What Fuels Your Faith?

Fuel your Faith how God intended

Fuel

What is fuel? Something that helps produce a sort of power or heat. In that fashion, I want to pose a simple question to you. What fuels your faith? When I go to the gas pump, typically there are different kinds of fuel. I’ll see 87, 89, 91 and sometimes diesel. Now my car has printed in the gas cap or near it, what kinds of fuel my vehicle can take. If I put the wrong kind of fuel in my vehicle, I cannot expect it to perform at its peak. The type of fuel is also important in regards to our faith in God. What are we allowing to fuel our faith? Hebrews 11:1 says “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” So it’s saying our faith should be comprised and made up of things “hoped” for. I want to emphasize the word “hope”. Typically being a “realist” will replace hope and is a disguise to avoid rejection or hide doubt.

Fueled by Yesterday’s rejections

For the last four months, I have been looking for work. I have applied for more jobs than I can remember. In this time I have interviewed a twice. Both times I believed I did quite well. To my surprise, I received zero call-backs. This resulted in my feeling a sense of rejection, inadequacy, and discouragement. As I continued to apply for jobs, this slowly but surely stayed in the back of my mind. Each time I applied for a new job, I thought secretly in the depths of my heart, they wouldn’t call back. And this has carried on for the last few months. This morning when I woke up, I received an email to schedule another interview. This interview was for a job me and my wife both agree would be a good fit for us. I told my wife the news and she was so ecstatic and began to praise God for his goodness. At that moment, though grateful, I did not express it in that way. I was mellow. After I thought about it, I was simply protecting myself from disappointment and rejection, so I thought. I felt if I didn’t get my hopes up, I couldn’t be rejected or disappointed. This is so common. We do this to protect ourselves. In an effort to protect ourselves. we remove hope from our situation. In that what we don’t realize we are removing hope from our faith and replacing it with fear. Fear of disappointment and rejection.

A Changed perspective

What we don’t realize at times is, what we view as rejection could be God’s provisions for something greater. God said he would do “exceedingly above all we could ask or think.” So what if that’s what God was doing? Often we are focused on what God can do for us, and we get very specific. God I want this job, this house, this car, this thing or that things. So when those things don’t come to fruition, we are disappointed. Was our hope and faith in God himself? I’d say no. I’d go as far to say, we were more focused on what God could do than who God is. When we focus on who God is more than what he can do, we will never be disappointed because he will always be God and will never change. That we can count on. However, when we begin to hope more in what God can do based on what we want rather than who God is and what we need, we will be disappointed and feel rejected 100% of the time.

The right fuel

We must change our fuel. What does that mean? Change our focus. We can choose to meditate and focus only on what we think we didn’t get that we thought we deserved or “we can meditate on the law of the Lord day and night”, as Psalms one refers to the godly man. We can choose what we allow to fuel our faith. We can choose what to focus on. It doesn’t dismiss what we feel but it moves us past feelings to faith in God. Philippians 4:8 says “And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” To fix means to set something manually. We must think and be sure we are fueling our faith with the right thoughts. We do this by surrounding ourselves with things that focus on hope, love, and things of the Spirit. The Spirit tells us to hope and have faith in God. Our flesh tells us to hope in ourselves and make things happen so we are comfortable. Lastly, Romans 8:5 says “Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires”. We must make sure we live according to the Spirit (God) and not according to the flesh. Our flesh wants pity for our rejection, but the Spirit wants us to remember “All things work together for the good of them that love God and are called according to His purpose.”