True Faith – Part 2

Last week we talked about the idea of “bounded faith” which means that we’re glad to follow God faithfully as long as we get to set the terms about certain things. Kevin observed that this would be like a bounded marriage – I’ll go to work all week and then fish & golf all weekend while you take care of the kids. Since this is not really faith at all, we discussed some ideas for going deeper in our faith walk.

Chris pointed out that last week that if he saw a burning bush, he we be more inclined to act in complete faith, but since we don’t see a lot of flaming shrubs these days, it’s hard to always know exactly what He’s calling us to do. And, since knowing God’s will for us is the first step in growing our faith, let’s start with a verse that will help guide us. Romans 10:17 says,

“Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.”

Paul specifically mentions hearing the word but doesn’t mention reading it. That might be because when he wrote this, people didn’t have the same access to written material, including scripture. I think the spirit of his message is probably that a growing faith comes from exposure to scripture, no matter how we get it.  Assuming that’s true, if Paul was writing this message today, he might say that faith starts with :

1)      Having a plan to regularly read and study scripture, and

2)      Regularly attending worship and Bible studies to hear the word

One additional idea to add to our faith-enhancing recipe is to make time for reflection. Just like rain running off of hard soil, if we don’t take time to reflect on scripture, it might not get down to our faith “roots”. In some cases, it might be as if we were never even exposed to the scripture. We’ll go deeper on that idea in Part 3 of this series next week.

So, a growing faith starts with dedicating time to read/hear scripture and then reflect on it, but how much time is enough? That’s a personal decision, of course, but the answer for many (most?) of us is that we need to do more than we’re doing now.

My friend Kevin humorously observed, “If you are praying for 5 minutes out of the day, come on.  Do you realize what percentage that is of your day?  I mean 1 hour of church is 0.5% of your entire week…Do you think the big man upstairs feels that?” 

Here are a few questions to help us think more about it.

1)      Do you agree with the idea that growing our faith starts with reading and hearing more of the word? Why or why not?

2)      Growing our faith is the primary focus of today’s lesson, but what are some other benefits of consistently reading and hearing scripture?

3)      What are some ways we can reflect on the scripture?

4)      If today’s lesson inspired you, in what ways would like to be more intentional about reading & hearing the word and reflecting on it?