By faith, not by sight

By Erika Schwibs

On the river of God's will, a believer must learn not to strive to row or paddle to something seen along the river bank, unless that striving is God's will and it's being done in His strength, and not human strength. 

When believers do something in His strength, there's a peace and effortless to it, even when accompanied by great trouble and difficulty. The Lord leads believers through the circumstances of situations, and He takes them where He wants them to go in His time, just like a boat on a river fully under His control instead of the control of the people in it. Just wait on Him until then.

Too often, believers think that when God shows them something and gives them insight, it means that He wants them to immediately go out and "make it happen," even if that means using worldly means, when instead He's teaching them and revealing things to them. If He shows a believer a shed on the river bank, then, including many details about it, it doesn't necessarily mean that He expects the believer to row like mad to the riverbank and then construct the shed by whatever means necessary. Nor does it mean that the believer should try to row furiously to the banks whenever something appears that resembles a shed and it's virtually impossible to reach it before the current takes the believer far downstream past it. When thinking that way, it can seem like God presented an opportunity to the believer, but maybe only to tantalize or punish with failure. 

But instead of building the shed or having to reach shore when it's impossible to do so, the Lord might only be revealing things about such a shed because at some time in the future, He will take the believer's boat effortlessly to that spot on shore in order for the believer to pick up just one needed item from that shed. God's ways and thinking aren't ours. They're higher. Believers need to always remember to practice waiting on Him.

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Once the Lord taught me something important from a large construction project that I saw almost daily. I'd see some of the same workers in the same areas of the site day after day, and through that He showed me that, despite the grand size and great intricacy of the project, all a singer worker could do each day was the daily work of one worker, and no more. They all had their very small piece to do out of the larger project, and it was manager of the whole project who actually knew who better than the worker how the pieces fit together.

In the same way, the individual worker couldn't just decide to break from the orders given him to do what seemed good to him, but had to stick with faithfully going along with the overall plan, whether he could see the point to any of it or not. One could imagine that sometimes some workers thought something else should happen, or wanted to be doing something else, but that was like playing God, and much more difficult than just faithfully doing one's one small part in the overall construction project.

And that is the perspective I should have, the Lord showed me, in going about my life on earth. I should remember that I can only do my small part of His plan. And I'll never fully understand it on earth -- neither the whole, or any of the parts, or even my own part. Even the human manager of a construction project, who seemingly knows it all, can never know how the Lord has used that project beforehand or will use it during construction or after. He doesn't know all that came before of that land, or the building materials, or the lives of the people making it, and He doesn't know how the finished project will be included in the Lord's plans, either, in the future. Since we know so little, then, even far less than we think we do, it's best to walk very humbly with our God, leaning on Him and not our own understanding, and walking by faith, not by sight. 

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The Lord and the devil come by. The Lord tries to give away the truth, as Wisdom tries to give herself away in the book of Proverbs. The devil has lies to give away, the price to be paid for them to come later. Even though the truth comes from God Himself, so we can be sure that it will be good and pleasant and pleasurable in the end, a lot of it isn't at all appealing at first sight, so it's not easy for the Lord to give it away. On the other hand, the lies offered by the devil look very attractive, and are practically irresistible to mankind. Even though the lies come from the devil, so that people should know that they'll end up making them terribly miserable eventually, they look so appealing and even sort of wholesome and good when the devil brings them out that it's all too easy to justify accepting them. They're full of flattery and false promises, just what people want to believe, and the devil has done the hard work. It would take a lot of work to counter or question his lies. It's easier just to accept them. "What else is there to do?" 

But rather than accepting and possessing the devil's lies, it would be better to be empty-handed for awhile, for as long as God wills, and to say, "I'm not sure what the truth" is about a situation if only the devil's lies are available while waiting on the Lord to reveal the actual truth, or to labor for the truth if it's our responsibility to do so, even though we find a stronghold in ourselves that doesn't want to accept the truth from the Lord. As it says in 2 Thessalonians 2, those who will be saved receive the love of the truth, and the truth is what God says is the truth, and what it reveals about His heart and our hearts.