“It’s not faith if, if you use your eyes.” - Paramore

What exactly is faith? And how much of this “faith” do we have?

It was explained to me like this a long time ago:

Faith is confidence or trust in a person or thing
So in order to have faith, you must trust
Trust is relying on the strength or ability of a person or thing
So in order to trust, you must rely
Reliance is being dependent for support, help, or supply

To truly have faith, you must rely on God for everything.

“I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can move a mountain.” - Matthew 17:20 aka Jesus

Being a human, and a guy, letting someone else be in control is just uncomfortable. Not knowing what will happen semi- freaks me out. And not being in control of it is even harder. But he calls us to depend on him anyways. In Matthew 10, Jesus is telling his disciples how to live a life of faith. He tells them not to worry about food or money, and that they will be prosecuted and scorned. All they can do is have faith.

Our faith is nothing compared to that. Our minds have gotten so wrapped up in the world and become so greedy that enough is no longer enough. God isn’t good enough for us, because if we do our own thing we get way better benefits. Eternal life just doesn’t exist, at least in this world. 

We don’t even see it happening. Having fallback plans “just in case” is doubting God. When Peter saw Jesus walking on the water he didn’t bring a life preserver with him, just to be safe. He just jumped out. And as soon as he got caught up in the world, the size of the waves and severity of the storm, he began to sink. 

The line in the song kept getting stuck in my mind. Whenever doubt is rooted in my mind, I just want God to show up and remind me that he is real. Living proof. But it wouldn’t be faith if I knew, if I used my eyes.

I feel like I have been getting convicted about everything, which makes sense because of all the times I mess up, but I never really understood why. Why would God do this to me? Why would God choose someone who follows Him to constantly hit with temptations and expose their weaknesses? Why God, why?

I could never see God’s love for me. I knew he loved me, but I didn’t understand his way of expressing it. It seemed like a love hate relationship.

It was because I never understood his reasoning for conviction. I guess he would always throw stuff into my life to make me a better person. I always thought he was putting crap into my life so that I could come out of it a perfect, flawless person. But looking at it, is that love? Is it love to expect someone to be perfect, and to throw in things to make it difficult in hope that one day they can finally overcome it? No, that isn’t love. Love is when you send your son so that someone doesn’t have to be perfect, they can just strive to be the best they can.

For a while I tried to find some way to redeem myself, saying “God, it’s ok, I’ll be perfect one day and then everything will be cool.” 

But I had this mindset until one day God just told me I was wrong. One day he just told me that he doesn’t expect me to be perfect. All of the conviction put in my life is just so that I can grow in my relationship with him. He isn’t putting this temptation in my life to make me perfect, but simply because he loves me and he wants me to turn to him. To grow with him.

This all happened a while ago, it just seems like I have been thinking about this a lot lately and how much it meant to me. So I just decided to write it down.