Get excited: Here’s the third edition of our lady blogs. Half way done! Last night the beautiful women on my team and I actually did our last night of this study; it was a bittersweet moment as we are wrapping up our time together and getting ready for possible team changes with the end of our time here in Africa. I couldn’t have thought of a better to wrap up our time together, but knowing that it is wrapping up our time together does add a bit of sadness to it all. BUT back to faith and confidence, eh?
So our proverbs 31 lady is distinguished by her strength and confidence, ie her faith.
Proverbs 31:7 “She girds her arms with strength and makes her arms strong.”
Proverbs 31:21 “She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household is clothed
with scarlet.”
Proverbs 31:25 “Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she smiles at the future.”
I’ll be honest, when I was thinking about this day of the study before we did it I thought it was gonna be kind of a typical time because it seems like such a typical topic. Whereas with the purity talk there is this kind of an expectation of things to get easily get stirred up and confronted. This proved however to be just that for our team, it blew my expectations out of the water. I think that it became this discussion that stirred things up in us and confronted us in ways we didn’t expect because underestimated the depth of this topic. Faith is such a huge part of our lives. It’s completely integral to our relationships with God. If we are not functioning with faith and are making decisions outside of faith, I’m going to venture to say that our relationship with Him will be severely limited and henceforth disintegrate.
So uh… what is faith? The fall back book in the bible to turn to on this subject matter is Hebrews, specifically chapter 11. Verse one says, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see”, and verse six tells us, “and without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him”. I’d like you to mull those two verses over, really chew on the idea of having [confidence] in what you hope for and [assurance] in what you can’t even see. I’d like you ask yourself if the way that you interact with our Lord displays that you believe that He not only is but is a [rewarder] of those who seek him.
What I realized is that a lot of the times the answer to that question is no. So much of the time I approach our Lord as if He is my great punisher. I think it’s a tendency that’s left over from the way I perceived Him my whole life before I really came to know Him. I’m still slow to bring things to Him and I’m afraid to be holistically real with Him because of that. It also leads me into a life of limited risk. (I know that might sound ridiculous coming from the girl who is travelling around the world for a year… but trust, it’s true) I live in limited risk when it comes to vulnerability, but not really with people, just with the Lord. This is true so long as I am not living in the faith that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.
Mulling over these verses and the stories found in the rest of Hebrews 11 (give it a read, for real) stirred up the fact that I interact with the Lord very faithlessly… it stirred that up big time and made me confront that. I had to evaluate why that was and as I did He was faithful to counter all of that with truths about Himself and how He desires us to live in relation to Him. Namely He desires us to trust Him with our hearts and lives, and bank our whole being on the fact that He will come through for us. And He desires us to do this despite circumstance, as the men and woman mentioned in Hebrews 11 did. It says that, “All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; the only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth”. Seriously read this whole chapter, so good.
The women we focused on were Rahab and Sarah, the only women mentioned in Hebrews 11. You can find Rahab’s story in Joshua 2 and Sarah’s in Genesis 16-17. These two women’s lives show us two very different stories about having faith in the Lord, believing that He is and is a rewarder of those who seek Him. They were both greatly blessed through their faith and were blessings to many others through it.
For You are my hope; O Lord GOD, You are my confidence from my youth. Psalm 71:5
The woman who fears the Lord trusts God.
