Faith Walking

What does it feel like to respond in faith to the call of God in our day?

Walking in faith is exciting. You don’t know what’s around the bend.

Walking in faith is sobering. You don’t know what’s around the bend.

Walking in faith is productive. You initiate new directions and travel places your friends and relatives are too afraid or too comfortable to go.

The productivity of the faith walk has been on my mind lately. I’ve been contemplating Abraham’s decision to leave his home behind for a new home in an unknown place. I’ve been considering how God blessed that mode of living—that lifestyle—and what that lifestyle would look like for me.

I don’t think faith walking necessarily involves geography. You could be a faith-walker and stay physically right where you are now. The clincher for me on that is the lifestyle of Jesus. As an adult, he never went any further from home than Lafayette.

Changes in geography are often necessary, however, as the stories of Abraham and Moses indicate. God owns the entire planet, and he wants his name to be known everywhere. When he finds obedient people he sends them out to the far reaches of the world to make sure everyone has heard the good news of his love and forgiveness.

You cannot walk in faith, however, without leaving your mental and emotional comfort zone. Faith demands that you experience strangeness—being a stranger in a new and different place. Until you say to yourself, “I don’t know what I am doing here,” you probably have not walked in faith.

We want life to make sense. That means that we are most comfortable when we understand the formulas and can work them ourselves. This is sight.

Faith is going beyond the formulaic. Faith transcends the known order of things. It leaps into the space where you have never been and do not know how to navigate. In this place only God knows what’s up. And your comprehension is only on an “as needed” basis.

Great human endeavors, mighty transformations, earth-shaking innovations, and exhilarating journeys happen in the unknown spaces of faith.

Be an Abraham or Moses. Push out from the shore into the current of God’s power and potential. Trust him beyond your vision or calculations. You will discover in the turbulence of the unknown the new configurations through which God brings about your finest future.

Listen closely to God’s Spirit. Every single day you have an opportunity to step beyond the boundaries into the arena of dynamic faith. In this zone you are a partner with God in the continuing work of healing and transformation.