Pastor's Corner

December, 2002

I’m reading Reaching for the Invisible God by Philip Yancey. The author’s candidacy with his struggles in faith helps the readers to easily identify with him because of our similar struggles. Let’s face it, to trust the invisible God who at times does things that are beyond our comprehension or even illogical in our minds, takes a tremendous amount of faith. The author gives a very practical meaning to faith when he wrote, “Faith means striking out, with no clear end in sight and perhaps even no clear view of the next step. It means following, trusting, holding out a hand to an invisible Guide.” That is a scary thought, isn’t it? How can we even tell whether the invisible Guide is there? And how can we tell the Guide will lead us to the right place? The answer is faith.

While I was reading the book one morning, I found my mind drifting to a familiar story in the Old Testament. It was the story of God asking Abraham to offer Isaac. The more I thought about it, the more I was puzzled by it. Why would God ask Abraham to offer Isaac in such a way? Human sacrifices were only practiced in pagan worships at that time. God had always prohibited His people to participate in human sacrifice. God asked Abraham to do something that was contradictory to his belief. God stretched his faith to the extreme. God asked Abraham to not only give up his only son, but also in an illogical way. Is that scary or what? Abraham stepped out his comfort zone and just trusted Him! He passed! Of course, we see that the story ended with God’s provision as being better than Abraham’s expectation. Faith involves taking risk with the one you believe in.

But we expect God to arrange all the events in our lives to form a “neat package” that doesn’t disturb our equilibrium. When things around us are not as stable as we think they should, we begin to draw conclusions that God doesn’t love us or God is not fair. We begin to ask God, “Why?” Of course, it is all right to ask God the “Why” questions, but in faith, we also need to realize that we may never be able to know why. To this, Philip Yancey wrote, “No time-bound human, living on a rebellious planet, blind to the realities of the unseen world, has the ability to comprehend such answers.” I can certainly agree with him. Our minds are simply too limited. When we don’t have answers, the ultimate test is to continue to believe in this invisible God.

Faith is important, because this is the only means by which we can relate to this invisible God. Though this invisible God came to live as a man over two thousand years ago, yet for us today, we still need faith to relate to this Historical Man/Eternal God. This is God’s mandate. “And without faith it is impossible to please God.”

Before I sign off, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I pray that you find Jesus during this Christmas season to be your Savior and Lord.

Pastor Larry