Skip to main content

Just A Moment?


  Every preacher has one great sermon, that doesn’t mean he is a great preacher. A student can ace a test; it doesn’t mean he is going to pass the course. An athlete can have a great year, but that doesn’t mean he is going to the hall of fame.

  In his autobiography of his stand-up career, Steve Martin had this to say:
It was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: Like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the abominable circumstances.


  Yet when it comes to faith some think differently. Faith is a moment. A once and done kind of thing. In the right place, at a certain time, when the mood is right, I will have faith and then that’s all I need. I really felt the presence of God. I was on a spiritual high. I was moved.  Faith is momentary.

  That, however, isn’t what we see of those described as having great faith. They were longsuffering, patient, they endured.  They had faith when things were up and when things were down.  No matter the circumstances, no matter the crowd, no matter the mood, they were faithful.  Ahab trusted God for a moment (1st Kings 21:25-29), but it didn’t make him faithful.  Those of faith are those of consistency.

Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
James 1:2-4

  Real faith isn’t defined at the tops of the mountains; it is in the entire journey. It’s remaining true and good even when the rewards are few. It’s enduring even in moments of disappointment and malaise.  One week where I am really close to God, then fifty-one others of worldly living isn’t faith.  One day a week I give to God and keep the rest for myself isn’t it either.  Those mountaintop moments can be great but to be perfect and complete, they can't be all there is.


Faith isn’t a momentary acknowledgment of who Jesus is, it is Him living in you every day.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

  Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so.  Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English.  Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome.  Wouldn’t you feel good?   You shouldn’t.  As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590.   You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with.   Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
Post a Comment
Read more

Master Your Self

  In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt.  He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!)  Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest.  Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt!   Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way.  He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal.  As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself.  He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors.   But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Other Peter Principle

  Simon wasn’t very good at his job.  For most folks, fishing is a hobby a good time on the lake even if you get skunked.  Not so for the professional fisherman. A day without a catch means no product to sell, no money collected, and nothing to bring home to the wife and kids. Those days seemed to happen a lot to Simon.   Maybe I’m wrong but all I can go by is the history we have on him and every time we have it recorded, he caught nothing, at least on his own. You would have to be hard headed to keep at it with all that failure. No wonder he got the nickname of rock.   So perhaps, that’s why when he got the chance at a new career he jumped at it. Well, not so much a new career but a different form of the old one. He would still be fishing just going after a different kind of fish.  This time he would have a boss, one that had shown him, even in his old job, a better way to do things. And that made all the difference.   Simon didn’t al...
Post a Comment
Read more