A Lesson I Learned About Faith

Tarah Avery

---

 

 

Has anyone ever made you feel like you lacked faith?

You weren’t healed because you didn’t believe enough. You aren’t able to do this or that because your faith just didn’t quite cut it.

I chose to write this article out of my frustration from those situations.

Years ago, I was being prayed over to receive the gift of tongues (this is when God speaks through you in another language). I was told that I had to believe I would and it would happen, but only if I had enough faith. People prayed fervently over me to receive it, but it didn’t work.

I remember being humiliated. Like I just did not quite measure up. I didn’t have enough faith. I was ashamed. And whether this church meant for me to feel this way or not, it was the message that was conveyed when someone wasn’t healed of an ailment, or who like me didn’t receive this spiritual gift.

And it hit me! If my faith is measured by whether I receive the gift of speaking in tongues, or whether I am healed – something that is supposed to be so great – how could it make me feel this way? How could believers of Jesus, in church, make me feel this way?

I’ve been on the reverse side as well. Praying for someone to receive healing and they didn’t. A lot of times I feel disappointed that it didn’t work. Isn’t healing what this person deserves? Won’t it allow them to have a fuller, happier life? Why God?

What I have been learning is that maybe faith isn’t what we think it is. What if we had it all backward? Maybe faith is not about how much we believe God will move and more about just believing in God’s goodness.

Trusting that God is good no matter what.

If God chooses to heal one person and not another or allows a person to receive one spiritual gift of some sort and not another, maybe it is less about me and my “lack of” faith, and more about trusting God in the process. Rather than a lack of faith, maybe God just chose not to give the gift of tongues to me? Could it be as simple as that? I think so.

Maybe this person wasn’t supposed to be healed because God had a greater plan all along, or maybe I wasn’t supposed to receive the gift of tongues because God knew that eventually I may have relied on that gift to give me a spiritual “high” and that is what I would come to worship instead of him.

Will I believe that he is good, and has things under control, whether my desired results happen or not?

God does things that we don’t have answers for, but that is the beauty of faith. We choose to believe that God is good no matter what. Because that is his character and he is the same today as he was yesterday and will always be!

It’s easy to point the finger at our own lack of faith for things that have an end result that we don’t like. And you know what? It makes people feel like failures. God chooses some things for some people and not others. And that is OK. We are not all the same, God has a different plan for each of us, and we can’t pretend that we know what’s best for people.

But we must trust that God does. 

What are you not trusting God with right now?

It might be time to surrender the situation or the person to him. He knows what’s best and he wants you to have faith in his plan and his timing. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

All my Love,