Foundation of Belief

Then Jesus said to him, "Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe." (John 4:48 NRSV)

I should not try to avoid it. I feel conviction when I read these words and I want that conviction to do its full work in my heart.

It is easy enough to point the critical finger at people back then and note how faithless they were, given all the miracles that Jesus performed. But that is from our perspective much later and even then it misses the whole point of this book. I am really not that much different than this man who was struggling to believe in Jesus for I too am very prone to want to see evidence before I am willing to trust the heart of God.

If I am honest enough (and that is more difficult than it may seem at first) to perceive the way I relate to God in my requests to Him, I would likely see that much of the time my focus is on getting answers that will accommodate the plans I have made for my life. I often ask for things to fill in where I cannot make things work for me or to supply the things I can't afford myself. Or I may be asking God to help me make a life-direction decision but am afraid to let Him probe deeper into my heart to expose selfish motives or skewed attitudes about what I think about Him.

That means that possibly a great preponderance of my prayers may be too shallow, too focused on my externals, the things that make me uncomfortable that I want to be made comfortable. I want God to fix my problems, remove my evil urges but without taking me through possibly very painful experiences that expose deeper roots that are feeding those urges. I just want to be free of them so I can get on in life with less pain.

But of course this is quite inconsistent with the way God relates to me. He is not interested in a patch, an imposed fix or a repair job that does not include the full solicitation of my will in cooperating with Him. He wants me to be fully aware and making choices all through my healing process. He wants to reveal to me more clearly the deeper motivations that have long been hidden from my sight when making life-impacting decisions. He does not want to be a vending machine to supply my desires, He wants to be an intimate friend, a wise Father more intent on developing maturity in my life than in making me comfortable.

Yet I have this intense desire to have my questions answered immediately. I want a sign from God like Gideon so I know if my impressions are really from God. But like Gideon I may then question even that and begin to second-guess if I am hearing correctly and ask for yet another one. God may accommodate me at times as He did Gideon, but is this the kind of life a Father really wants their child to live? Is a healthy relationship between parent and child one where the child remains afraid to make any decisions in life without deferring all of them to a parent? I am not saying we should ignore our parent's wisdom or not seek their advice, but if a person becomes so dependent on having their parents make every choice in their life so they don't have to think for themselves or learn responsibilities we view that situation as very sick after awhile. It becomes obvious that it is turning into an unhealthy dependence, a cop-out, a way of avoiding growing up and becoming accountable.

Does learning to take personal responsibility mean that we no longer depend on or trust good parents? Not at all. We can in reality make our parents very proud of us by stepping up to challenges as we are equipped by our parents with capacity to use our minds and the knowledge and experience we have gained from both them and in our own lives. It is the job of our parent's, not to make us blindly dependent on them for every little choice in our lives but to train us to use the right equipment in our own brains to properly relate to situations in a mature way. That is what raising children is supposed to be all about though today it is rarely seen anymore. We can certainly always use wisdom and counsel from people who can act as parents and elders in our lives, but we must also learn to mature and gain wisdom ourselves so we can benefit others.

But in relation to God most of us are still very much like infants. The sad part is that we seem quite content to remain that way all of our lives. We want God to hand us food and milk on demand and to never be expected to grow in knowledge and wisdom and accountability. And even as we demand that our needs be met, at the same time we often doubt whether God really cares about us enough to provide for us. All of this dysfunctional reasoning reveals a sick condition of the heart, a condition of unbelief shown by our unwillingness to believe that God cares about us and desires to bless us far beyond our wildest imaginations.

Think for a moment of how we would feel about a teenager with good parents who demands that their parents constantly “prove” to them that they still love them. It is not hard to imagine that for there are plenty of examples all around us. But what is really going on here? In fact, what is usually going on in a similar situation when a teenage boy asks his girlfriend to “prove” that she really loves him? All sorts of alarm bells start going off in the minds of mature adults when they see that kind of scenario, and properly so. And yet how much are we like that when it comes to our belief in the love and care of God for us?

Whether the things that I want God to do for me or give me are good or not so good misses the point. It is the fact that I keep wanting Him to “prove” Himself to me continually as the condition upon which I am willing to trust Him that creates such a serious problem. We think that a sign would produce belief in our heart, but in fact that is not the source of real belief. Instead, this kind of mentality is really exposing our choice of continuing to live in unbelief that His heart is willing to care about me. How would I feel if someone treated me that way all the time and refused to trust my motives unless I did exactly what they wanted me to do? Yet I struggle to see that I treat God that way much of the time.

I can see a little better what Jesus is talking about here, but there still seems to be a heavy cloud that shrouds my awareness of this contaminating influence in my spirit. I want this fog, this darkness over my spirit and heart to be cleared away so I can see my true condition and repent. Like this man in the story who found himself exposed and suddenly realized how much he really didn't trust Jesus, I want to see more clearly why I am afraid to trust when I am in dire circumstances that threaten me. I want to develop a more deeply rooted level of faith that anchors itself in God's heart, in God's Word instead of resting only in the shallows of the externals.

Maybe this is like the difference between building a house on firm bedrock or constructing it only on shifting sand. The first house on rock may also be surrounded by deep sand just as the other house, but because its foundations are deep down past the externals, past the sand that is so obvious on the surface and fastened securely on what is much deeper underneath, then when the storms of emotions come it will be far more likely that this house will not shudder and shift and collapse but will be secure and calm and filled with peace and joy.