Faith – Part 4
What I am about to share with you really helped me tremendously. You see whenever I do a study on faith and then read passages of scripture like Hebrews 11 and see that awesome hall of fame, I naturally aspire to be like them. Like me, you may have read books by Smith Wigglesworth and thought, “wow, I wish I could be such an instrument of healing and mighty miracles”. We can read stories of amazing feats by men and women in church history and just wish that we had that same kind of faith. Let’s be honest, it can leave us feeling a bit deflated when we can’t seem to get to that same level of faith.
But, here’s the good news; the Lord has assigned to every believer “a measure of faith”. Simply put, that means we are not all meant to be like the Smith Wigglesworth, Martin Luther’s etc of this world. Here’s what it says in the bible:
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
Consequently, the way to just chill out and be at peace with ourselves is to know what our place is in the body of Christ. Paul in this divinely inspired and incredibly well thought out and structured letter to the Romans has a very logical order in this 12th chapter. Verse 1 states that in view of God’s great mercy and all that He has done for us, we should offer our bodies as living sacrifices, wholly pleasing to Him. We realise that our bodies are a holy temple for the Lord and we were purchased and redeemed at a great price; the blood of Jesus. We no longer use our bodies to gratify our sinful nature but to serve Him. Then in verse 2, we are told to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. If we do these things asked of us in these first two verses then we will be able to discern and know what God’s will is for us. In particular, that will enable to know what our place is within the body of Christ.
Firstly, and most importantly, Jesus is the head of His church which is body here on earth. Every living creature has a head and if you cut the head off, what happens? Death! The body cannot function without the head. We must recognise that Jesus is the head of the church and we are his body on earth ever since He ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father in heaven.
Time and time again, I come back to this amazing prayer of St. Teresa of Ávila:
“Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours.”
The big question to ask is, “what part of the body of Christ am I?”
We are not all pastors, teachers, prophets etc. We need to know what part God wants us to play in His church and then realise that he has given us a measure of faith that will align perfectly with our role. For example, if you just love serving people at the church, you will have a measure of faith that people can visibly see when you don’t just serve teas and coffees but you are so radiant and bubbly and helpful. Just as every part of our physical bodies have an important part to play so it is with the body of Christ. We need each other. We might not think our roles are important and might equate it to being merely like a toe on a foot but as anyone can witness to who has had just toe nails removed, without them it’s very hard to walk!
I’m sure that once we put verses 1 and 2 into practice we will start to get a clearer idea of what our part is in His body and of course it is important that this is also recognised by others which prevents us getting too high a notion of ourselves as well.
So, I think this is just so wonderful and takes a lot of the unnecessary imposed pressure that we can apply to ourselves. When wanting to grow in faith and wanting to know how to get faith, we need to factor in the measure of faith that the Lord has assigned to us?
