echoes of redemption

The only thing harder than taking a step of faith is taking the next step of faith – especially if you didn’t see the response you wanted with the first one.

But taking multiple steps of faith is the definition of walking by faith.

One day a man came to Jesus and asked him to heal his son. Jesus responded, Go, your son will live. Easy for us to read, but this man was going to need to take a step of faith. He was going to have to leave the comfort of where he was and walk – all the while trusting Jesus had healed his son.

The challenge was that home was 25 miles away.

Two days by foot.

Step after step, after step of faith. Never knowing for sure his son was healed until he arrived home.

The only thing the man knew for sure was that he had left the comfort and security of where he was for the unknown of everything he dreamed.

How small would our victories be if it only took one step to get there?

How many things do we miss out on life because we’re not willing to take the second step of faith?

The third?

The sixteenth?

Sometimes when we feel the most stuck, God is doing the most work in our lives.

The book of Hosea is an unbelievably deep metaphor for how God responds to his people and moves with them, redeeming them and growing them to be like him. So when it’s time for Gomer – the character that represents God’s people – to be brought back to God, we watch how he works.

It’s not a long monologue answering every question she has.

It’s not the answer to every pray she’s prayed.

It’s not every door opening up in her life so she could move forward without struggle.

God’s plan was completely backwards.

I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.

- Hosea 2:14-15

So to move deeply in Gomer’s life, God takes her to the wilderness – where most people assume God does nothing. The one place that stands as a universal symbol in Scripture for being apart from God. Being lost. Hopeless.

God’s plan was to take her somewhere she would have nothing but him.

God’s plan was to give her places full of life and hope.

God’s plan was to turn her place of pain into an opportunity of hope.

So maybe the times we think we’re stuck in our faith, God is really doing the most. Moving the most. The closest to us.

Maybe the times we want to give up because we feel stuck are really opportunities to rely on something outside of ourselves and learn that through him we can live a life beyond what we ever imagined.

Maybe the only thing stuck in our lives is our insistence that we can do it on our own.

A recent study of American christians showed that 1 in 4 church attendees felt “stuck in their faith.”

Globally the idea of being stuck in faith is distinctly a western thought.

Historically it is almost exclusively an idea that has built up over the past 100 years, with the past 50 as the epicenter.

Not to say you wont find people struggling to hear from God throughout the world and history – that’s a different matter. The idea of being “stuck” is that a person’s faith is taking them nowhere. God isn’t revealing anything to them and they don’t feel like they are growing in any significant way.

Scripture doesn’t have much advice for people who are stuck simply because there is an underlying assumption that every follower of Jesus will be radically involved serving others.

When a person pours their life into other people – both inside and beyond the walls of your church – the concept of “stuck” isn’t quite as likely.

Helping a single mom you met a church pay her electric bill so she can also by groceries each month somehow moves a person forward in their faith.

Going without coffee for a month to send water to an organization to build a well in Africa somehow makes a person’s faith stronger.

Trying to live faith out in private gets people stuck.

Maybe what we have today that is both distinctly western and unique to the past 100 years of history is a rise of individualism. Faith is designed to be personal. Not private.

So the best way to get the 25% of American Christians un-stuck is to get them involved serving people. Engaging with the cry of the world.

I don’t want to take a complex problem and over simplify it, but the idea of “stuck” is about lacking motion. And in the path of Jesus, serving people is the movement of love.

So let’s stay un-stuck.