Faith Fertilizer

When I lived in a suburb of Minneapolis, there was a small patch of ground behind the garage that I made into a garden. I didn’t want a lot of vegetables, just tomatoes and cucumbers for my mini addiction to green tossed salad.

I didn’t do anything to the soil. It had been previously lawn so there was some black, top soil over a mostly sand base. I soon found out that different plants need different soil. The tomatoes went bonkers. I had so many tomatoes I didn’t know what to do with them.

The cucumbers . . . now that was a different story. They struggled. The vines didn’t get very big and so they didn’t yield many cucumbers. The cucumbers, themselves, grew slowly and didn’t get very big.

Apparently the soil was perfect for tomatoes, but severely lacking in the right ingredients to grow cucumbers.

What a perfect example of growing your faith. In order for your faith to grow, you must have good soil, and if you add the right kind of fertilizer, your faith will grow faster.

So what is the right soil and fertilizer for your faith?

Let’s start with the basics. You may have heard of Willowbrook church on the outskirts of Chicago, started by Bill Hybels, over forty years ago. Bill started the seeker movement. He wanted to make church extremely attractive to people who were “seeking God.” The idea was to make it easy. After a couple decades, Bill wrote a public letter to the body of Christ in general. It was a letter of apology. Basically, the letter said, “I was wrong. The only things that produce growth in the Christian’s life is Bible reading and prayer.”

Well, I think it took some guts for Bill to make this public statement, and I respect that. So what does that tell us? It takes some real effort to grow in our faith. If everything is easy, there will probably be very little growth.

The Christian life is not a great big party. We have to put some real effort, sacrifice and discipline into it in order to grow in our faith.

So what about the basics, Bible reading and prayer?

To illustrate the power of those two things, let me tell you about two great heroes of the faith from our past. The first lived in eighteenth century England. His name was George Muller and he lived completely by faith. He never borrowed money but he built five large orphanages, praying in the funds to build and operate them. George was a drunkard as a youth and experienced a rather dramatic about face when he gave his life to Christ at the age of twenty.

I have often wondered what was the key to the many and continual answers to prayer that he and his staff experienced. Perhaps, the greatest factor was that he saturated himself with the Word of God. He read the Bible through in his lifetime nearly 200 times. I once did the math, calculating the total chapters of the Bible by the number of times he read it through, then dividing that number by the total days of his life as a Christian. He was saved at the age of 20 and lived to be 92, so let’s say his life, walking with God was 72 years. That means that for his entire Christian life he read about 13 1/2 chapters a day!

Is that Bible saturation? I would say so.

The Bible says that “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God (Romans 10:17 NKJV).” In other words, hearing the Word of God increases your faith. You can’t get any more direct than that.

So what about prayer?

How does prayer increase your faith?

Let’s look at another hero of the faith, this time a Bible character. Elijah, the prophet, prayed that it wouldn’t rain, and it didn’t rain for three and a half years. Then after three and a half years, he prayed again and it rained. What did that look like?

First, he told King Ahab that it was going to rain. What do you think King Ahab thought, because it hadn’t rained for three and a half years?

Then Elijah took his servant and went up to the top of Mt. Carmel . . . a high place, perhaps symbolic of getting as close to God as possible.

He got on his knees and put his face between his knees, a posture consistent with humility, effort and passion. If you really want something from God with all of your heart, this is probably the posture you would take. I remember a desperate time in my life, perhaps one of the most desperate. I went into a bedroom, closed the door, got on my knees and bent my face to the floor.

Elijah did this all day. He told his servant to go and look toward the sea. The servant returned and said that there was nothing in the sky. Elijah sent him seven times to look for a sign of rain, while Elijah kept praying. On the seventh trip, the servant reported a cloud the size of a man’s hand rising out of the sea.

So Elijah told his servant to tell Ahab to get home because there was going to be a down pour.

And then it started to rain . . . and it was a cloudburst.

What was the source of Elijah’s faith? Well, it seemed that Elijah spent most of his time by himself. Sometimes the king would send his men to find Elijah and they couldn’t find him.

What did he do in solitude? I’m guessing he listened to God a lot. He had a tuned ear. When God spoke to him, he heard. So Elijah’s faith grew from hearing God speak, or hearing the Word of God.

Hearing God’s Word, or hearing God speak to you, builds your faith.

It doesn’t get much more basic than that.

So if you want to fertilize the soil of your life and grow more and better faith, read God’s Word and pray. Spend a good portion, as much as two thirds of your prayer time listening to what He says. If you do these two things, you will, in effect, pour fertilizer on your life . . . and you will have more faith.

Log in next week for the next installment posted right here.

Photo designed and taken by Lorraine