When Our Faith is Not Enough but Jesus’s is Plenty

When I first started drafting this, I wanted to write an analysis of Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1-10 because there’s some really good stuff there, but as I got going on writing it, the lesson morphed to something I’ve been learning recently from an excellent podcast called “40 Minutes in the Old Testament.” I recommend it if you want to see how the Old Testament connects to the New. This new learning comes in the idea of faith and how you and I really don’t have any, which sounds like a sacrilegious statement, but it really isn’t, and I’ll explain.

The Appetizer of Trial

We say our God works in mysterious ways, but that’s really not true if we peruse the annals of history; He has worked largely the same exact way throughout all time, following pattern after pattern of faithfulness toward His chosen people and judgment toward the wicked from Adam and Eve until now. The Bible details these patterns if only we look closely enough to find God in them instead of ourselves (which is incredibly important when studying Scripture). It’s the reason Israel had to make sacrifices and even the reason Abraham was told to sacrifice Isaac; further, the how of Isaac’s almost-sacrifice is important in painting an early picture of the cross.

I could give a thousand examples, but I wouldn’t be able to flesh any of them out, so to make a long story short, suffice it to say that, though God’s ways and thoughts are higher than ours, He tends to do things in the same way through each generation almost as though nothing truly changes (Ecclesiastes 1:9-11). God does not change; nor do His ways. It is why His commands have lasted from Adam and Eve onward and remain relevant. He does and expects the same things form the beginning of time until the end. That is also why we can see trial after trial that refines and tests our faith just as Noah, Abraham, Moses, etc. experienced.

Scripture states thoroughly that trials are to refine faith (Proverbs 17:13, Isaiah 48:10, 1 Peter 1:6-7, etc.). Its purpose is to bring us to an obstacle we cannot overcome, to ask us to walk on water,, wait on God to make life from a barren womb, sacrifice a son, wage a siege with voices rather than weapons, and give up the things God has given us (as Hannah did Samuel). And because we are the same sinful beings as our forefathers, we tend to follow the patterns of faith in ourselves before we realize our faith is nothing.

As Abraham and Sarah laughed and then schemed to give themselves children with the help of Hagar, so, too, do we hear God’s promise and covenant and then seek to get ourselves to the end of the line, the blessing we so earnestly seek. Interestingly, all we do is create more hardship and trial for ourselves. Sarah and Hagar didn’t get along. Elkanah’s second wife, Peninnah, constantly berated Hannah. Eventually, Abraham and Sarah came to the end of their rope, realizing none of their options gave them the son that was to come from Sarah’s womb. Hannah poured out her heart before the Lord so intensely that Eli thought she was drunk. Then, and only then, did God finally act because, at the end of the day, trials are to refine us into purity, and that purity only comes from less of us and more of God. As John 3:30 says, God must increase, and we must decrease.

The Entrée of Grace

I want to first be clear that, as I’ve written before, coming to the end of our abilities does not necessarily preclude God will then move. I have few better examples for this than my own life. I’ve been at the end of my abilities for almost a year now; still, God has not blessed me with what I have been asking for in promise. We cannot allow a works-based theology to drift into our suffering in trial. God will move when He is ready because He is in heaven and does whatever He pleases (Psalm 115:3). We can reference the entire book of Job for that.

Though grace comes when God is good and ready, at the exact right time, its meaning cannot be understated because God is a God who desires to give good gifts to His children (James 1:17, Romans 8:32, Luke 11:13). The interesting dilemma, then, is trying to understand why we must wait for grace, oftentimes until after the worst pain we have ever experienced. I have many examples in my life of this again, but I think the Israelites will do well also.

Multiple times, God commands Israel to mark down places and events and to tell the stories of what He has done to generation after generation. Sometimes the Israelites follow through. Sometimes they don’t. But what changes when they do? Not a ton, really. They still sin; they still fall away; they still turn to idols. At the end of the day, no matter what good God did for them, when suffering came, it didn’t help them hold on to God bar a few extraordinary people (usually the prophets). Even Elijah fell victim to this innately human reaction when He called down fire to consume an offering, routed the servants of Baal, and then ran for his life to ask God to kill him. All this in the matter of weeks at most.

“ My heart rejoices in the Lord; my horn is lifted up by the Lord. My mouth boasts over enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation. There is no one holy like the Lord. There is no one besides you! And there is no rock like our God.”

— 1 Samuel 2: 1-2

Grace is best after a trial because that is when we truly recognize God’s goodness; personally speaking, I’m far too much of a human to really recognize and attribute goodness to God when I’m suffering so heavily, even though I can look back on specific moments of God’s grace before the trial. And I think we’d all be lying to ourselves if we said otherwise. The uniqueness of grace after trial is that it leads to joyous exultation. Note Hannah’s first lines of prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1-2 “My heart rejoices in the Lord; my horn is lifted up by the Lord. My mouth boasts over enemies, because I rejoice in your salvation. There is no one holy like the Lord. There is no one besides you! And there is no rock like our God.” Personally, I’m not praying that in struggle; but when God blesses me, you can bet that’s going to be the first line out of my lips. See, we don’t appreciate grace until it comes after we’ve seen discipline; that’s why it comes after the refining trial.

The Side of Pain

I don’t want to take away from what I’m getting at, but as a short aside, I do want to mention that sometimes God’s grace comes with pain. Abraham, after raising Isaac until he was a young man, was told to walk him up a mountain after a multiple week journey and sacrifice him. Hannah gave up Samuel to the temple and likely only saw him once a year. Sure, Abraham believed God would resurrect Isaac after he killed his son, but that doesn’t take away the pain he would have felt. Hannah was blessed with more children, but her firstborn still lived in the temple from the moment he was weaned. Some of that pain might be in realizing that God’s grace doesn’t make things perfect. As I wrote about for the on February 9th and 16th, we assume God’s grace is going to mean a flawless situation, a perfect relationship, whatever we need grace for. But God’s grace is meant to sanctify us just as much as His discipline is.

The Dessert of Faith

1 Samuel 2:9 says, “He guards the steps of his faithful ones, but the wicked perish in darkness, for a person does not prevail by his own strength.” This is an incredibly rich theological statement that seems simple and straightforward (and the best theological statements are just like this). God guarding the steps of His faithful ones is evident in Abraham’s story, when he does stupid things like offer his wife up to a king’s harem twice. Still, God reached out through these unbelieving kings to preserve Abraham and Sarah. Moreover, it is evident in His getting His Son to the cross to die so that we do not perish in darkness because, were it up to our strength and faith, we would all perish in darkness.

Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us that we are saved by grace through faith, and this not from ourselves. Instead, it is a gift from God so that no one can boast. Most of us read this wrong. It is not just grace and salvation that are God’s gift but the faith itself, for if we were able to act by our own faith, we could still boast in something. The point of all of this is that we can boast in nothing. Abraham and Sarah did nothing for God to choose them or bless them. Plenty of people pray like Hannah and don’t receive what they ask for. Jesus tells us of the mustard seed of faith not to say that a little bit of our faith can do great things but to point out that we don’t have even enough to do the smallest things.

The thing about faith is that if we had our own to rely on, we’d have none. We’d have no desserts, and that would be plenty just. Yet God is righteous and just, and, as Hannah prayed, a person does not prevail by his own strength but by God’s, which is credited to us in faith and righteousness as it was to Abraham.

I’ll leave you with God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 to drive my point home. In covenants wherein both parties are to uphold a promise in contract, it was typical to split some animals in half and pass through them to acknowledge both parties will fulfill their promises. In this case, however, God passes through the animals alone because Abraham could not hold to his side of the covenant. Instead, God declares that His goodness and faith in Himself will be sufficient, and at the end, He credited it to Abraham for salvation, just as He does for us through Christ.

Delighting in the Lord when Little Feels Delightful

This has been a rough two weeks, and I have had numerous losses in the spiritual space since I last posted. Although, quite honestly, I have been in what seems to be a state of loss since March of 2024 despite many situations people would label as wins coming my way: a steady job, a new house, a newer car, progress on personal goals. I count most of them as highly insignificant. And while this one loss has waterfalled into a place of desperation, it isn’t really the heartbreak that is causing me to wrestle with God, for, indeed, I am wrestling even as Jacob wrestled. The only difference is that I sometimes feel like I have no God to wrestle with, as I admitted to some friends a bit over a week ago.

I give you this incredibly general understanding of my spiritual, knowledgeable, and emotional state to tell you this: I spent some time really fighting my faith, highly doubting that God was real—or, if He was, if He cared about me. See, I have never doubted His goodness toward others, but even today, I wonder how good He is being toward me. Suffice it to say, serving Him does not feel delightful in the slightest, and this is why I wrestle. As Jacob did, I am bound and determined to fight with God until He blesses me.

The Benefit of Good Friends

As I noted earlier, I admitted my lack of faith to some friends late one Thursday night, and all I can say is that it is a blessing to have good, godly friends. They spent some time speaking some harsh truths at me while also being gentle and understanding of the lowly place I have been dragged to kicking and screaming. And then they prayed for me, offering up to God the words I couldn’t speak out of anger and fear. I told them that night that I was grateful I had better friends than Job, especially as I am not nearly as righteous.

Their encouragement affected me deeply, and I was able to pray a simple prayer that night as I came back across a passage of Scripture I had been fighting with for weeks: Psalm 37, specifically verse 4, “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires.” I was angry because I spent most of my life delighting in the Lord without true difficulty, I thought, and even when I was, everything was ripped away from me, yet now I do not know how to delight in Him to gain it back because I didn’t want to delight in Him at all, yet I knew I had to. So, I took my lack of faith and paired it with the faith of my friends, who believed so wholeheartedly that I couldn’t comprehend it, and I asked God to tell me how the heck to delight in Him.

There are No Coincidences

Lo and behold, God answered not only that prayer but also an unspoken one I had been throwing up in my declaration of wrestling with Him as Jacob. On Friday, my faith was dead, but on Sunday, I was reborn just a little bit stronger as I first attended a sermon preached by my aforementioned good friend (his first). His message? The blessings of Jacob on his children, of course. The wrestler himself, after having been blessed, got to give out blessings of his own.

This message spoke particularly to my anger at God for seemingly taunting me with the very blessings I have been fighting Him for on other people. I’ve been forced to watch with joy and no small amount of anger and hurt as quite literally everyone around me is receiving everything I have asked God for, and while I won’t get into specifics, I will say the hurt this has caused me has been immense. And then I hurt because I can’t just be happy for others; it’s a vicious cycle. But the key takeaway (there are many good ones) from this message was the specificity of blessings: for each son, Jacob had a different blessing, and for each son or daughter of His, God has a specific blessing that He doles out as appropriate. (In all honesty, this hurts almost as much as it helps because I feel quite strongly that I would like my blessing now, thank you very much!)

Taking Delight is far Simpler than We Imagine

Since I had attended this service so early in the morning, I visited another local church that had piqued my interest. And, of course, the pastor was delivering a sermon on Psalm 37:1-8. My prayer uttered in near faithlessness was answered. And how great and simple an answer I received. I won’t delay it any longer, but I will run through the Scripture in order from verse 3 because I think it’s all helpful to my point. Trusting in the Lord is far simpler than imaginary, insubstantial faith. It doesn’t have to be some metaphysical thing. Instead, it means doing the good things we’re supposed to be doing and asking the Father to assist us in believing that God rewards those who seek Him (Hebrews 11:6). It means dwelling exactly where we are in the security of His future promises, which cannot be touched.

Taking delight, again, is simple: it’s doing things that cause us to be thankful to God and then thanking Him for those things. While Peter and James state we should rejoice in suffering, we don’t have to rejoice because we are suffering. In fact, though Paul boasted about his affliction, he rejoiced about the good things God was doing because of it, not enjoying his pain. We don’t have to enjoy the hard times, but we can enjoy the God we have in the hard times by looking at the good things He’s given us. In practicality, this means I can enjoy my home, car, job, hobbies, and friends and be thankful to have them while hoping, praying, trusting, and wrestling for the blessings that come at the end of suffering (1 Peter 5:10).

Committing our way to the Lord, from verse 5, is just like Paul later writes, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.” Do the things you’re doing like Christ would do them and trust that God will act in those things for goodness, and that He will make righteousness and justice shine.

Everything is Still in God’s Timing

Finally, recognize that doing all these right things does not change the necessity of waiting silently and expectantly on God. Doing these things will not speed up His work or His blessings; He will give them in His time. I know it’s not what I wanted to hear, and I know it’s not what most of us want to hear, but this belief that doing certain things or letting go of them will cause God to act faster or slower is a works-based theology. We cannot alter His plans.

In the meantime, give up your anger, even at God, because we all want to be angry at Him when He takes longer than we want Him to, but let it go. Let go of the anger that comes when you’re forced to watch Him give everything you’ve ever wanted to your friends. Let go of the anger that comes when the wicked get easy lives or good gifts. That can only bring harm, but in the time God makes it beautiful (Ecclesiastes 3:11), God will bless you, me, us. And yes, that sometimes means only in death and the resurrection of our bodies for eternity with Him. Even though I really didn’t want to type that and want to believe He’ll not wait that long for me and for you.

What if I am not Poor in Spirit?

Welcome to Fathoms of the Word! This is my first post after rebranding. If you have questions about anything relating to the rebrand, check the home page! Now, before I start writing this thing, I just want to make it clear that I am not overly happy about writing it because the lesson stinks. It attacks my pride and my desires and my impatience. But in the end, that makes it far more valuable.

In the last year, my life has been flipped upside down, and in the midst of the turmoil, I lost God. Not that He wasn’t there, but I couldn’t find Him, and I had no idea what He wanted from me. I was much like a zombie, just going through the motions of living the “Christian life,” while slowly falling into a depression of decay in my faith. I doubted everything. The crazy part is, I have never pursued God as doggedly as I have these past seven months, yet I felt that He was purposefully eluding me and tormenting me on the few occasions He let Himself be found.

So I changed the way I prayed, and in this change from pride, fear, and anger to longing, desperation, and the tiniest particle of hope a human has ever produced, God spoke. He directed. And around three months ago, a new battle began in my mind, heart, and soul. I honestly thought God hated me for a while, that I was an object prepared for dishonor (Romans 9:21), and this whole experience was just another method of attack on a creation He meant to destroy. I went at God the same way Job did, demanding that He face off with me and tell me what was going on—which obviously did nothing but make me angrier.

Now, however, because of His answer to my prayers, because of His provision, I find myself facing a new problem: a question of His provision. Ironic, isn’t it? But it’s the case. See, in that time when the Lord answered me, He gave me a path forward. I was at point A, and He told me what point B was. But there were caveats. The first was that He put me on the path, established my steps, and said take pleasure in the way (Psalm 37:23) but then He said, “wait,” and refused to let me take a step on the path He placed before me.

Capability is the hard way to the kingdom

Because the second caveat was obedience, trusting in Him. One of the many characteristics I’ve had to confront in myself in this time of grief and anger is my pride. I found myself drawn to the Sermon on the Mount, specifically the passage Jesus leads off the Beatitudes with: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the kingdom of heaven is theirs” (Matthew 5:3). Well, to be quite honest, I don’t consider myself poor in spirit. I’ve been studying and teaching on spiritual gifts recently, and one of the things I’ve had to confront is that I’m blessed by the Spirit. I’m skilled. I’m smart. And more than anything, I’m capable of learning and doing pretty much anything I decide to tackle. Sometimes I’m so capable that I do things without obedience and deference to God. Sometimes I simply do them without Him entirely. In my life, I’ve learned I can disobey and still be successful because God made me capable of so much.

But being capable doesn’t help us in the kingdom of God; in fact, it’s a hindrance. Once I realized this, my favorite verse popped into my head: “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; as knowledge increases, grief increases” (Ecclesiastes 1:18). And that’s when I realized this list of Beatitudes is in an important order. Notice how the end of Matthew 5:10 is the same as the end of verse 3. The poor in spirit, those who absolutely have no choice but to rely on God? In the Kingdom, they’ve got it easy, in a sense. For everyone else, it’s time to follow the path God lays out.

The first thing we must do is mourn our position and our knowledge and wisdom. Mourn our separation from God, our pride that keeps us away from obedience. Then He comforts. But our mourning must turn us to something: humility. We must lower ourselves from the pedestal our capability has put us on and place God there. He will take us on the path of life and give us all things we need on the earth (Psalm 16:11). But if we have all things on the earth, we must not build up on the earth where moth and rust destroy but make treasure for ourselves in heaven for our hearts will then be there (Matthew 6:19-21). We may, then, love God with all our heart (Matthew 22:37). This means a hunger and thirst for righteousness rather than whatever else we might chase. And He will fill us.

Another difficult thing for a prideful person is mercy; I know I struggle with giving grace and mercy to those who can’t do what I am capable of. And I also sometimes struggle with believing I even need it—there’s pride again. But just as the Lord’s prayer asks God to forgive us as we forgive others (Matthew 6:12), we receive mercy when we give it. So we must learn to be merciful toward those who don’t have the advantages we have. And once we grow in being merciful and receive the mercy of the Lord (recognizing that we do certainly need it) we allow God to purify our hearts, and we can see a glimpse of who He truly is—not just capable and skilled, love, just, good, honorable—but so much more and greater: a God who truly cares for every individual and is actively working everything to be beneficial to His servants (Romans 8:28).

And when we see God for who He truly is, we make peace with others, no longer waging war because of our differences but loving people because of their identity as creations of the one true God—and for those who are chosen and who choose Him in return, as sons and daughters of the Most High. Because it is possible to live at peace if we make it (Romans 12:18). And in that righteousness, because they also persecuted Christ for it, we will be persecuted and the Kingdom will be ours as well.

Humble yourself and give up control

I’ve written a lot to come around to ending my story with where I’m at now: I have fought God on His provision and goodness because I’m still in step three of this process: humbling myself. Eventually, God will let me step out on the path He made for me, but even now I keep insisting that God act on the promise He made me three months ago in my time. I want it now; I can’t even pretend I don’t. But as I was driving down the road recently, I started to really see the picture of what I’ve been calling detours but He’s been calling the way of my life.

The interesting thing about life is how good of a metaphor for life it is. See, in my car, I’ve got a gas pedal, which means I get to control how fast I go. But on the road, there are a lot of things slowing me down: speed limits, curves, stop lights, and other drivers. I’m impatient and prideful, and I often think I’m a better driver than others. And I definitely think I know a more appropriate speed limit than the government that set them.

I know point B, and I want to get there. And I can get mad when every stop light is red or drivers in front of me insist on going below the speed limit or someone cuts me off. I can even try to finagle my way through traffic to get ahead. But the thing I’ve found about the road, and about life, is that no matter how angry I get or how many things I attempt to speed around, I’m not getting to point B much faster, if at all. God knows where point B is, too. And even though I can’t see what’s up ahead, He can. And He has put the red lights, the slow cars, and the standstill traffic in place for a purpose.

Sometimes, I can not trust Him, act on my own, and get to point B a little quicker, and He may choose to bless it. But the thing about trust is that, if we can manage it, it’s a blessing in itself to watch His plans unfold. I still haven’t seen it; I’m still waiting on the promise. But if there’s one good thing about God (and everything about Him is good) it’s that He cannot lie. So if you can’t trust Him in your circumstances (like I struggle with) trust that He can’t lie, and that means He will take care of you because, in Him, we are sons and daughters.