Blind Trust?

 As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, calling out, "Have mercy on us, Son of David!" 28When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him, and he asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?" "Yes, LORD," they replied. 29Then he touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith let it be done to you" Matthew 9:27-29

Someone said that the journey of faith is a matter of coming to the place, again and again, of having to live out what it is we say we believe. I agree, so I have to ask, both you and myself, where are we on that journey of faith. Do we live out what it is we say we believe? It was said of the Jewish leaders of Christ's time that they didn't believe the God that they said they believed in? Do we? We had better, because I believe our faith, our confession of what it is that we believe, about Him, His Word, His promises, His truth, is going to be tested as we have never seen it tested before.

The blind men who followed Jesus were desperate for His healing. Their desperation lent strength to their faith. They had no physical reason to believe they could see again, and in the face of that, Jesus asked them if they believed He could restore their sight. They answered that they did, and then He did. Here is where some questions come in, and only we can answer them. What if He had not restored their sight? Would they still have hailed Him as the Son of David? Would they still have followed Him? Let's get more narrow; what happens if that which we ask of Him isn't given us? We all have deep needs in our lives, desperate ones. If we call ourselves followers of Christ, we are going to go to Him and ask that He respond to them. A loved one with what is believed to be terminal cancer. A child living in open rebellion. A marriage that seems beyond repair. The list can go on and on. What happens if we take all of these to Him....in faith...and He doesn't respond as we hoped? Jesus restored the sight of these men, yet there were others, many others, who were also blind, sick, broken, who were not healed. What if in our desperation, we find ourselves among those "others?" Will we still believe? Will we still trust? Will we still go on with Him?

I think that this is the true journey of faith; coming to the impossible place, looking to Him in that place, and going on with Him in trust whether He responds as we want Him to or not. I give Him glory for all the miraculous things He has done in my life, and in the lives of so many others. Yet, not every desperate prayer was answered as I wanted them to be. When that happens, and it will happen to us all, we're faced with the choice of whether we will still believe. Will we believe that He is good, merciful, all powerful, perfect love, even when the circumstances of our lives give the appearance that He is none of those? And be assured, such times will be ours.It is in these places that we'll have to choose to either believe, or reject all that it is we have confessed concerning our faith.

The key to this is our coming to the place, before we have actually come to these kinds of situations, where we have decided that, no matter what, we are going to believe Him, trust Him, follow Him. Some will call this blind, foolish faith, but it's not, for it is this kind of faith that is rewarded with seeing Him in the midst of all things. In the midst of our disappointment and pain, our discouragement and sorrow. Our decision to trust, believe, and obey, opens the eyes of our hearts to see Him. And we will see Him.

We cannot live the kind of faith life I speak apart from His cross. It is there that we die to our insistence upon having everything work the way we wish them to. At the cross, we surrender to the wisdom of His way, trusting that even in suffering, He will bring His good out of all of it, that His purposes and ways are far above ours. Only at the cross can we pray, as did our Lord, "Nevertheless, not my will, but Yours be done, O Lord." And we can say this because we do believe.

Blessings,

Pastor O