For all the promises of God find their Yes in Christ. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory. (2 Corinthians 1:20)
Have you ever expressed some goal or wish to one of your friends, and their reply was “just have faith and claim it”?
As an insulin-dependent diabetic for years, and a Bar examinee this year, I get this a lot.
The biggest megachurches, the most popular preachers, and the biggest-selling products in Christian bookstores overwhelmingly accept and advocate this Christian version of the Law of Attraction — that if we just believe for something with enough single-mindedness and mental determination, refusing to accept all other possibilities, then we will receive whatever it is we are believing for and claiming.
The first problem is that this implies that the goodness of God is conditioned upon our own works.
For then, God rewards and hears only the “strong” of faith, the “super Christian”. This creates insidious problems for the Christian soul, leading the believer into either excessive pride on one hand, or excessive despair on the other.
For when we are experiencing more success in life, we internally and even piously attribute those successes to ourselves because of all the faith we had mustered up and exerted. Our effort becomes our entitlement. God becomes our debtor, and we become our own little gods and goddesses in our hearts.
This is why we even get angry at God when He doesn’t grant us what we’ve believed for so hard, and we even think that He has cheated us. This is vain self-idolatry that destroys lives and souls.
On the other hand, when life goes terribly wrong, and bad things just keep happening in life, we end up blaming ourselves for not having enough faith for God to hear us. Imagine the guilt and confusion that we feel when we pray and believe so hard for a loved one to be healed, but the person dies nonetheless.
In this case, we don’t feel that God has cheated us, but that He has rightfully punished us for not being strong enough in faith.
This, too, is a great tragedy brought about by the “just-claim-it” theology, and many a church person has spiritually burned out and lost their faith from the sheer weight of the burden on their hearts.
Yet, Jesus Himself said that we will have tribulation in this world (John 16:33), and that if He as our master endured suffering we as His servants will suffer as well (John 15:20).
All over the Bible, from cover to cover, God frequently uses pain and loss in the believer’s life to accomplish His purposes and bring glory to Himself, the supreme example of which being the pain and suffering of His one and only Son on the cross.
We are to have faith, but it is the strength of the God we believe in that saves and avails, not the strength of the faith itself.
The strong and the weak of faith in Exodus were equally able to miraculously cross the Red Sea. And the great and the small of faith will both be saved in Christ, even faith as small as a mustard seed (Matthew 17:20).
I quoted a passage at the start of this article saying that God’s promises are always Yes in Christ. But how do we know if God has promised us something? By our feelings? By our greatest desires? No.
It is by reading His word. He has not promised us healing of all diseases, or a promotion at work, or a good grade in school, but He has made much better promises, such as: to provide for our needs (Matthew 6:33), to never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5), and to forgive and cleanse us of our unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).
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Author’s email: micahdagaerag@outlook.com
