Have you ever asked the Lord to increase your faith?

The Apostles did in Luke 17:5. Look at the somewhat astonishing answer Jesus gave in verses 6-10! He starts out by saying that it is not the size of your faith but the substance of your faith. Jesus used an agrarian and husbandry illustration. Think how hard it would be to plow a field with an ox and a plow? Think of the hours of rigorous effort and broken blades. You would have to remove large rocks, break up the hard ground, and work in the elements…all while keeping the rows straight! Or what about being a sheepherder? Sheep are independent creatures with below average intelligence. They require extraordinary attention and consistent vigilance in order to be kept safe. It would not be an easy task to say the least! Farming and sheepherding were then, as they are now, lifestyle jobs. They demanded an all-out effort 10-12 hours a day, 7-days a week.

When a farmer or sheepherder came home at night, he was fortunate if he had a family member who would help with preparing meals, cleaning up, or doing chores. In the story Jesus tells, the servant who had been working all day in the fields would come home from a long day only to be required to serve all the more. The master had no obligation to thank the servant, nor would the servant have expected thanks. The servant was simply doing his duty. Notice how Jesus ends his story: “So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’” Now, I don’t know about you but this strikes me as strange. If someone asked me how to increase a person’s faith, I would say things like, “Dream big! Expect God to do mighty things! Live on the edges! Take risks and go for the impossible! Trust God to accomplish the unthinkable! He desires to do big and grandiose accomplishments in your life as you trust Him in faith!”

Jesus says just the opposite. Role up you sleeves. Be willing to function in obscurity. Do your job. Keep a strong work ethic. Be humble enough to live with a sense of duty… not glory. Keep working without recognition, and never give up simply because the job is always there. Have you noticed that the word “duty” is almost completely non-existent in our modern expression of Christianity? Yet here Jesus is giving us a practical lesson in regards to the development of our faith. In the past, I have mentioned the website www.wallbuilders.org. David Barton has a fantastic CD titled “Reformation”. I bought several of them and you can borrow them if you wish. He tells the story of George Whitfield who the Holy Spirit used to bring revival in the 1800’s here in America. George Whitfield gave over 32,000 sermons in 34 years of ministry. Imagine the sense of duty that he had by giving over 3 sermons a day for 34 years! He did it all from horse back with a portable pulpit traveling through adverse weather, battling physical sickness, as well as harsh treatment from other pastors. Yet it is said that at the end of his ministry, 80% of all Americans had personally heard George Whitfield preach. The great Awaking took place in large part because of the dutiful, and committed faith of workers like Whitfield.

Would you stop for a moment and pray with me? Oh LORD, forgive us of our laziness. We ask that you would cleanse us from our desire for glory and for our lack of humility. We repent and surrender to You. We confess our lack of effort for Your Kingdom purposes. Oh Holy Father, please empower us for the duty of obeying. In Christ’s Name, we pray. Amen.

For our fourth wedding anniversary Vanessa and I took a trip to the Central Coast of California. I’ll never forget how beautiful the cypress trees were that lined the famed 17-Mile Drive at Pebble Beach. I learned that, proportionate to their size, cypress trees have some of the deepest root systems of any tree. Their constant coastal winds cause their roots to sink deep into the soil becoming nearly immovable. They have a effortless way about them. You might even say they seem relaxed even amidst the constant battering of the elements. They actually thrive on account of their difficult surroundings.

This is, of course, a microcosm of the Christian life. Harsh winds can feel constant, yet through it all our dependence upon God deepens. Consider the Apostle Paul’s perspective:

⁷ We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.

 ⁸ We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. ⁹ We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. ¹⁰ Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.

 ¹¹ Yes, we live under constant danger of death because we serve Jesus, so that the life of Jesus will be evident in our dying bodies. ¹² So we live in the face of death, but this has resulted in eternal life for you. – 2 Corinthians 4:7-12 NLT

Paul saw the big picture. He knew in the deepest part of him that every day of his life was all about Jesus, and if Jesus took Him home it would be all the better (Phil.1:21)!  The “setbacks” he endured would likely crush many of us today, as our hardships seem to pale in comparison. Yet the durability of Paul’s endurance lay in the fact that He trusted in the power of God. Let’s read verse 7 again: “We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.”

An anchor for our souls in times of suffering is to be deeply convinced of, and trust in God’s great love and power. As fragile and cracked clay jars, this can feel close to impossible at the time. Still, it’s in these moments of hardship and against all hope that I have found faith in God’s love and power to be incredibly rewarding. I love the passage in Romans that speaks of Abraham choosing to believe in God against ALL hope. It was that kind of faith that God determined was righteous (See Romans 4:18-25). Let me share a story that may help illustrate this idea.

Shortly after Jude was diagnosis with Tuberous Sclerosis, Vanessa and I began a journey to better understand God’s power and heart to bring healing. Against all hope, we were choosing to believe in God’s goodness and that His desire was to bring about complete healing for Jude. We began to hear more about “environments of faith” where belief in the miraculous seemed to be the norm.  One such environment was at a church in Redding, California. We had personally interviewed a doctor from our town that had been miraculously healed of stage four cancer at one of this church’s “healing services”. It’s funny, but when medical minds acknowledge the glory of God and the healing power of Jesus, you tend to be especially inclined to listen to their story! We decided to make the 12-hour trek north. On our way, Vanessa and I spent hours in dialogue and prayer as we read books on healing and considered the numerous accounts of miracles Scripture tells us that Jesus and His disciples carried out. Could instantaneous and complete healing for Jude be in line with God’s plan? We believed the Lord was able; we believed he was willing. Our good friends, Phil, Jen and their 1-year-old boy Caleb, caravanned along with us on this particular trip; teaching us so much about love through their willingness to join us. We are forever grateful for the way they modeled Jesus to us.

It was about 9:00pm on a Friday night when we arrived in Redding. The church’s “prayer rooms” opened early the next morning so we settled into a Holiday Inn for the night. After getting Vanessa and Jude settled into our room, I went to wait for Phil and Jen who were about 15 minutes behind us. It was a seemingly insignificant moment, waiting downstairs checking my email on the lobby computer, however the Lord was about to do something miraculous. The door opened and closed a number of times welcoming weary travelers. Still, no Phil and Jen. Then something odd happened. A familiar frame walked through the front door. “Keith?”, I thought. I’ll have to look again…after all there’s no way my best friend from Oregon’s dad just walked through the front door. I blinked and looked again. Sure enough, it was Keith Slater and opening the door for him was Phil! All I could say was what I had thought earlier… “Keith?!”… then 2 second later, “Phil?… Do you guys know each other?” Of course they didn’t. Phil just happened to be arriving at the exact same moment that Keith and Barb were pulling in for the night on their way back to Oregon from Arizona. They walked through the front door, coming from completely different trajectories but arriving at precisely the same time… as if coordinated. Just so you get a picture for how crazy this was, let me tell you a bit about the Slater family. There son Jeff and I have been close friends since birth, you might even say before birth as our mom’s were pregnant together. Barb, in particular, had prayed extensively for Jude and even shared a couple of visions she had of him as an older boy talking clearly to groups of people about all God had done in his life. The Slaters, like so many others, were part of our healing journey and it was God’s grace to bring them to that hotel at the exact moment He did so they could pray with us the next morning.

Now the skeptic in me initially tried to discount this encounter as a wild coincidence. But it’s far too difficult when you really stop to think about it. Each of us were driving different speeds, stopping at various points, choosing that particular hotel, and then there is always the fact that I didn’t have to be waiting for Phil and Jen in the lobby. Phil still would have held the door open for Keith, but as two complete strangers. God was clearly orchestrating these events. We believe he did so to graciously let us know he cared. That he was with us and was pleased with our hearts to seek Him at all costs.

I wish I could say that Jude was miraculously healed on that trip. Or that God healed him the next weekend when we drove to Phoenix to take part in a similar healing service. In both cases our faith was strong and we made a conscious choice to believe God against all hope. The Lord had other plans. As I shared in the previous article, Embracing Real Life, Jude’s seizures did finally stop through a miraculous touch from Jesus after an “unsuccessful” brain surgery in New York. He still has Tuberous Sclerosis and likely always will. But the point in sharing this story is to say that Vanessa and I became thoroughly convinced of God’s love and power through this hardship. Like the cypress trees, our roots in the Lord have gone much deeper.

If we’ve trusted in Jesus, then His mighty Spirit dwells in our fragile frames every day of our lives. There is nothing we can go through that will break us, for his supernatural presence is our daily sustenance.  Don’t you wonder sometimes why God would trust His glory to such risky vessels? As the passage above indicates, it is to ensure that He alone receives the glory! (2 Cor. 4:7).

In Psalm 119 David utters something that, for a long time I didn’t know what to do with. The Psalm reads, “I know, LORD, that your laws are righteous, and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.” – v.75 NIV. Really? David felt the affliction of God and considered it His faithfulness? How does one get to that place? Perhaps Paul in the same letter we’ve looked at today understands this gracious heart of God to allow affliction into our lives:

“…So to keep me from becoming proud, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger from Satan to torment me and keep me from becoming proud.  ⁸ Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. ⁹ Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. ¹⁰ That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” – 2 Corinthians 12:7b-10 NLT

Clearly, we are not to seek out suffering, but the Bible tells us a great deal about the good and sovereign purposes of God in allowing affliction into our lives. In the instance here, Paul was graced with the knowledge of why this affliction had beset him: it kept him from becoming proud on account of revelations he had received (v.7). Often, however, the reasons behind our sufferings are not so obvious, and that’s okay. As finite, and extremely dependent creatures as we are, I believe God has our best interests in mind when concealing this knowledge from us. At the end of the day we all must learn to trust ourselves to our faithful Creator (1 Peter 4:19). He is carrying out his good work in each of our lives and will do so until we are graced to behold Him face to face (1 John 3:2)

¹⁶ Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. ¹⁸ So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” – 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 NIV

Hi All,

I wanted to introduce the first teaching our son Seth has done in a short series he will be writing for the site called “Following Jesus in Suffering”. This first entry is titled, Embracing Real Life. I hope it ministers to you as it has to me!

Embracing Real Life

“I think it’s Tuberous Sclerosis”. The neurologist calmly affirmed. “You see, these white marks on his skin, along with the seizures make T.S. the strongest possibility.” Our hearts caved.

“What do you mean? What exactly is Tubular…how do you say it?” I asked as a wave of nausea came over me. “Well Tuberous Sclerosis is a rare condition; a multi-organ genetic disease that’s characterized by seizures that are usually difficult to control…here I think I have a picture in one of these books… It’s on page 47 I think”. He handed me a dusty copy of an old neurology book that I never dreamt held the details of a condition our newborn son would possess. Our precious Jude Winters was just 7 month old when my wife Vanessa and I received this devastating diagnosis.

Our hearts immediately felt betrayed. Why would the Lord allow this beautiful little one to suffer? Didn’t we believe in Jesus? Didn’t we pray during pregnancy for Jude to be healthy in both body and mind? Furthermore, didn’t we choose a life of following the Lord into ministry? We deserved better. We deserved a “normal”, happy, healthy child.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but think of our reputation as well. “Were all eyes on us watching to see if we were really committed? Would people think that we loved God only when life gave us roses? How would my ministry be impacted if I couldn’t respond in a godly way? What if I couldn’t hold my family together through this living nightmare?”

The ensuing months would be marked by many ups and downs. A dull depression and disengagement from life seemed to characterize our daily living. Months passed and Jude was having somewhere between 60 and 100 seizures a day. His little arms and legs would jerk upward; his face expressionless as if someone was unplugging him for a brief moment. All we could do was lay our hands on him, pray, and do our best to bring him comfort.

After numerous medicines and diets, we decided to take the only option left: brain surgery. While the surgery was never intended to take away his seizures and by all human standards ended in failure, God’s was abundant. Jude got out of surgery on March 11^th, 2008 and has been free from seizures ever since. For nearly four years we have been praising God for our son’s precious deliverance. The lessons we’ve learned along the way have been innumerable but I thought it would be helpful to share a few simple insights from God’s Word that have shaped Vanessa and I’s perspective on suffering along the way.

Many of us, even unknowingly, have a tendency to adopt the worldview of the culture around us and apply this view to our understanding of how the Christian life “should work”. We live in a culture of affluence and deep down we believe that the American Dream is also God’s dream for our lives. Who doesn’t want health and wealth? Our desire for prosperity and happiness is not in and of itself wrong, and if we’re honest the Bible has much to say about God’s amazing heart to bless His children! At the same time we know that to follow Jesus is to willingly sign up for persecution and hardship. Jesus told us so. Consider his words,

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33 NIV).

If you think about it, we’ve chosen to follow a man who was brutally beaten and crucified. Not to be a downer, but we need to realize that following Jesus encompasses both hardship and incredible joy. It’s the most authentic way to live as it embraces life as it truly is in a fallen world. We believe in, live out, and celebrate God’s goodness each and every day, but our complete and lasting redemption comes later. As the title of one of Francis Chan’s chapters in Crazy Love so perfectly states: Your Best Life…[is] Later.

In John 6 we find an interesting account of Jesus’ teaching at a synagogue in Capernaum.  Stop and pray for a moment that the Holy Spirit would make Jesus’ words alive to you:

“⁴⁷ Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. ⁴⁸ I am the bread of life” and then down in verse fifty-three we read,

⁵³ Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ⁵⁴ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. ⁵⁵ For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. ⁵⁶ Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. ⁵⁷ Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. ⁵⁸ This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.”  – John 6:47-48, 53-58 NIV

Jesus here, at least in part, is expressing His nature as being the great Sustainer. He is our Bread and no life can be lived apart from our feasting on Him. He holds it all, including us, together (See Colossians 1:17). He tells us that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink. Implicit in this metaphor is the call that we embrace Jesus’ real life. His whole life. His real death. His real and final victory. To part from Him at any point is to miss the point altogether. Even when life is darkest and we feel hopeless, Jesus longs to minister His love to us.  Brennan Manning quotes psychiatrist Gerald May as saying:

“I know that God is loving and that God’s loving is trustworthy. I know this directly, through the experience of my life. There have been plenty of times of doubt, especially when I used to believe that trusting God’s goodness meant I would not be hurt. But having been hurt quite a bit, I know God’s goodness goes deeper than all pleasure and pain – it embraces them both.”[1]

I take great comfort in the reality that God’s goodness embraces both pleasure and pain. Think about it for a moment. Don’t the truly meaningful relationships in your life embrace both pleasure and pain? The sweet times we enjoy with loved ones are often sweeter because we’ve walked through hardships together. So this day, may we choose to rest our hope in the unchanging love, strength and beauty of our matchless God! He is always worthy of all praise and we can know beyond any doubt that He is working all things together for our good (Romans 8:28). May we embrace Peter’s exhortation today, who said:

 ¹⁰ “And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. ¹¹ To him be the power for ever and ever. Amen.”

In Hope,

Seth Ebel

seth@theshoreline.org