My Thumb
In this introduction to The Higher Faith, MacDonald places faith squarely within his relational context. Faith is trust in a Big Heavenly Father!
Let me start with a personal story of my own journey of faith. It begins long, long ago with a Dale far, far away. I’m in my mid-thirties and at the height of my personal performance program. I’m in the faith movement, not the Copeland-Hagan variety that will upset your stomach, but the kind where people die. We did not have insurance, borrow money, or go to doctors. I was very proud of what I did not do!
It was a bright and clear summer morning and I was heading to town. You see, my wife and I and our three children lived in the country at the time. I was a minister in a small church and was heading downtown to have lunch with a friend. It was really quite an ordinary day, but little did I know, it was also a pivotal day in my life. My friend worked downtown in Jackson, Mississippi in a twenty-story office building and I was heading that way. As I was heading up the entrance ramp on the interstate, I could see my destination rising above the tree line.
I had an impression to raise my thumb and position it between my eye and the building. Once I did the building vanished from view. Upon arriving, I stepped out onto the sidewalk and had the same impression once again. I lifted my thumb and could not block out even a single brick. As I looked up, the building towered over me into the sky. The building had not changed size, nor had I, but my perspective surely had. Perspective is the view seen from the position of the viewer.
My God is too Small!
First, the obvious but limited lesson was that of distance. “Draw near to me and I will draw near to you.” While this is true, it was but the first of its many layers. Next, I would come to see that I was too big and my god was too small. When the weight and responsibility become too much for you, and your trust is in your effort, group, doctrine, or concepts of God. Then the result is weariness from continually trying to keep it all together. Often it is not God that fails us but our concepts of Him. Again, true, but still just working through the layers.
It would be decades from my hilltop experience before I would finally read a passage from MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons. “That the devotion of God to His creatures is perfect! The truth is that They loved and were devoted to us first. And our devotion is but a mirroring of Theirs in return! They do not think of Themselves, but us! They want nothing for Themselves, for the Trinity lacks nothing and only lives to be a blessing! Their devotion and self-giving love is at the center of the Divine Childlikeness, the Universe’s Heart and Life!” Now, this is the God from the sidewalk. A God big enough to trust!
A Big God!
My faith is not Dale’s faith. It is trusting in the faithfulness of God. It is faith in God Himself! This faith cannot be measured by success or increased with use. It was finished 2,000 years ago by the “author and perfecter” of it Jesus Christ. Paul understood faith clearly, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20 KJV) Paul explains it with the example of Abraham, faith’s father, in Romans chapter four.
“So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we’re given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. What we read in Scripture is, “Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own.”
If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift. . . .”
“That famous promise God gave Abraham—that he and his children would possess the earth—was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God’s decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed. If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That’s not a holy promise; that’s a business deal. A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise—and God’s promise at that—you can’t break it.
This is why the fulfillment of God’s promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God’s promise arrives as pure gift. That’s the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that’s reading the story backward. He is our faith father.” (The Message – Romans 4: 1-5, 13-16)
Faith is more a matter of surrender than one of control! Is your God big enough to trust, or do you have a Jesus plus instead of a Jesus period faith!
Check out Part 2 of this post: Covenant of Faith