Believe.
Believe has been a word on my heart this last month. My whole life I’ve understood that believing is simple. However, I have come to experience believing is incredibly difficult.
As a kid, I remember one time my grandpa took me and my little brothers fishing. My grandpa would always reload the worms on our hooks, probably because we didn’t want to touch them.
I remember I just got my worm on the hook, and it fell off into the water. I brought my pole to my grandpa and asked for another worm. He told me, “Just wait a second, I’m getting a worm on your brothers line.”
Instead of just standing there waiting with an empty hook, I had the idea to put my hook back in the water. I remember believing- I am going to catch a fish. A second later, a fish bit my empty hook and I pulled out a small sunfish.
My grandpa was so surprised! He was just as excited as I was.
As I have gotten older, it has become harder to believe. It’s like I’ve lost part of my childlike faith in believing that anything can happen.
“God I want that childlike faith again. I want to believe!”
As I’ve been reading the Bible in the book of John, God continues to bring up the word believe. For example:
John 6:29 “Jesus told them, ‘This is the only work God wants from you: Believe in the one he has sent.'”
It seems simple, yet it has become difficult. Questions started filling my mind.
Is just saying, “I believe” actually believing? Does believing require action? How do I believe?
The reality is, I still don’t know the exact answers, yet I hope the Lord continues to show me how to believe.
I have been waking up every morning at 6:12AM and praying by 6:18AM while here in Morocco. I have realized, especially the last couple of days, that I am in a place of desperation. I am desperate for God to move.
There is absolutely nothing I can do here to change anyones life. God is the one who draws people to Himself. He is the one who is orchestrating things and it is simply my responsibility to believe.
Here is another passage I was reading recently.
John 11:1-44 which is the story of Lazarus.
Check out what it says in verse 33-35
“When Jesus saw her weeping and saw the other wailing with her, a deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled. ‘Where have you put him?’ He asked them.
They told him, ‘Lord come and see.’ Then Jesus wept….”
I was analyzing this passage and really grasping why Jesus was angry and why he was crying. I think the natural reaction is to say that Jesus was crying because he lost his friend Lazarus, yet I think it is deeper than that.
?As I was praying, God revealed this nugget of gold to me.
Jesus wasn’t crying because Lazarus his friend had died. He was crying because Mary and Martha and the others around them did not believe Jesus. Jesus told Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying” (John 11:4). Yet still they didn’t believe.
I see how sad God is when He sees the people He created in His own image not believing in Him. My heart hurts as I see many around me who do not know the truth about Jesus.
See even John 3:16 says, “For this is how God loves the world. He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who BELIEVES in him will not perish but have eternal life.”
