Hosanna Restoration Church

“I am determined to believe you Lord. My mission for this year is to believe and trust you and know you. I want to be caught up in the one I believe in and not what I believe.” These are words that I scratched in my journal as I headed into a new year.

Have you ever considered that we can get so caught up in what we believe that we lose sight of what is true and right? This is true in every walk of life, but it is especially sad when it occurs in our walk with God. Wasn’t it this very problem that drove Paul to arrest followers of Christ and watch as they were murdered? He was so caught up in what he believed that he could not accept truth. His whole life changed when Jesus introduced Himself to him!

I don’t think there is one Christian who has never tried to put Jesus in their particular box. We know that without faith it is impossible to please God. We know that we believe that He is and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him. These are good things to believe. They are better than good, right up until we forget that He has a plan and we make our plans according to what we believe. When what we believe begins to replace Jesus in our lives, it is time to return to our first love. Remember, if we have faith that can move mountains but we don’t have love, we are headed for a wreck.

When we first met Jesus, we realized that we did not know much. We were totally dependent on His mercy and amazed that He loved us even when were far from Him. Let’s face it, when we really meet him we are star struck! We can’t believe it is possible to feel so clean. Oh yes we are also pretty ashamed that we were so foolish, and we have times of doubting that it can really be true. But hope that it will not end, keeps us looking to Him.

Then we begin to grow and know some things, and if we are not careful those very things can distract us from Him. I just do not want to be distracted and kept from knowing God more. That is why I wrote the things I wrote. Paul had a long list of things that he was, and declared they were nothing compared to knowing the Lord. They all may have added to his strength in Christ, but still they were nothing. Faith is not about what we know, or where we go, or how we worship. It is about Him. It is in Him that we have life.

We can believe a lot of things. We can know a lot of things. But if we don’t know Him, all that we believe and know can be the very things that keep us from life. I am prepared to start a new year counting everything behind me as nothing so that I can know Him more. A friend told me that his goal was to trust God more. Most certainly the more we know Him, the more we will trust Him. It is going to be a great year! May God bless us all with a hunger to know Him more.