Purpose Relationships

The Outcomes of Faith

Trusting is often difficult. We have all been disappointed or disillusion and know that sometimes as much as we might hope for something, it may not come to pass. When we put our faith in God, we know that He is good, He is mighty, and so we can trust in what He does. This fills us with confidence and peace as we await the work of His good hands.

Yet faith in God doesn’t end with us. As Martin Luther commented –

Faith is a living, unshakeable confidence in God’s grace; it is so certain, that someone would die a thousand times for it. This kind of trust in and knowledge of God’s grace makes a person joyful, confident, and happy with regard to God and all creatures. This is what the Holy Spirit does by faith. Through faith, a person will do good to everyone without coercion, willingly and happily; he will serve everyone, suffer everything for the love and praise of God, who has shown him such grace. It is as impossible to separate works from faith as burning and shining from fire. (Preface to the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans)

Faith accomplishes a work in us, to be sure, but the work of faith doesn’t end at the confines of our heart. Faith moves to our hands to cause us to love and serve one another. We know that with Him we have everything, and therefore in sacrificing for others, we have nothing to lose. Faith gives us the wisdom to know that apart from Christ we can do nothing, and the confidence to know that through Him we can do all things.

May we live a life of faith today.

How have you seen faith put into action?

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Purpose

Time for Worship

As  I’ve written about before, one of my “pet peeves” is when church services are segmented into “worship time” and the rest of the service. Generally this is done with the time of congregational singing. That’s designated the time of worship, while the rest of the time, for lack of any designated, is something else. Often I think this is probably done unintentionally; we don’t realize that by saying, “Now it’s time for worship” that somehow we’re indicating that the rest of the time, worship is not required.

What we do in church services, we also do in our daily lives. We comparmentalize when we serve God and when we don’t. We set aside “prayer time” and then go the rest of the day without communicating (or listening) to God at all. We designate certain hours of the day as the time where we “go to worship,” not realizing that this should be what characterizes our lives..

As A.W. Tozer said,

If you do not worship God seven days a week, you do not worship Him on one day a week. There is no such thing known in heaven as Sunday worship unless it is accompanied by Monday worship and Tuesday worship and so on. (“Tozer on Worship and Entertainment“)

As Tozer indicates, eternity will make this clear. In Heaven there won’t be times where we are worshiping and where we aren’t – our very existence will be focused on giving God glory. There may be times where this is through singing songs, or attending Heavenly church services, but other times this will likely be through a variety of other things that because of the way that we do them, we will be demonstrating how good God is. Worship time won’t be relegated to a specific hour or occasion – it will be the timbre of our lives.

If this is what followers of Christ are going to be spending eternity doing, shouldn’t we get busy about making our lives look increasingly like this now?

 

How can we worship God in all we do and not just at specific times?

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