All Sons & Daughters - DevotionalSample

For Your Glory & My Good

Faith.

This can be a strange word. It's almost like you have to have it in order to understand it. It's all or nothing. You can't stand on top of a bridge with a bungee chord around your legs and say "I'm going to jump off this bridge to see if I have faith that this chord will hold me and not send me, instead, plummeting to the rocks below." No, you jump because you already have faith in the chord’s ability to hold you. The jumping is the proof that you know you will be caught by the bungee. Otherwise, you would not jump. Right?

Unless….

You jump because you have exhausted every other option and you have nothing left, nowhere else to place your faith and you are desperate. Perhaps faith is also like someone running towards a cliff, fleeing an avalanche. They see a rope at the edge of the cliff, they grab it and jump; without time to think of whether or not it was attached to anything, whether or not it was rotten or frayed. They see the rope for what it is, a last ditch effort for salvation.

Bob Utley says, “Physical reality is known by the five senses, and is not eternal, but fleeting. True, eternal reality is unseen and; therefore, must be held by faith, not sight. However, it is so real and true to believers that it controls and demands their priorities."

In the book of Mark 5 we see a woman who, after 12 years of failure to heal her body’s illness, the pressing awareness that she was getting worse instead of better and the exhaustion of all of her finances, desperately threw her doubts, brokenness, suffering, rejection and hopes at the cliff’s edge/feet of Jesus. She reached for the hem of His garment and jumped, saying, “If I only touch His garments, I shall be restored to health,” and in her reckless abandon, she was healed. That day the glory of Christ was seen, not only in her healing but also in her faith. Her good was found in not only in her body’s mending but also in her faith’s affirmation.

Whether a calculated jump or a last minute launch of faith, His glory will ALWAYS be for our good.