Faith Beyond Reason

Lately I've been going through a period where I've been praying for a bunch of things I've felt very frustrated with for a long time. Things got much better and I thought my prayers were finally answered for good. These were personal issues I've been dealing with forever. I kept praying daily, but things got worse again, and I was no better off than before. I got really angry.  I couldn't understand why God was able to answer my prayers, but wouldn't. I felt like healing I needed was being dangled in my face but not given to me. What good reason could there possibly be for that? I was asking for help. Isn't that what I'm supposed to do? There was so much I didn't understand. I looked for the answers everywhere, but it seemed the more I looked, the more lost I became.

Then I went to a sermon at church and heard something I needed to hear. The lady preacher was talking about faith. She said there are 2 things each of us want to know: 1. Who is this God? and 2. Can I trust Him?  She also said our faith doesn't mean anything if you don't risk something and take a chance.

Well that started me thinking... maybe I should take a risk and trust God beyond my understanding. By my own judgment God withholding on me looked cruel and totally out of character. Could I trust Him beyond reason?

I decided to name this Faith Beyond Reason because that's the name that popped in my head. I googled it and realized it's also the name of a beyond amazing book by A.W. Tozer. I started reading it immediately and I was floored by what I found. Before my very eyes on one of the pages was one of the personal issues I was dealing with. I couldn't deny God was speaking to me here.

I started writing furiously and this is what I came up with:

Trust God beyond what you want and what you’re praying for, even if NOT answering your prayers doesn’t make any sense.  That’s what faith is- believing without a current reason. It’s based on what we know to be true of God in the past. It’s based on what we know of Him in the Word. It’s not needing one more reason to believe. We don’t need another sign. We’ve been given many. We don’t need a God where our every wish is His command. That’s hardly a God.

We need to be the type of people who love beyond expectations, beyond all hurts, beyond all wishes, beyond all needs and beyond all wants. Our relationship with God goes much deeper than any of that. When everything is stripped away, it’s just the two of us and yet we find all that we need. We pray for all these things when what we actually need is God Himself. I’m not saying this is easy to understand. I have sought Him at times and not found Him, but when I kept on and didn’t give up He was there.

We are talking about the nitty gritty of our relationship. We have a lot of excuses we put between ourselves and God – grievances, blame, hurt feelings, misunderstanding, un-forgiveness, anger, frustration, resentment, fury, ultimatums, conditions for our love, expectations, rudeness, mistrust, so many “whys?” “Why didn’t you do this?” “Why is it like this?” “Why don’t you answer my prayer?”

I see all of this as a cloud of distraction that stands between us being close with God. There are so many unspoken hurts, so many things we hold onto, so many unresolved issues, so much ambivalence.

“I love you God but I am very, very angry with you.”

“I trust you but this time better be different. “

We treat God as if He were a human that sinned against us, and somehow wronged us. How can we forget this is a God who knows no sin?

The sin we are imagining is our own. It’s our own misunderstanding and faulty blame. This is the fall of man firsthand, unable to acknowledge the sinfulness of self because it’s too painful. A perfect Being like God highlights all of our flaws for us to clearly see and it is utterly disgusting to our eyes, so we turn it around and blame Him. We cannot bear to face our own brokenness. Thankfully, God is merciful.

Sometimes we have to put reason on the back-burner to find the truth we’re looking for. Sometimes when we put reason to the side and trust God we get the answers we've been looking for and suddenly things make a lot more sense. I have found that as I stopped asking why I have had the answers pop into my head and they are more brilliant than I ever could have imagined. God certainly has His reasons why; His understanding is far beyond our own. He is never cruel or negligent, no matter what it seems.