How Strong Is Your Faith?

Sorting through a suitcase of papers, I came across this illustration, and how a stronger faith in God is about a growing trust in and experience of God’s strength.

Imagine coming to a wooden bridge. It looks good, and you feel confident about walking across it. But unknown to you, it’s totally rotten underneath. Your faith in the bridge is very strong, but as you walk across it, you get dumped in the river.

Then imagine coming to another wooden bridge. It also looks good, but you’re still damp from the last bridge, so you’re hesitant! If you’ve lost all faith in bridges, you won’t even start to cross. If you have a little faith, you carefully start out (especially if a friend you trust tells you it’s ok). The more you cross it and find it’s not giving way, the more your faith grows and the stronger your faith becomes. Perhaps after a while you’ll jump up and down on it! And in time you may even find you’re taking it for granted and not even thinking much about it.

God, of course, is not a lifeless object like a bridge, but even so, becoming stronger in faith in him has similarities. If we have no faith in God, we won’t even start to walk with him. But If we have a little faith (perhaps encouraged by something a trusted friend says), we tentatively try walking with him. We start ‘exercising’ our faith. As time goes on, particularly through the tough times, we’ll find we’ve grown in our faith, often without really realising it. We’re growing in trust and love in the Lord and his strength which has no limits.

Didn’t the Lord talk about having faith as small as a mustard seed (Matthew 17v20)? We may walk hesitantly with small faith at first, but in walking the path of trusting him, our faith grows in the same way that a seed grows. Stronger faith is not something that we ‘will’ into being. It’s something precious and amazing that grows and buds, like the flowers we’re seeing around us now as spring approaches. And it happens as we exercise our faith, walking in his ways, through both the easy and the tough times, through the joys and the sorrows, sharing it all with him.

And a final thought – if we’ve discovered the gift of faith, we can be the friend telling others that the bridge, our God, is more than strong enough to take the weight of their lives.

Peter Iles
Guest Writer