Join us this Sunday! In-Person 9:00am & 10:45am, Online 9:00am, 10:45am & 5:00pm

Join us this Sunday! In-Person 9:00am & 10:45am, Online 9:00am, 10:45am & 5:00pm

Join us at the next Sunday worship service:
In-Person
9:00am & 10:45am,
Online 9:00am, 10:45am & 5:00pm

Crisis Of Belief

“When God invites you to join Him in His work, He has a God-sized assignment for you. You will realize that you cannot do it on your own.  If God doesn’t help you, you will fail. This is the crisis point where many decide not to follow what they sense God is leading them to do.  Then they wonder why they do not experience God’s presence and activity the way other Christians do.” – Dr. Henry Blackaby,  Experiencing God. 

God speaks to people today. First, God speaks to us through His Word (2 Timothy 3:16–17). Isaiah 55:11 tells us, “It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it.” God can also “speak” to us through events—i.e., He can guide us through arranging our circumstances. God allows events to occur in our lives to direct us, change us, and help us to grow spiritually. God also speaks through prayer. So yes, God does speak to us. But when He does, what do we do next? 

In Experiencing God, author Henry Blackaby refers to this moment as a “crisis of belief.” For Blackaby, a faith “crisis” is not necessarily a traumatic event or a life/death emergency but is rather part of the ongoing process of us continually giving ourselves over to God’s plan for our lives by trusting Him for not only the proper provisions for doing His will but also believing that He can and will do through us what seems, at first glance, humanly impossible.

When God speaks, we will face a crisis of belief. Do we trust God enough to follow Him to where he’s leading us when we have an uphill climb? This could happen every time we hear God speak. No matter if you are taking your first steps or you’re taken thousands of steps, every step of faith still is going to take faith. It’s still going to have a little bit of a risk factor involved in it that we are going to wrestle with and ultimately make a decision. The decision is am I willing to let it go in order to take hold of this next thing that I believe you’re leading me to?  I’m going to have to decide what I believe about God.  

 The life of Gideon illustrates what we are talking about. Gideon was a frail, weak, and relatively unimpressive person in the book of Judges whom God would use to deliver the entire nation out of the oppression of the Midianites. What is encouraging about Gideon’s story is the way in which God continuously accommodated Himself to Gideon’s fears and insecurities by patiently and graciously stretching Gideon’s faltering faith. By the end of the story, Gideon goes from being a self-conscious and unassertive individual to the head of Israel’s army. There are some rich lessons we can learn from Gideon when we face a crisis of belief.

There will be proverbial forks along the road of life, forks that continuously challenge and encourage us to trust in God and not ourselves. We can’t limit ourselves to only attempting things that can be accomplished by relying on our own ingenuity and resources because we have a crisis of belief. The people around us may be impressed but will take little interest. But they will take notice when we live lives that can only be explained by the fact that God is who He says He is. 

Discussion Questions:

  1. Do you agree with the “crisis of belief” principle? (Decision point requiring faith when God invites us to join Him).  Why or why not?
  2. What can you do this week to more effectively deal with the “crisis of belief” moments? 

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