Outrageous Faith

When we in the body of Christ talk about faith, 90% of the time we are referring to something we have asked God for. The question is “Do we have the faith to receive it?”

But James says faith is action. We demonstrate how much faith we have by what we do.

 “But someone will say, You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.

                                                                                                          James 2:18

So if we have true faith, it will show in what we do. Often putting our money where our mouth is, requires great sacrifice. Do we have the faith to go out on a limb or jump off of a cliff, figuratively speaking, if God asks us to?

You remember how God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac? Abraham went so far as to gather the wood for the burnt offering and to tie his son up and place him on the altar. At the moment he reached for the knife to kill his son, the Angel of the Lord called from heaven, “Abraham, stop! Don’t harm the Lad!” (Whenever the Angel of the Lord appears in the Old Testament, this is none other than Jesus.)

Then God provided a ram that was caught in the thicket for the sacrifice.

I once heard the great man of God, Leonard Ravenhill, speak in Minneapolis. In his message, he said the ram was not caught in the thicket beforehand. Rather, it was caught in the thicket at the very moment Abraham needed it for the sacrifice. If it had been caught in the thicket for any length of time, it would have pulled its horns off, because that is the nature of the ram. So God provided the ram with split-second timing.

Real faith on our part is obeying God when it makes no earthly sense, and when it comes at a great cost to us. Most Christians don’t want anything to do with that kind of faith. They just want the kind of faith that gets them something they want from God. I might add here that God knows our hearts. If our motives are not right when we ask Him for something, He won’t give it to us. He might first test the motives of our hearts by asking us to do something outrageous. After the ordeal with Abraham and Isaac in the mountains of Moriah, God said, “Abraham, now I know that you love me.”

When I was living alone in Shakopee, Minnesota, I was by necessity living by faith day to day, trusting God to provide. There were days when I didn’t have gas in my car or enough money in my pocket to buy a cup of coffee. I had just come out of a season where I lost nearly everything and was homeless for about seven and a half months. During that time, I lived by whatever contributions came in the mail, or by what money someone might give me in a personal encounter.

God instructed me that I must not hang on to what money I had with white knuckles, fearing that if I spent it, I would be broke. I had to spend the money paying the bills or buying stamps to send out the newsletter. My money supply would almost always go down to a couple dollars. Then more money would come in. If I held on to the money, however, more money would not come in. This is true faith. I was forced to trust God by spending all of my money down to nearly nothing and sometimes loose change, in order to obey and trust Him.

Obedience is a vital part of faith. Without obedience on our part, what we call faith is a farce.

A national television personality, in the beginning of his ministry, gave his car away and was without a car for some time, because God told him to. The evangelist, Dave Roever, once gave his house away to a friend because God told him to.

I was once in the process of mailing out the newsletter. There was $30 in the ministry account, and my intent was to use it to buy stamps to send out the newsletter. God stopped me and told me to instead send the $30 to a woman in Indiana, a serious person of prayer. So I did. I didn’t have check blanks at the time, so I walked over to the bank, withdrew the $30 and turned it into a money order. Then I walked back to the coffee house, put the money order in an envelope, addressed it to the woman and put a stamp on it. When God tells you to do something, it is important to do it right away. I would have also mailed it at that time, but I was too far from the post office.

The newsletter would not be sent out, but that wasn’t my problem. It was part of the test, however, because how does one receive contributions to run the ministry if he doesn’t send the newsletters out?

About twenty minutes later, Lorraine called me at the coffee house where I was working. She was excited. She was out running errands and she ran into a friend who handed her a wad of bills . . .$230! Because I was obedient, God turned my $30 into $230 within a half hour.

One of the most dramatic stories I have heard of faith that requires outrageous action, was told to me by my friend, Pastor Terry, in Faith, South Dakota.

A married couple he knew were both working, making about $80,000 between the two of them. God asked them to quit their jobs, buy a motor home and live out on the road doing ministry. This they did. The husband spent a lot of his time carrying a large, wooden cross down major highways. Often the journey required them to wait at a gas station because they were out of gas and couldn’t buy any. They would wait until someone walked up to them and said, “God told me to fill your tank.” This happened many times.

The big test came one day when they were parked at a truck stop. They had been on the road several years and their motor home was getting a little old and shabby. A man walked up to the husband and said to him, “God told me that this is my motor home.”

“Well no,” the husband replied. “This is my motor home.”

“No, God told me that this is my motor home,” the stranger insisted.

The husband walked around the side of his motor home to pray. “God, I don’t understand,” he said. “This motor home is all that I have in the world. Do you really want me to give it to this man?”

The answer that came back was “Yes.”

The husband was very sad, but he determined that if this is what God was asking, then he was going to give this stranger his only possession in the world, his motor home.

He walked back to the the stranger and handed him the keys. “Here, this is your motor home, now.”

The stranger took the keys. Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out another set of keys and gave them to the husband.

“What’s this?”

“The keys to your new motor home,” the stranger said. “Go look. It’s parked around the corner.”

The husband went around the side of the building to investigate and there was a brand new motor home, exponentially better than his old one.

The stranger went on to explain that if the husband hadn’t given him his old motor home, he was not to give him the new one. This was God’s instruction.

God gives us tests to see what the true condition of our heart is. To obey Him when He asks outrageous things of us is the action, or works part of what James teaches. It is the “action” part of the equation that demonstrates real faith. Keep that in mind the next time God asks you to do something outrageous.

Photo taken by Lorraine