Shaken Faith

Shaken Faith

Take your son, your only son—yes, Isaac, whom you love so much—and go to the land of Moriah. Go and sacrifice him as a burnt offering on one of the mountains, which I will show you. Genesis 22:2

ABRAHAM WAS GIVEN A PROMISE, and after years of waiting, stumbling, laughing, and waiting some more, the promise was fulfilled. Isaac, the son of laughter, was God’s visible means for fulfilling his plan to bless the world with descendants of Abraham and Sarah. Yet one day, God told Abraham to sacrifice this one vessel of fulfillment. Abraham had a choice to make: God or the promise. The way the choice was presented to him, he couldn’t have both.

We place our faith in unshakable things: God, his Kingdom, his character, his purposes for our lives, and that all that he tells us is true. But sometimes our faith itself is shaken. That jolt often happens when we are asked to surrender the very thing we are praying for. In Abraham’s case, surrendering Isaac led to restoration of the promise. But our sacrifices would be meaningless if we assumed they were just a formality always leading to restoration. Sometimes the sacrifice is real—and extremely painful. But it’s how God often works to bring us into a place of greater promise.

Our faith will be tested—sometimes by circumstances and challenges, sometimes by temptations or our own tumultuous minds, and sometimes by God himself. When the test comes from him—when it pits the object of our faith against its Fulfiller—we have to be willing to lay it down. We need to choose God over the very thing we are asking him for.

Never let your prayers of faith become bigger than the God you are praying to. He values a relationship of trust far more than an agenda for our lives. He promises abundance and fruitfulness, the joy of life in his Kingdom, but that joy begins with him. When we think our joy begins with the answer to our prayers, we need correcting, and the correction isn’t easy. But it’s always good. Choose him above all else. Lay down whatever rivals him and let your prayers flow from unshakable trust in him.

For the first two or three years after my conversion, I used to ask for specific things. Now I ask for God.