And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
—Hebrews 11:6
How hard must you try to believe? How much effort do you exert before sitting on a chair, eating in a restaurant or driving along a highway? You believe the chair is structurally sound and will support your weight, so you sit. You believe DHEC has approved the restaurant’s kitchen for safety and quality, so you eat. You believe your car, along with the roads and bridges, have been engineered with precision, and so you drive. How difficult are these things?
Ever heard of an unbelieving believer? Michael Wells explains in his book Sidetracked in the Wilderness that an unbelieving believer is someone who is a Christian, is born again, and will arrive in heaven; the problem is that this person has never believed in the Lord Jesus with his whole being. That is, with his mind he receives and believes all that is told him about the grace, care, concern, and love of the Lord Jesus; he is a believer. Yet at the same time, he feels that he is in charge of every aspect of his Christian life—that he must change the lives of those around him, bring transformation into his own life, and work to make himself more pleasing to God. That is, in his emotions he is unbelieving, and it’s from his unbelief that he behaves. We always behave in proportion to what we believe.
The church today is full of unbelieving believers, i.e. folks who with their minds run to God but with their emotions run away from Him. So much time is spent persuading people’s thoughts to agree with what scripture says, but very little attention is given to the emotions which need equal convincing. Our “emotional concept of God” is just as important as our intellectual view.
When life throws us down and we start “thinking with our feelings,” we end up taking God all wrong. When we’re feeling our worst, it’s easy to give emotions influence over our mind, the result being a distorted God-view and corresponding interaction with Him according to a lie. A negative emotional image of God will hinder attempts to look to Christ as the way, truth and life. Many understand (believing) that God will care for their every need but feel (unbelieving) that He really will not, and they must do everything themselves, so they continue in great turmoil.
Working to “believe harder” is actually unbelief. It’s been said that unbelief is the mother of every sin, but have you realized pride is the father of unbelief? When we feel the weight of concerns upon our shoulders, when we are once again courting the sin we thought long gone, when we are withdrawing from those who love us, and when we find ourselves returning to the world, is not unbelief the cause? Is it not the root of every evil? Is there any defeat, failure, instance of depression, anxiety, frustration, or sin that has not been birthed from the seed of pride fertilizing the egg of unbelief?
Pride tells us we are on our own, that God is more illusory than pragmatic, and He can scarcely be trusted. Because pride is self-focused, it tells us we lack something, we have a need, and it’s up to us to bring the remedy because God is not coming to our aid. So out of our own unbelief, we resolve to try harder. Employing our minds once more, we dust ourselves off and read one more book and listen to one more sermon concerning our perceived need. We seek information, to learn about our situation, to educate ourselves as to the causes and effects, often as a counterfeit for coming to God Himself. We “believe harder,” but one’s belief is only as good as the thing it’s attached to. It’s as if we believe believing harder will somehow make God realer. For many of us, the pathway to belief is more knowledge, but believe or do not believe; there is no try. Ironically, the secret to believing is to believe.
Believing or not believing won’t change your reality. The French-born philosopher René Descartes, widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy, is famous for coining the well-known phrase “I think therefore I am.” But truth is “I am, therefore, this is how to think. I am, therefore I believe.” Believing the truth doesn’t make anything true, nor does believing a lie nullify the truth. George Costanza once said, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Is that right?
Neil Anderson in his excellent book The Bondage Breaker says, “When we find a promise in the Bible, the only appropriate response is to claim it. When we find a commandment in Scripture, we should obey it. But when the Bible tells us the truth about who we already are and what Christ has already done, there is only one appropriate response – and that is to believe it. The verses in Romans 6:1-10 are not commandments to be obeyed; they are truths to be believed. You cannot do for yourself what Christ has already done for you. Notice again the overwhelming use of past tense verbs in Romans 6:2-10, indicating what is already true of Christ and about you. Your only response is to believe them.
A wrong response to these verses is to ask, “What experience must I have for this to be true?” The only necessary experience is that of Christ on the cross, which has already happened; and the only way to appropriate this truth is to believe it. We don’t make anything true by our experiences. We choose to believe what God says is true, then live accordingly by faith; and the truth works out in our experience, e.g. Romans 6:11 ff.”
None of this is new. Several thousand years ago Moses wrote, Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?”Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?”No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it (Deut. 30:11-14). Belief is so simple and natural to our soul that Moses compares it to breathing...the word is in your mouth...that is, the word of faith which we are preaching (Romans 10:8). God has already gifted the air. How hard must you try to inhale? Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27). As the air is totally surrounding us, eager and available, we appropriate Christ moment by moment like breathing. He is here. Believe or do not believe, but you can quit trying.
How about you? Do you find yourself trying in your Christian walk time and time again only to come up short? Give us a call at 864-224-5557 or click on the Counseling button below. We would love the opportunity to encourage you on your journey.