets all believed in God’s unseen promises. So did the countless martyrs of the early Christian church and so do modern-day martyrs throughout the world.
The Bible says we are “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses” such as they. (Hebrews 12:1) Their testimonies of faith are meant to encourage us to put aside our weighty concerns and our sins, trusting instead in God’s promise of eternal life through His Son, Jesus.
How ironic that, though we sometimes mess up in the middle of our faith walk, just as did all the biblical heroes of faith, God remains faithful to us. His faithfulness never ends. As He sees ahead to the farmer’s harvest, He also sees ahead to the spiritual harvest worked by and through our submission and obedience to Him, even when we struggle to believe in a good outcome.
Lord, thank You for Your faithfulness. Keep our faith from faltering and cause us to rely totally on Your Word and Spirit. Give us the patience of a farmer waiting for the harvest as we plant seeds of Your love and mercy. In Jesus’ name, amen.