Bruce Collins, Evangelist

The personal website of Bruce Collins

Little Faith

 

Mat 8:26  But He said to them, "Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?" Then He arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.

 

The Difference

The difference between little faith and great faith doesn’t have to do with the intensity of our believing but with our ability to take God at His word with regard to great promises.  If we are saved, we have faith that God is real, that Christ died, was buried and was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures.  We know that that faith saves us for eternity.  But many of us still have trouble with practical promises that God has made to us in His word.  Some of us have trouble with the whether we are really saved.  We ask if we have believed right or whether we have truly repented because of faulty teaching on both subjects.  At times we wonder if there is anything to anything that we say we believe.   The doubts of Christians are real.  We have evidence of that in the Scriptures.  The Bible calls these doubts the fiery doubts of the wicked one (Ephesians 6:16).  The solution to our doubts is to take the shield of faith.  That does not mean to take the shield of believing but to take the shield of the truths that we believe.  Our salvation is by the faith that comes through hearing the word of God (Romans 10:17).  The cure for the fiery darts of the wicked one is the same.

 

Personal Doubts

I "got saved" (that is, I got the salvation that God has provided) when I realized that I was waiting for God to save me when He had already sent His son to the cross to do that.  I remember getting down on my knees and telling the Lord, "I don’t know if I have "gotten saved" the way everyone else has "gotten saved," but I know this, "If I were to go to hell now, you would have to be a liar."  I was satisfied at that moment that I was saved.  I had peace.  I marveled that I hadn’t seen that truth before.  But it wasn’t long before I began to look within at my believing rather than looking at Christ, the object of my believing or faith.  I would ask myself, "Are you sure you are saved?"  And I would doubt.  Then I would think, "But Christ has died for me" and I would be alright.  This went on for about two weeks.  One day I read Matthew 7:24-27 dealing with building a house on sand and building a house on a rock.  I realized that before I was saved I had been trying to believe and couldn’t say that I did because I didn’t have my eye on the One in Whom I was to believe.  After I was saved, I couldn’t convince myself that I didn’t believe because every time I had doubts, it was the truth of Scripture that cured them.  I realized that I was founded on a Rock (Christ) and no longer did I need to be concerned with how others described their salvation because I had God’s word for it that I was saved.  That ended that bout with the fiery darts of the wicked one.

 

When my father-in-law died, I was holding his hand.  If there ever was a man who I was convinced was a godly Christian, it was him.  But yet when he peacefully took his last breath, Satan was right there.  I thought to myself, "Is that all there is?"  Is he really enjoying the presence of the Lord?  Can he say now that to be with Christ is far better (Philippians 1:23)?  Or is he just "dead."  I wrestled with that most of the afternoon and suddenly it was as though the Lord told me, "He has seen the Lord."  Now we don’t find those exact words in Scripture but we do find that the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord after the resurrection.  That satisfied me and I really have not had a lot of trouble with doubts since then.

 

My first problem was with whether my salvation measured up to the preaching I had heard and I found it that if it measured up to Scripture, that was sufficient.  My second problem was with whether there was anything to anything that I believed.  What satisfied me, probably won’t satisfy others; but let me assure everyone reading this, that eternity is real.  Heaven is real.  Hell is real.  Christ is real and faith in Him prepares us for heaven.

 

Did People in the Bible have Doubts?

In our passage above, the disciples in the boat had doubts.  They didn’t realize that when Christ was in the boat, whether sleeping or awake, the boat could not sink.  Peter had doubts when he came to the Lord walking on the water.  And yes, he was able to do that until he looked at the waves instead of the Lord.  Thomas had doubts as to whether the Lord had really been raised from the dead until He saw the Lord.

 

My Suggestion

When we have doubts we need to be honest about it.  Then the first person we should tell is the Lord.  I am convinced that the Lord will give assurance of salvation to those who need that and He will give any other assurance that Christians need if they just tell Him about their problem.  They need to be honest like Thomas was.  Sometimes talking to others helps.  Some of us are just built with a personality that always looks inward rather than outward and we will always have some problems.  But I am convinced that the fiery darts of the wicked one are real.  And it is only the shield of "the" faith that will cure them.  And for some they may need to be cured over and over.

 

I am sure that all of us in a measure have little faith since none of us can move literal mountains.  But fortunately, a little faith in a great God means a whole lot more than supposed great faith in the false promises of the wicked one.

 

Bruce Collins

 

Meditation for the week of March 18, 2018

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>