Author: Tom Sanders

How Big is Your God? – Pt 1

What are your favourite stories in the bible?  Stories that moved you and excited you?  Stories that made you wonder about the possibilities.  Who are the hero’s you love to read or hear about?  David and Goliath?  It is probably the most popular and familiar story.  A little scrawny guy with rocks in his pockets who stands against the giant.  Maybe it is Daniel in the lions den, or Jonah and the whale.  Maybe it is Moses and the splitting of the Red Sea.  There is the story of Elijah and his defeat of the prophets of Baal.  Maybe it is the story of Paul and Silas locked up in prison where God shook the whole jail and set everyone free while they prayed and worshiped.

The bible is full of stories where people saw great and powerful miracles done by a great and awesome God.  Stories about men and women of faith whom God powerfully used.  Stories that move us and cause us to desire the same, ‘God powerfully move through me’.  As Christians we want to see people healed and set free, and see lives transformed.  And when it doesn’t happen we can sometimes think the problem is we are lacking faith.  Most of us have heard people teach or talk about faith, and we have read the scriptures where Jesus teaches on faith like “According to your faith be it done to you.” Matthew 9:29 ESV

Faith is something that is very necessary in our lives and walk with God because without faith it is impossible to please Him, but if you asked most Christians about their faith level, most would be fairly discouraged.  We have many Christians who read the scriptures of Jesus telling His disciples that they had “little faith” and think that applies to them.  Then we read where Jesus said we only had to have faith the size of a mustard seed to move mountains, and we feel lower still.  A mustard seed is pretty small, and if that is all it takes to move mountains then our faith must be pretty small then because we can’t seem to move a cold, let alone a mountain.  Or that’s how many followers of Christ feel.  At times in my walk with God I have wondered “Just how small must my faith be?”

“If only I had more faith” is a thought many of us have had.  I would pray for people, usually with little to no effect, or at least not one I could see.  And I wondered, why did things happen when people in scripture prayed, and not much seems to happen when I pray.  I know I’m not alone in my wondering.  Many other disciples before me have wondered similar things.  People like Charles Spurgeon, CS Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and AW Tozer.  And many others after me will wonder as well.  Even the disciples of Jesus had questions like this.  At one point the disciples tried to cast out a demon for hours with no success at all.   Jesus came along and cast it out with a word.  And afterwards the disciples went to Jesus

[MAR 9:28] His disciples began questioning Him privately, “Why could we not drive it out?”

As I have pondered on this question I felt like I was looking in the wrong place for my answer.  I began to feel like the source of my problem wasn’t in how little faith I may feel I have, but more in where I had my faith placed.  God began speaking to my heart and I began to understand that the size of my faith is totally unimportant if the size of my God was wrong.

A great faith in a small God will yield little to no results, A small faith in a great God will yield the miraculous

So the question I began asking myself is How Big is Your God?

Empty Pat answers

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What kinds of answers are we giving to peoples spiritual questions?  It is something I have been giving some thought to in my own life.  For most of my life there was the quick “Christian answers” that I would here.  Answers that didn’t really answer my question, or if it did it just raised three more.  For ,he most part these answers just left me feeling like people didn’t really want to hear what I was saying, or to give any serious thought to the questions being raised.  Unfortunately as I grew up I found myself repeating the same answers I was being given in years past.  It seems like good hearted people have learned to answer questions a certain way without thinking.  They become like the greating we all give “How are you?”.  A greating which is given in passing without a single moment of thought to what the answer will be.   I was onced asked when I greated someone “Do you really want to know?  Or is this just the social question to ask without a response needed?”

It was a question that began my quest to remove all pat answers and questions from my life.  I was reading recently and was again confronted with the need to remove these quick comments and answers when I read 

“Pastor, if I raise my finger, will God know which one I’m going to raise even before I raise it?” Thirteen-year-old Steve attended church every week with his parents. This particular Sunday, he had stayed after the worship service to ask his pastor this pressing question. The pastor replied, “Yes, God knows everything.” Haunted by the plight of African children suffering from dire famine, Steve then pulled out a Life magazine cover depicting two children tormented by starvation. He asked the logical follow-up, “Well, does God know about this and what’s going to happen to those kids?” The pastor gave a similar response: “Steve, I know you don’t understand, but yes, God knows about that.” 1 If you were Steve, would you be satisfied with the pastor’s answer to your question? Steve wasn’t. He walked out of his congregation that day and never again worshiped at a Christian church.

Powell, Kara; Mulder, Jake; Griffin, Brad. Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church (Kindle Locations 1190-1198). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

People are not being helped at all by the quick comments and answers we offer them.  Comments and answers that are empty of thought and feeling.  They are just “the things we say”.   If we were to actually think about the comments we would probably quit using them, because the comments don’t encourage growth, they don’t encourage conversation, and they don’t develop relationships.  All of the things that God wants us to be doing.  When Jesus walked the earth He engaged people in the world they lived in.  He talked with them about what they were facing and He was open and taught them spiritual truths.  They were not always easy to take, and often hard to follow, but they were always relevant to where people were at.

Our empty comments and pat answers just tell people we are not really interested in them or their problems or concerns, and the world is hearing it.  One of the reasons churches are dying because they don’t see us having anything but empty phrases and pat answers to offer them.  They don’t see us as people who want to relate to them and engage with them on any real level.  It can be difficult to examine our faith and take a real look where it is just a surface faith which is doing little to affect our lives or our world.  It can create a crisis inside when we examine the empty phrases we have been building our lives upon without thinking of them.  But if we are willing to do so our faith can be a faith that moves mountains.  People are asking some great questions.  And they are searching for real answers.  Answers that can offer them something to commit their lives to.  Something that can transform their lives.  And those answers are available in Jesus if we are willing to go looking for them, and be willing to let go of the quick empty answers we currently are currently using.

You’re such a Curmudgeon!

“You’re becoming such a curmudgeon!” one of mcurmudgeon-with-bow-tiey co-workers said to me a couple weeks ago.  I had to admit I didn’t know what he was talking about.  He grinned widely and said it means “a cranky old man.”  It’s a comment meant to be a joke but it has got me thinking.  Because the things we say we believe we don’t often live like we do.  Craig Groeschel wrote “The Christian Atheist”, a book which premise is that Christians today declare that God exists and is involved in their lives, and then live like He isn’t.

We live in a society which says that they are Christian.  For many it is because they go to church, at least at Christmas and Easter.  For others it is cultural, and while we are getting further and further away from a Christian culture many still see themselves as Christians.  And there are others who believe in the Christian message.  But it isn’t what we say we believe that matters.  In fact our lives declare more about what we believe than anything we may say.  And for many of us our lives are not declaring what we hope they may.  It is a fact I have been looking into in my own life.

It is not a bad thing to evaluate your walk with God from time to time.  If you don’t you will quickly become complacent and coast through life.  Paul wrote “Test yourselves to make sure you are solid in the faith. Don’t drift along taking everything for granted. Give yourselves regular checkups. You need firsthand evidence, not mere hearsay, that Jesus Christ is in you. Test it out. If you fail the test, do something about it.” 2 Corinthians 13:5 MSG

Everyone of us needs to look at what our life is saying about our beliefs.  Are we following Jesus or are we saying we are Christian and living like He doesn’t exist?  Craig Groeschel wrote “Who do we believe in more? Ourselves or God? Our actions and decisions will reflect that.”  Our actions declare what we believe.  John Calvin wrote “the doer is he who from the heart embraces God’s word and testifies by his life that he really believes.”   Rick Warren said something similar when he said “You only believe the part of the Bible you do.”

Paul said three times in scripture “Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ.” Philippians 1:27 NLT, Colossians 1:10, Ephesians 4:1.  Our conduct says a lot about us and about what we believe, and the world around us is watching.  Are we declaring the majesty of Christ, or the selfish whims of our own hearts.  What is your life saying about what you believe?  Is it agreeing with the words you say?  It is a tough question to ask, but a very important one to answer.