Faith is what we choose to believe despite what we can or cannot see. It begins with a childlike acceptance that God loves us so much, He was willing to come to the earth as a Son, to walk among us as one of us, subject to the same temptations and doubts we all bear. He live a flawless, sinless life, a Son who gave up His life on the cross, bearing the weight of the wrath of God for each one of us who chooses to believe.

As we grow in faith, we practice obedience to God's Word and Ways as we come to understand that Word more and more. We know that God shows up whenever we call to Him. We experience the answering of prayers, even when those answers are no. We learn the value of seeking and enacting God's will in our lives, especially when times get tough for us.

The foundations of faith are this.

• God alone is our perfect Creator. He cannot lie or be double-minded. He cannot be all good and allow what is evil in his presence. He will do what He says He is going to do. By studying His Word, we learn more and more about the things that God will and will not accept from us and about the times when God has kept His promises.
• God wants a relationship with us. He formed the earth and created a paradise garden, in which He placed one man and one woman, a couple who walked with God in that garden, who had a relationship with God that He actively sought. Later, after the Garden, God selects Abram, promising to not only be Abram's God, but to also make a covenant with Abram's descendants, a nation larger than all the grains of sand on a seashore. Much later, Jesus comes to earth as God's perfect Son, the promised descendant of Abram, Who lives a sinless life, and dies on the cross for all the sins of humanity, the ultimate step between our one and only Creator and we whom He has created, the most important relationship any one of us can accept and choose to obey.
• God hates sin. God is perfect, omnipotent, holy. His one goal for us, evident in the Old Testament every bit as much in the New, is to become holy as God is holy. Books like Exodus and Leviticus are filled with laws laid down by God to help us achieve that holiness. So, to sin against His holiness is to sever oneself from the holiness of God. Once severed, the relationship can only be amended by an act of atonement, which in Old Testament times meant sacrifice, the spilling of the blood of a perfect specimen, to honor God when He had been dishonored.
• Sin requires redemption. God wants to be in relationship with us, but He cannot be in relationship with anyone who has chosen to disobey Him, stepping outside of holiness. Christ came to earth to live as a human, knowing He would be tempted, knowing His purpose in living would be to act as the sacrificial offering, a more perfect Lamb than had ever been offered, to atone for humanity’s sin once and for all. That means that Jesus has also become the High Priest for us. He intermediates between us and God, and He is always there to serve that role. The Holy Spirit that dwells in all who believe in Jesus helps guide us as we pray and as we listen for God’s still, quiet voice. The Apostle Paul writes that we are slaves to sin or slaves to righteousness. He concludes that living to sin is a heavy burden, but that freeing oneself from sin by seeking to obey Christ, we experience a much lighter burden, just as Christ promises.
• To be redeemed is to be obedient to God and His Word. Following Jesus is so much more than saying one believes. The only way to become holy as God is holy requires submitting one’s will to the will of God. We seek that will by knowing His Word, God’s Holy Bible, and not just someone else’s interpretation of it. We also pray often, listening for the Holy Spirit in us, not the yearnings of our own hearts. We gather together to lift each other up, striving toward the same goal. Holiness.
• The only way to salvation is through one’s atonement of sin through Christ’s sacrifice and our belief in His Godly Authority. All have sinned and fall short of the glory, the holiness of God.  When we accept Christ as our savior, we accept that His sacrifice on the Cross redeemed us all from our sinfulness. We also join in a covenant with Jesus that we will take on His yoke by being ready to do what He says to do.  We will love God as the one and only God and obey Him with all our hearts, and minds, and souls. And we will love and treat other people as we love and treat ourselves.

This time of year, when our stores are filled with eggs and bunnies instead of Crosses and lambs, it's important to think about the real reason for the season.  Like the perfect lamb of Israel's tabernacle and temple days sacrificed in the presence of God to redeem the repentant of his sin, Jesus, the perfect Lamb on the Cross, took on the wrath of God for us. He suffered the punishment for sin, the absence of God. His dead body went into a tomb as a heavy stone sealed Him in. 

But the good news we celebrate at Easter is this: He is risen indeed! Jesus lives. And as a risen Christ, He makes us holy, holy so that we can come before God and speak to Him whatever is on our hearts, including seeking guidance on the way that we should go. This is a gift almost beyond our understanding.  Before Christ made His sacrifice, only the High Priest could come before the holy presence of God. He met God in the inner sanctum, behind a curtain that separated the holy from the holiest of holies. This was such an important moment, that the High Priest never just walked behind the curtain. He prepared by cleansing himself, putting on a special, holy wardrobe, and finally tying a rope around his ankle in case he profaned the altar and died there, so others could pull him out and not risk dying themselves. 

I try to remember how precious it is that Jesus works as my intermediary every time I choose to bow my head.  I think hard faith begins in those moments when we find the courage to admit our failings to a holy God and accept that He will actually forgive us because of what Jesus has done for us. I think this precious communication is why Jesus instructs us not to pray with mindless repetition, but to acknowledge God's holiness and our need for Him to accomplish anything at all. 

The first step toward hard faith is having any faith, even if it is a tiny, fluttering spark waiting to break into a flame.  And that small seed of faith, laid in good ground, can turn into a wonderful, lifelong relationship with God. 

In Christ,
Ramona
Photo by Pixabay: 

I’m thinking about how the Pharisees’ hypocrisy can teach us to love God’s Word.

Back then, they wanted to know why Jesus’ disciples weren’t following the “rules.” Before they sat down to eat, the disciples didn’t ceremonially clean their hands. Jesus’ response is that what comes out of us, our words and actions, make us unclean, not failing to ceremonially wash according to traditional rules.

But the Pharisees were master rule keepers. Besides the commandments God gave Moses, the Pharisees upheld a weighty list of dos and don’ts, accumulated through years of traditional practice, but not founded in God’s word.

These traditional rules were so cumbersome, in fact, that many people worked at finding loopholes in the rules. One loophole that Jesus points out to the Pharisees is this: even though God tells us to honor our father and mother, the Pharisees’ traditional rules allowed them to deny help when their parents asked for it, as long as they said that money or resource had already been promised to God.

The prophet Isaiah warned against this practice of relying on traditional rules rather than God’s Word, “The Lord says: ‘These people come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship of me is based on merely human rules they have been taught'” (Isaiah 29:13; NIV). Jesus says this plethora of traditional rules lead men astray, representing themselves as coming from God when they really come from the hearts of men.

"But whatever [word] comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this is what defiles and dishonors the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts and plans, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, slanders (verbal abuse, irreverent speech, blaspheming). These are the things which defile and dishonor the man; but eating with [ceremonially] unwashed hands does not defile the man.”    Matthew 15:18-20 (amplified version)

Before we condemn the Pharisees for being hypocrites, we should look to our own record when it comes to living by the Word of God instead of being directed by how we think and feel. In the world that surrounds us, doing what feels right has rapidly outstripped doing what God says, so much so that even people who claim to be Christian okay behavior that the Bible says God hates.

But in order to live by God’s will rather than our own, we first have to know God’s Word. The Bible is our roadmap to thinking and acting in ways that please God. Paul underscores the importance of the Bible in this way:

"All Scripture is God-breathed [given by divine inspiration] and is profitable for instruction, for conviction [of sin], for correction [of error and restoration to obedience], for training in righteousness [learning to live in conformity to God’s will, both publicly and privately–behaving honorably with personal integrity and moral courage]; so that the man of God may be complete and proficient, outfitted and thoroughly equipped for every good work."  2 Timothy 3:16-17 (amplified version)

Being human, we are destined to make choices based on our hearts, but that doesn’t mean we have to fail God. We can create hearts that will honor God rather than defile us by knowing God’s Word, studying it and living it so that what He says is ingrained in us. In this way, we will make choices that are clean in God’s eyes, not just our own.

​In Christ,
Ramona