Look Up in Faith

JESSICA ROAN | GUEST It was another early morning. The 5:20 alarm went off as it always does, waking me for another day of teaching. On my way to school, I drove with my eyes fixed on the road, praying I would be ready to meet my twenty-six early morning students in just a few minutes. And then I saw it, a pinkish orange hue highlighting a sky full of cotton puffs. I couldn’t believe it. How many years had I been making this drive and I just now noticed? If I’m honest, I’ve always had a hard time looking up. On a particularly chaotic day at the treatment center I once worked at, I remember asking our sage psychologist: “What do we do? It’s crazy out there.” His answer? “That’s why the psalmist says, ‘I lift mine eyes to the hills’ (Psalm 121). We are supposed to look up, not at the world around us.” The students we worked with were displaying such severe behaviors, but God needed me to keep my eyes on him, not the events around me. There are many times when this brief conversation has come to mind, and often when it's much too late: I’ve already stressed, and even despaired at the circumstances around me. As Christians, we are called to keep our gaze on Christ. To look up for hope and help. To look away from ourselves, and to the One who controls all things We Look Up When We Lack Faith Noah was well-respected and righteous. One fateful day, God gave him a seemingly unreasonable command. He was to build an ark that was about 31,000 square feet (Gen. 6:17). God said he would flood the earth because the world was filled with evil. While many scholars believe it was 120 years from the command to build the ark until the flood, others believe it took merely 75 years. In any case, for Noah to work so diligently on a project for so long without understanding the significance of why he was doing so, could not have been easy. For decades, he risked his good standing in his community. His actions must have appeared strange to those around him. Interestingly, Noah has no dialogue in the Genesis account. This passage simply says, “Noah did this; he did all that God commanded him” (Gen. 6:22). While we don’t know what Noah said to God, we do know what he did. He trusted and obeyed God: “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Heb. 11:7) He “looked up” and waited for something to happen just because God said it would. This is a testimony to us in our own seasons of waiting for God to move in our lives. We continue to “look up” to God, trusting in his promises, even when they seem slow to come to fruition....

Look Up in Faith2024-06-23T18:45:33+00:00

Five Lessons in Waiting on the Lord

I was 23 years old when I started praying daily for my husband and 33 when I met him. From the time we came home from our honeymoon, we prayed the Lord would make us parents. It wasn’t until the day before our 3rd anniversary when we finally received a positive pregnancy test. Waiting has often been a painful part of my story, but as I look back, I can see the Lord’s hand through it all. In many ways, the waiting was and is not complete, but in that sense I feel a kinship with many familiar Bible characters, and more so, the ultimate story of redemption. We are all waiting, aren’t we? How I long to wait well and in ways that honor God! When it comes to waiting well, the following are five helpful principles I’ve learned during long seasons of waiting: Be Honest with God. Your Heavenly Father knows you are in a season of waiting. He hears every cry of your heart, sees every painful tear that falls, feels every flicker of hope you feel. He knows it all, yet He longs for His children to be honest with Him, to wrestle with Him, and to continue to respond to Him in prayer, petitioning and trusting that He has not forgotten you. As Elisabeth Elliot said, “Waiting on God requires the ability to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one's thoughts.”..

Five Lessons in Waiting on the Lord2022-05-05T00:30:17+00:00

Who’s in Your Cloud of Witnesses? Lessons learned from Helen Roseveare

Have you seen the Capital One Financial ads, asking the customer, “What's in your wallet?” It’s meant to convince potential customers that we need to have a Capital One credit card in our personal wallet.I think a question we can ask each other is, “Who’s in your cloud of witnesses?” (Hebrews 11), or who are the faith heroes we look to as role models to follow for life and ministry?Helen Roseveare is one of my heroes. Her wisdom has soaked over my life as I’ve read her books and listened to talks she gave during her life. I’ve kept her words in the pocket of my heart, so to speak, and the dividends have enriched my relationship with Christ and ministry.Helen was a British missionary, doctor, and author. She worked in the Congo from 1953 to 1973, including part of the period of political instability in the early 1960's. She practiced medicine and trained others in medical work. She remained single until she met her eternal Bridegroom face to face in 2016 at the age of ninety-one.Here are three (of many!) ways Helen has discipled me to follow Christ more faithfully:Humor can be a godly tool in our ministry tool belt. Helen was funny! She was able to poke fun at herself and life itself in a way that softened the hearts of her audience. I appreciate that she used humor not to shame others, self-exalt, or self-deprecate but rather to reveal her humanity in a way that lifted the gaze of her audience to Christ and the cross...

Who’s in Your Cloud of Witnesses? Lessons learned from Helen Roseveare2022-05-07T23:32:01+00:00
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