Faith: Why is it difficult? The second post in this Life Lessons series included the following observation about toddlers:
When the little ones are learning to walk they often fall down. They get up, take another step or two, and they fall down again. That is a beautiful picture of living from faith to faith. The longer the toddler does that the better they can walk. The faltering steps of our toddlers hold another tremendous lesson for the Church!
Life Lessons: Learning From Toddlers
Have you noticed faith is often followed by frustration? Even if we understand our lives are to be lived from faith to faith, that doesn’t mean faith is easy. That’s where we encounter frustration. There are many lessons here. Our faith families (churches) need to be taught by the toddlers. Actually, the lesson comes from the parents of the toddlers!
The toddler takes faltering steps. When the fall occurs, the parents gets angry and scold the child for falling down. That isn’t what you did when you kids were learning to walk?
More than likely, when your child took their first half-step you were probably cheering and clapping. By now, you may be ahead of me on this one.
See the toddler as a new Christian. They are learning to take baby-steps of faith. They don’t learn quickly and they don’t cover great distances without falling. Now, does the Church act like the parents I described? Not usually, and that’s the lesson we need to learn.
Life Lessons: Believing the Unseen
In our previous post, we looked at Hebrews 11:6. That verse says we must believe that God is… That’s part of our problem. Our language cannot fully express the differences between us and God. Many times we find this line in Scripture:
God is like…
We are finite while He is infinite. We have physical bodies while He is Spirit. We are imperfect and fallible while He is perfect and infallible. These are things we believe by faith. But then there is the work God promises to do. We must believe His promise to complete the work He has begun in each believer.
Since we cannot see God at work we are often tempted to think no work is taking place. Our toddler Christians falter in their faith and then experience our wrath (as if it was our place to have some wrath). If the body of believers acted more like you and I did when our kids were learning to walk, the faith of those young believers would grow much faster. How different would your church be if that happened?
You and I believe God is at work in us. We must also believe He is at work in others. But there’s more. Our mission is to make disciples. Disciples are like babies. They are born and they must grow up. The Apostle Paul mentions growing up in the faith. Our faith in the Lord’s command to us must include walking faithfully and patiently beside those whose faith is younger and weaker than our own.
Now, how is your faith? Think about it. More on the difficulties of faith next time!
