Victory! (2012) by Gerry James

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Get in the

Habit of  Believing

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I've been called a lot of things over the years, and hard-headed, stubborn, even gullible are some of them.  >> Yeah, I am those things.  But, I would rather be gullible than hardhearted.

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If one of you wrote a blog post about how once you got to accompany the astronauts to the International Space Station, and on the way fell out of the space shuttle, drifted through outer space a couple days, then re-entered the earth's atmosphere, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean and swam to California...

...all under the power of the Holy Spirit...  up until California I would have been laughing and wondered if you forgot to take your medication before you sat down at the computer.  But when the Holy Spirit is brought into it, for me that changes everything.  I would look very closely at your story and would hold the possibility it could be true.  I would deem it worth evaluating instead of just writing you off as a nut case.

Now, I realize that some of you might think it would be foolish of me to even consider believing a story like that.  You can think what you like.  I just make it a habit to always believe, if God is involved.  I CHOOSE to live on the believing side of life.  God asked, "Is anything too hard for the LORD?" (Genesis 18:14)  Over the few years I've known Him, I haven't found anything yet.

I know of at least one time when Jesus got on to His disciples for being hardhearted.  It all started when Thomas made a faithless decision after hearing reports aout Jesus being raised from the dead.  Thomas told his fellow disciples, "Except I shall see in His Hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I WILL NOT BELIEVE."  (John 20:24)

Well, not long afterward, Jesus "appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not them which had seen him after He was risen" (Mark 16:14). 

Jesus called Thomas "faithless" (John 20:27) and rightly so.  Thomas rejected the Word of the Lord in favor of physical "proof".  Jesus had been teaching them what the Scriptures said and meant and preparing them for His death and resurrection for three years.  Thomas rejected ALL of this and said "prove it."  He had that perogative, but it was a negation of everything about the way he claimed to follow.

Jesus rebuked all His disciples for their "hardness of heart".  Their hearts were hard.  None of them was in the habit of believing without physical proof.  How could they have been apprentices of Jesus, as it were, and when crunch time came throw it all out and wonder, 'what if?'.  Like many of us, they had processed everything Jesus had taught them about faith through their minds, instead of through their hearts.

I used to think that people with hardhearts were God-haters, or, at the least, people in rebellion to Him.  Then, I realized that His close circle of disciples had hardhearts.  And then the day came when I realized I had a hardheart.    .... I was on a flight and reading the story of Jesus walking to His disciples on the water.  They were in a terrible storm.  After nine hours they were still only halfway across the Sea of Galilee, normally a two-hour trip.  They were in trouble and fighting for their lives.  Yet, here comes Jesus walking on top of the very thing that was trying to kill them.  He was totally in control.  Wow.  I put the Bible aside and stared out the window, trying to imagine being there.  Trying to see it as not just a story from a Book of spiritual