“Pseudo faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God fails it. Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of any second way or makeshift substitutes. For true faith, it is either God or total collapse. And not since Adam first stood up on the earth has God failed a single man or woman who trusted Him.
The man of pseudo faith will fight for his verbal creed but refuse flatly to allow himself to get into a predicament where his future must depend upon that creed being true. He always provides himself with secondary ways of escape so he will have a way out if the roof caves in.
What we need very badly these days is a company of Christians who are prepared to trust God as completely now as they know they must do at the last day. For each of us the time is surely coming when we shall have nothing but God. Health and wealth and friends and hiding places will all be swept away and we shall have only God. To the man of pseudo faith that is a terrifying thought, but to real faith it is one of the most comforting thoughts the heart can entertain.
It would be a tragedy indeed to come to the place where we have no other but God and find that we had not really been trusting God during the days of our earthly sojourn. It would be better to invite God now to remove every false trust, to disengage our hearts from all secret hiding places, and to bring us out into the open where we can discover for ourselves whether or not we actually trust Him. That is a harsh cure for our troubles, but it is a sure one. Gentler cures may be too weak to do the work. And time is running out on us.” ~A. W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous
Real faith has no contingency plan…for salvation or any other category of life. If we truly trust God and put our faith in him, we need no backup option, alternative route, or secondary means. How often do we like to say, “I’ve got things covered,” as though the success of our endeavors rests assuredly on our capacity to arrange the details and execute them with all the pompous, self-satisfaction that it brings when they turn out right. Where is God in all that? Quite surely he is not there. Well, at least we exclude and confine him in our manner. We easily slide into a tendency of seeing our own efforts and how we devise our ways as standing or falling depending on whether we meticulously tend to all the particulars and assiduously stick to them without deviating. What we need to realize is that our efforts are spurious if we don’t reckon that God is the captain charting our course and trust that he is working everything out in the way that he wills.
A person plans his course, but the LORD directs his steps.
There is a false sense of reasoning involved in our faith if we think that because we are believing for something to happen that we are then “including God in the equation.” Such a notion falls far from the tree of truth. Our plans are not the ones that God is obligated to follow, much less that he is ever inclined to follow. In fact, we can never say that God ever follows our plans? We wrongly presume that as his people that God must then desire to please us by accommodating our trifle desires, as though that is what constitutes his care and concern for our lives. The truth is actually the reverse — we are to be pleasing to God; he does not need to be pleasing to us. Sometimes the steps God has us take are ones we would rather not, but he does not guide us toward them because he thinks we will be happy and enjoy them in the same way we would be happy and enjoy personal pleasures and entertainment. He guides us toward them because he wills it and it pleases him.
To see faith as a means to an end, is to see faith for what it is not. The idea that faith is merely designed to be the means to rewards and blessings and having our prayers answered is a rotted bridge spanning a deep ravine just waiting for someone to step on it so it can break and plummet the unsuspecting wanderer to their doom. That is not faith. When we place improper constraints on what it means to have faith and improperly attribute to it the function we desire it to play, we delude ourselves and fail to see the true power and meaning of faith. Faith plays no part in ambitions of self-gratification and desire. God will not bend to the will of man and God will not suffer man to exalt himself in the name of faith. Faith is never a means for people to live more comfortably; faith is a means to draw one’s heart and soul to utter dependence—dependence on God.
Faith is not about getting whatever we want (or believe for). Faith can do unimaginable things, like casting mountains into the sea, but that is not its purpose. Faith releases our control of the circumstances; faith says I am willing to go where the Great River takes me; faith acknowledges and embraces the fact that the course you may plan is rarely (if ever) the plan God is directing your steps toward.
Faith has no “Plan B” because God does not revise his plans for he has no need of reconsidering his ways. Thus, if you have faith in God, then there is only ONE plan — God’s plan. But oh how we like to attempt to overwrite it and steer it in our own direction. We like backup plans, we like options to navigate uncertainties, we like to know how we are going to handle incidentals and still come out celebrating our success in achieving our original goal.
At times, our faith is tested by trials, tribulations, and troubles. In those times, we tend to want to exert all the more control over our circumstances and take the reins from God’s hands in order to actively maneuver our way out of our predicament because we feel uncomfortable and disappointed being disturbed from our vision of where we were heading or what we were trying to do. We think we know better and can see the problem clearer and that the only person who is going to do anything about it is ME.
These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold–though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.
In thinking about our failures to look to the Lord in good times and bad and realizing that faith is the act of letting go of self and accepting his hold in our lives, we seldom would confess that we naturally feel content about giving up our efforts to strive for control. If faith was so easy to acquire, everybody would cling to it and give their burdens to God without a second thought. But faith sounds easier than it is. It is the all-time challenge of our lives to let go and let God. Even mature Christians still work to refine their faith for there is never a time in this world when we don’t face the temptation of sidelining God and taking over. We humans are a despicable bunch, but thank God we can never exhaust his mercy. I would never even want to see the outcome of what my Plan B would look like; God’s plan will always be more than enough.
