Struggling With Faith

 Michael Brown has an article today at Townhall.com on Loving God with All Our Hearts and All Our Minds. Loving God is the essence of the First Commandment, and it has been said that it is the only Commandment, because if we did, we wouldn't need the other nine. It reads: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.” Exodus 20:2-3. But Jesus explains the true meaning of it in Matthew. When asked which is the greatest Commandment, he summarized the Law and the Prophets with “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And the Second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Would that we could actually do these things!

Brown writes about the many people who do not have a relationship with God, or seem to be looking in all the wrong places. The point though is that our God is not offended by questions. Part of having faith is having questions.

All this makes for a toxic mix of unbelief, but one which is also perfectly understandable given the many secular influences on young people today, coupled with their lack of deep, spiritual experiences. To browbeat them for their lack of faith is to do the devil’s work.

Instead, we need to provide an environment where people of all ages can ask their questions, a place where they can feel secure in their searching, a place where they can be honest about their doubts. We also need to provide an environment where they can truly meet the Lord and experience Him for themselves. Without a deep, strong spiritual experience in my own life during those times of intellectual testing and before I had discovered solid answers, that testing might just have pulled me away.

...snip...

But for the moment, I simply want to underscore the importance of us welcoming questions about our faith and challenges to our faith. In order to do this, we need to know the Lord for ourselves and have a strong foundation in our own lives, both spiritually and intellectually.

Only then can we love the Lord with all our hearts and with all our minds. And only then can we help others love Him fully for themselves.

As Jacob was preparing to cross the river and confront his estranged brother Esau, he wrestled with God the whole night through. When God saw he could not prevail, he knocked out his hip joint in order to escape. Thereafter, Jacob would be called "Israel." So God expects us to struggle and question. Because as long as we are doing so, we have a relationship with him. the notion that we must believe certain things unquestionably is probably the biggest obstruction to beginning down the road to true faith. Rather, faith is more of a journey, like life itself.