Faith is not about who you are, or who I am, but about who God is. I don’t have faith in myself, because it would be well and truly misplaced. I do, however, have faith in God because I know He is faithful and unchanging from generation to generation, and having spoken the universe into being, His ability to do what men deem impossible is beyond doubt.
Psalm 33:7-9, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. He gathers the waters of
the sea together as a heap; He lays up the deep in storehouses. Let all the
earth fear the Lord; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him.
For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded and it stood fast.”
Does the resolution of your situation seem more difficult
than gathering the waters of the sea together as a heap, or speaking the host
of heaven into existence? Whatever you may be going through, it’s doubtful that
God would have a more difficult time making a way for you than He did speaking
creation into existence. So, if God did these things, if He spoke and it was
done, or commanded and it stood fast, what makes you think He is incapable of
intervening, rectifying, or restoring your situation?
Just as faith is not about who you are but who God is, faith
is also not about where you are, but where you will be if you continue to walk
in it. Stagnation is not a natural environment for a child of God. If I find
myself in the same place tomorrow as I was yesterday, if my faith has not
grown, stretched, and matured, if my understanding of God has not expanded from
one day to the next, it should be a reason for concern, if not outright alarm.
If fish stop swimming, they die. If a believer stops growing
and becomes stagnant, he begins to wither, grow stale, and his progress is
stalled. If you’ve ever run across a pond, a pool, or a body of water in which
there is no inflow of fresh water, you’ve likely seen all the grimy stuff that
can grow atop it, and given enough time, it becomes foul and not habitable for
any sort of life. When our spiritual life is stagnant, there is no inflow of
living water, there is no refreshing, and what is present becomes murky,
overgrown with weeds, and eventually malodorous and unsuitable for consumption.
Whenever we hear horror stories about a once-famed preacher,
pastor, or evangelist having gone off the rails, and committed such heinous
atrocities as to bring shame to the household of faith you can always trace the
genesis of their descent back to the moment they stopped prioritizing growing
in God, and trying to grow their church or ministry instead. Their purpose
shifted from being godly and upright to doing whatever they needed to do to get
ahead, to grow, and perhaps in contravention of God’s will for them, become
bigger than they are.
It’s easy to grow a ministry if you’re willing to compromise.
It’s easy to grow a church if you’re willing to circumvent the hard truths of
the gospel and begin doling out platitudes and insisting that God had to change
the rules of the game because there weren’t enough people signing up to be on
His team.
Quantity was never God’s concern. Quality always has been.
When my grandfather was still alive, he was a fan of buffets. I don’t know if
they’re still around, but there was a place called Sizzler up the road from
where we lived, and when he wanted to treat my brothers and me, he’d take us to
Sizzler.
It was an all-you-can-eat buffet, and at the time, I was too
young to understand the difference between quality and quantity, so we all took
to the stale mac and cheese, rubbery mystery meat, and semi-congealed meat loaf
with abandon. As I grew older, I realized that quantitatively speaking, you
couldn’t go wrong with a buffet, but if you were looking for a quality cut of
meat, that was the last place you wanted to be.
Admittedly, you’re unlikely to glut yourself ordering a
ten-ounce ribeye at a steak house as you would have at a buffet, but if you’re
taste buds are in working order, you must admit there is a marked difference in
the quality of the food from one place to the other.
It took twelve men to turn the world upside down, all without
the benefit of zooming, the internet, telephones, air travel, snail mail, or
audio teachings. Anyone who insists that it’s acceptable to sacrifice quality
for the sake of quantity should remember this truth and adjust accordingly,
because what God can do through one man who is wholly sold out to Him, a
thousand men cannot do of their own volition or in their own strength.
It’s a matter of pride, though. It stopped being about God and
building the Kingdom some time back. Now it’s about the status symbol of presiding
over a mega church, or being the frontrunner for the vaunted distinction of
being the biggest in your state or the nation. To what cost, I wonder? What
compromises did you need to make, and what half-truths and outright lies did
you have to speak in order to reach this status and claim an honorific that
holds no weight before Almighty God?
Somewhere along the way, we’ve inverted God’s standard, convincing ourselves that the more we grow, the less God expects of us, or the bigger our church or ministry, the more liberties we can take with our walk, and building up our faith. A pastor’s license doesn’t give anyone the liberty to stray from the path or nullify the mandate to flee the appearance of evil. It should make those answering the call to ministry aware that they have a bullseye on their back, and the enemy will double his efforts to try and ensnare them somehow. Ministry is not a ticket to easy street; it is being held to a higher standard of accountability while beating back the darkness that has you in its sights.
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea, Jr.
Posted on 30 April 2025 | 11:27 am
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