Five Things God Uses to Grow Your FaithExemplo

PRAYER:

God, thank you for giving us the gift of relationships. They make life so much better. Help me to open my eyes to the providential relationships that you have for me. And help me to be aware of the relationships in my life where you might want to use me in someone else’s life.

READING:

Providential Relationships

Whenever you hear faith stories, you always hear about relationships. I’ve never heard someone say, “In isolation, on my own, I discovered God, grew in my faith in God, and became everything God wanted me to be—and it had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else.”

Generally speaking, when people tell their story, they talk about providential relationships—although they may not use that term specifically. It sounds something like this: “I was going along doing my own thing, and then I met this person. Looking back, as I got to know them, I just feel like God meshed our lives in that season. And wow, my faith grew.”

So, here’s the point of today’s message: God uses human relationships to influence and impact our faith in him.

Relationships are powerful things. They intersect with our faith for good or for bad. The wrong kinds of relationships have the potential to undermine our faith, and the right kinds of relationships have the potential to build and grow our faith.

If relationships can be providential, and if God uses people to pump up and build greater faith, then we need to ask the question, “How do I leverage that?”

“Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm” (Proverbs 13:20).

Here’s the promise of this verse: The people you choose to surround yourself with have the potential to impact your spirituality. If you choose to walk with wise people, God will use those relationships to create something good in you.

Now, the opposite is true as well. Like all principles, it works both ways. As you look back, are there any relationships in the past that kind of took the legs out from underneath your faith? As a result of that relationship, perhaps you believed less and found yourself further from God.

“Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character’” (1 Corinthians 15:33).

Just as the person who walks with the wise has the potential to grow wise, so in the same way bad company erodes faith.

It’s true of you, and it’s true of me—our friends determine the direction, quality, and depth of our faith in God because he uses relationships to impact and to grow our faith in him. The question is how you need to leverage this in your life. Do you need to be intentional about some new relationships and give God an opportunity? Or do you need to be more available as a person who’s willing to intersect with someone who maybe needs to hear what you have to say?

REFLECTION:

Who in your life has impacted your faith? How did they help you grow in your relationship with God? As you think about the people God has surrounded you with, who could you connect with to help them grow in their faith?