Fabricated faith

I remember the fairy tale of The Emperor's New Clothes.  Often.  Half the time I remember it, I've just left a church service where some well-meaning but misled person has called people to "have more faith" in order to get something from God - a healing, the resolution to an impossible problem, a financial miracle, whatever the case may be.

I don't deny that it's important to employ faith in our lives.  I don't deny that without faith it is impossible to please God. 

But there is no such thing as a faith factory or an assurance assembly-line. It can't be manufactured.  It can't be faked. It is not the product of human effort. 

I absolutely detest the popular phrase, "Fake it 'til you make it."  The idea behind it is that you "act as if" something you want (whether healing, or whatever the miracle you want, or the quality that you wish you had) is actually yours.  It isn't.  "Act as if" essentially means "Pretend."  In other words, "Lie."  

Lie to yourself - go ahead, everybody does it. (Seriously?) That doesn't jive with another term that I have come to depend on far more: "rigorous honesty."  

The way to get more faith is NOT to act as though you already have it.  The way to GET it is by admitting you DON'T have it.  And then you ASK for it.  Because, as Ephesians 2:8 so clearly points out, "... faith [is] not of yourselves." It's not self-produced; it's a divine gift... the same way grace is, the same way relationship with God is.  He takes the initiative, gives the grace AND the faith to believe.... why? so that NOT ONE of us can boast and say, "It was because I believed so much, that this miracle happened."  The truth is, it was because God decided to do it, that it happened. If we used the faith He gave us to ask for whatever it was, then we didn't cause it to happen.  We got to watch Him work; He gave us that privilege too.

This illustration from a modern version of
Andersen's tale - HERE

Faith doesn't come from a factory.  It is not man-made.  It is organic; it is life, and God is its source. It can't be manufactured.  It can't be fabricated. (Interesting fact: the word "fabrication" is another term for "falsehood" or a story invented by a human to cover up his or her nakedness.  Exactly like the Emperor's New Clothes.) 

In the well-known Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the sheisters came in to the king's court, and offered to make a unique suit of clothing for the emperor.  They pretended to have fabric so special that only wise people could see it.  Of course they had nothing - and everyone who saw them pantomime their creation doubted himself or herself, right on up to the emperor himself. Nobody could see anything; everyone was scared to admit it.  It took a child to point out that what these fake tailors had made was fabricated; it wasn't real at all!  Only the child had the courage to say, "The Emperor has no clothes!" The misled monarch was parading around in his underwear thinking that he was covered - when he wasn't.  All the faking it in the world wasn't going to help him make it.  The bare truth was there: he had no clothes.

Fabricated faith is what the Pharisees had - and they'd had it so long that they thought it was real!  They faked it all the time!  They put on a big show, did the whole pious act, thought themselves to have "made it."  But Jesus called them "white-washed tombs" - scrubbed meticulously clean on the outside, and full of death and decay on the inside.  If they could have achieved what was necessary by faking it, they would have had it made in the shade. But I kinda think they missed the point entirely - because they ended up killing the Point.  Instead of realizing what they had was fabricated - and getting something real from the Giver of it all - they plugged their ears and kept on in their delusion that they were doing God's will.

The point is that it is not, nor has it ever been about how worthy a person is, or how able a person is to drum up enough faith to twist God's arm into doing something.  It's all about how worthy HE is.  His initiative, His plan, His grace, His faith, His salvation, His perseverance, His love. 

We just get to go along for the ride.
:D

Seeds we sow

Did you know that God hates? 

Yeah, sounds weird doesn't it?  But Proverbs gives us a list of six things that God hates - no, as a matter of fact there are seven that are an abomination to Him (abomination is like really intense hatred).  

Let me give you the list and the reference - because something jumped out at me about it some time ago as I looked at it.  

"There are six things which the LORD hates,
Yes, seven which are an abomination to Him.
Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, 
And hands that shed innocent blood,
A heart that devises wicked plans, 
Feet that run rapidly to evil, 
A false witness who utters lies, 
And one who spreads strife among brothers."
 - - (Proverbs 6: 16-19)

Did you notice it?  There are two things that jump out at me.  One is that lying is mentioned TWICE - once as just the tongue (body part) which lies, and the other as the PERSON who lies.  And the other thing is that for the most part, these are just actions that God hates (represented by body parts) - whereas the last two - (which talk about lying and about spreading discord between brothers) actually talk about the person.  So much for hate the sin, love the sinner!!

Source (via Google Images):
http://www.metronews.ca/ottawa/life/article/363719

That should be a clue as to how desperately wrong it is to lie to people and to tear down person A to person B so as to make person B mistrust or judge person A.  I've seen this happen over and over again, and every time it is extremely upsetting.  Talebearers, the Bible calls them. People who betray confidences to make themselves look like the good guy ... while the other poor slob comes off smelling like a skunk.  I'd even go as far as to say that this kind of behavior can be seen as bullying.  And I have less and less tolerance for that kind of thing, whether in a family, a church, or a workplace.  Those words of discord are seeds that spring up in not only the life of the person being disrespected, but also in the life of the person tearing him or her down.  The seeds of discord yield a harvest of shame - whether now or later.  

That's the thing about seeds.  They reproduce and multiply - IN KIND.  You can't get an orange tree out of an apple seed.  The kind of seed we sow is the kind of fruit we'll get, and we'll always get more than we give, for good or for evil.  And when I hear someone talking to me about this one or that one - revealing secrets or expressing opinions on what he or she has done or said, I now find myself wondering what that person tells others about me. 

That's a sobering thought.  

I need to pay attention to make sure that I not only don't spread discord, but also that I don't allow others to do it as well - that I pray for and appropriate the courage to confront and expose it ... in a kind and gentle way, knowing that it could just as easily be me holding the seed bag.