Friday 13 Jun 2014

June 13: Luke 7:1-10

Key Verse: Luke 7:9
When Jesus heard these things, He marvelled at him, and turned around and said to the crowd that followed Him, “I say to you, I have not found such great faith, not even in Israel!”

Devotion:
There are some people that you meet that you look at and wonder how they can have so much faith because your own faith seem to fade into nothing when you compare it with theirs. But each of us has a different measure of faith and we will display that faith in different ways as well. This centurion was a man who displayed his belief in Christ by doing things for others but how much faith he had may not have come across in the same way.

There are going to be people in our own lives that do many things for God and yet we don’t get to see their faith; that is up to Christ to see because He is the one who will be able to see inside their hearts and not just what they get up to physically. We may see things and see them as faith instead of just being faithful. We may see things as see them as being weaknesses instead of being full of faith. This centurion displayed his faith in his belief by telling Jesus and His entourage that they did not have to come physically but just to say the words.

Many of us look for the physical experience rather than the actually blessing from God; that is just the way we are and it is how we work. What God seeks is not the faith that people have after they have seen the proof, but the faith they display before they get to see the proof. Faith is a belief in the unseen not a belief in what we see, that is proof not faith.

God wants us to have a firm belief in Him and all that He can do because of what others, including Christ and the Holy Spirit, have taught us. He does not want us to build up a “faith” in what we have seen and what we have experienced. Yes it is hard trusting in what you hear rather than what you see, but that is exactly what Christ has called us to do; to believe in the word of God, what the prophets and disciples have written down for us to believe in.

Points to Ponder:
Are you a person who needs proof?

Are you willing to trust the bible?