Relentless Faith

I don’t know about you, but never in my lifetime have I seen a greater need for Relentless Faith, so this is going to be a very practical post, even including an acrostic to help you remember the action plan. The hope is that these tools will help all of us to activate and relentlessly maintain our faith regardless of what is going on in the world around us. 

We hear it almost every day, words like uncertain, unprecedented, and tumultuous to describe these times in which we are living. This is when we must remember that faith is a choice, and relentless faith means making that choice anew every morning. Faith is not dependent on circumstances or feelings. Right now, it’s easy to spend five minutes on social media and lose faith in humanity. To avoid this we have to change our perspective. 

ALL

That’s where our Acrostic comes in ALL. Just tuck that into your back pocket for right now and we will come back to it in a minute.

So sticking with our example of social media, let’s say we see a post, we comment and begin reading some of the other comments on the post. Most of the comments are positive or at least civil, but then here come the trolls. There are only a few hateful comments compared to the many positive comments, but which ones grab our attention and our thoughts for the rest of the day? Which ones we allow to influence our faith in that moment? Do we focus on the hurtful comments from the hurting or the good comments from the seemingly healthier set? Before you begin to think that this post is about having relentless faith in humanity, let me clarify, that this example is to illustrate that we can choose our focus and either diminish or build our faith.

A -

Let’s relate this example to our faith in God starting with the first letter of our Acrostic: A. A stands for All good things come from God. ALL good things: every talent, every kind word, every moment of empathy, every bit of the beauty that surrounds us is all evidence of our good God that loves us. Staying with our social media post example, if we believe all good things come from God then we can see God’s reflection in the goodness of the people leaving the positive encouraging comments, and likewise we can see the influence of the enemy in the hateful comments. We can build our Faith by meditating on the good that God allows to permeate into everything and remembering that we have a Redeemer who will deal with the bad on our behalf. We need only focus on Him so that we do not let the thoughts and activities of the enemy deteriorate our faith in God.

L -

L - 

The final L in ALL is Lean. This becomes necessary when you are exhausted from trying to notice All of the good things, and you have been Looking but aren’t connecting emotionally to the times when God has been faithful both in your own life and in the Bible. This is when we Lean on God and we allow the Holy Spirit to fill in the gaps while we just remain faithful and continue to do the things that we know are right. We stay vigilant and relentless in our prayer, in our pursuit of peace and we steady our faith, but simply going to God with our doubts. When we feel numb, when we don’t see progress in our homes, or communities, or cities, or our country, or our world, and we can’t see a way that God will protect and provide we bring that confession to Him. We ask God to help us in our unbelief. We look to the example of Jesus and we pray, “Your will not mine,” and we lean on the Everlasting Arms. God strengthens our faith, allowing us, even in our trembling, to turn our what ifs into even ifs. We read and reread the promises of God that assure us that even when we don’t see it, God is faithfully working all things for the good of those that love Him, and that includes you and me.

To wrap this all up, let’s review how we relentlessly increase our faith:

A -All good things come from God, so focus on the good not the bad.

L-Look over your life & The Bible and recall how God has been faithful.

L- Lean on the Holy Spirit to restore our faith and help our unbelief.

Our challenge to you this September is to join Shazzy Fitness as we look for ways to reinvigorate and shore up our faith, even in these unprecedented, uncertain, and tumultuous times. First, we have a guided prayer that we hope you will pray with us on a daily basis. Feel free to change the wording to make it specific and personal and new each day. Then we invite you to meditate and study the Old Testament and New Testament scriptures for each week. Most of these verses are very short so dive in to their chapters for context and study. Finally, as a part of looking back over your life and looking to the Bible for examples of ways that God has been faithful, write the examples on strips of paper and put them in a mason jar or another clear container, and when you are struggling in your faith, pull out one of the strips of paper and remember that our God is always faithful.

Guided Prayer:

Father, God, we thank You for all good things. We even thank You for the challenging things, because we know that You can make wonderful things happen out of even the most awful circumstances. We ask that when we don’t feel our faith that you would protect us from the thoughts of the enemy. Help us to recall Your Word so that we can stand firm in our faith and shut the enemy down. Father, give us wisdom to know that You are still in control even when everything seems out of control. Please forgive us, Father, for our doubt and for depending on sinking sand instead of the Rock of Our Salvation. Please revive our faith, restore us, and help us to be relentless as we faithfully pursue all that you have for us.

In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

Week 1 – OT: Habakkuk 2:4 & NT: Mark 11:23

Week 2 – OT: Gen 50:20 & NT: Hebrews 11:1

Week 3 – OT: Micah 7:7 & NT: Romans 10:17

Week 4 – OT: Proverbs 3:3 & NT: 1 Corinthians 2:5

*All verses are NLT