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A friend reached out to me recently, telling me they have been praying for “something almost impossible” for a long time.
They are discouraged that God hasn’t answered their prayer, and they find their faith “diminishing” that He ever will. Did the Lord not promise that “whatsoever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” (Matthew 21:22)?
It's not just unanswered prayers. There are many things we encounter along the pathway that can shake us. Things which cause us to question our relationship with God, the character of God, or even the existence of God. Truthfully, we are all too easily knocked. We need to make sure we have solid ground under our feet. And if we’re wise, we’ll do it before we find ourselves stumbled, not after.
Is your faith built on a stack of pebbles, precariously balanced, waiting for the breeze to topple it? Are we one loose stone away from total collapse? Be honest with yourself, is your faith fragile? May it not be! There is an entire colonnade of evidence, reason, experience, and testimony – row upon row of sturdy support – upon which we can build our confidence. But we must take our part in building it!
It is true that not every column will be equal in strength. Some will turn out to be duds. In the Christian life, we can get things wrong about God and his word. We can misinterpret, misapply and misjudge. Our understanding of God and his promises will change, as we “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18). But these sometimes disheartening (or rather, enlightening) experiences cannot take away the sure foundation of our faith: the historical veracity of the resurrection and the spread of the gospel; the compelling narrative and beauty of scripture as a trans-cultural explanation for the world around us; and the “great cloud of witnesses” who have demonstrated the truth of God’s power to save the sinner and secure the saint; not to mention our own experiences of God and his answers to prayer, which we quickly forget.
Are you going over these foundations? Are you “stable and steadfast” in the faith? Or are you easily “shifted from the hope of the gospel”? (Colossians 1:23)