Written by Pastor Jack Wellman– Stephen Charnock
Devotional: 5 Ways Faith Moves Mountains
If you have faith, you can have peace of mind, confidence, and energy. Faith is the seed that gives birth to many changes in our hearts, Faith is that secret ingredient that really makes a lot of things possible. In a very famous passage, Jesus said to his disciples that if you only have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains. What Jesus was saying was not so much the amount of faith people had, but whether they had faith in the first place. To Jesus, faith is something you either have or you do not have. Even if we have little faith, that little faith is enough to do big things.
Here are five ways where faith can do that.
Faith Shifts Your Focus
If you take your hand and put it right over your eye, what looks bigger, the mountain that you are looking at or your hand? It would be, of course, your hand. Why? This is the trick of perspective. Your focus is now shifted. If you have faith, you would shift your focus from how big your problem is to how big God is. Once you shift your faith, you feel energized, and things start happening.
Faith Helps You Realize How Powerless You Are
Faith is important because when faith is outward flowing, we put our faith on something or someone outside of us. This is crucial because it makes us realize how little power we have in ourselves. When you place your faith in something else, you draw your power from it. That is why it is very important to put your faith in the right things and in the right person who, of course, is Jesus Christ.
Trust in God’s Power Drives Your Sense of Possibility
Faith is the seed, but within the core of the seed is trust. You cannot have faith without trust. A crucial component of having faith in something is that you trust it. A crucial component of believing in somebody is that you trust that person. When you place your faith in God and trust Him, it unlocks your sense of possibility. When you trust that God will make changes in your life, things go from bleak to beautiful. Things go from hopeless to hopeful. It is that little seed of trust and God’s power to bring changes that turn your world up-side-down. While objectively nothing has changed, what changed was your trust. And that is how powerful the change you chose to trust in God. That is how powerful faith can be, because it unlocks a sense of possibility that changes how you act, wherein your actions change your reality.
Trusting God’s Outcome Gives You the Energy to Keep Bouncing Back
Life is full of failures, challenges, and it’s very easy to get knocked down; it is very easy to want to stay down. But when you have faith and you trust in God with the outcome that God wants you to enjoy, you get the energy to keep bouncing back—the energy to keep trying, to keep taking shots, and to keep believing. This is a big difference between many people who fail and many people who succeed. It all boils down to faith.
Whether you choose to have faith in God or you choose to have faith in something else, it is faith that makes the difference because it is faith that gives you the energy and the passion to keep trying again and again and again. Success can be very elusive. In many cases success is not easy. You have to go through many failures for you to achieve success. By trusting that God wants the very best outcome for you, you get the energy to keep bouncing back and to keep stepping up to the plate giving it your best swing.
God’s Assurance Keeps Your Eyes Open to the Lessons You Need to Learn
Life is full of challenges, and that is precisely why life is full of blessings. As a Christian, you would realize that the challenges God allows to appear in your life really contain blessings. At the very least, challenges give you an opportunity to trust God more. When you are able to trust God more, your relationship with Him grows, and that in itself is a blessing. So, based on that perspective, every challenge is really an opportunity to claim a blessing.
God’s assurances, growing from the faith that you have in Him, enables you to open your eyes to the lessons you need to learn. Once you are able to learn these lessons, you can move on to the next level. In many cases, challenges are not exactly bad; they are lessons that we need to learn. If we don’t learn the lesson, we keep getting challenged. Once we understand the lesson, we move past to the next challenge.
