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Where to Find Lasting Faith

August 6, 2018 by Alyssa Poblete Leave a Comment

Where to Find Lasting Faith

There is a cool and unwavering confidence I sense from people who have walked closely with God for decades longer than I have. It’s like speaking to someone about a mutual friend whom they happen to know far more intimately than I do. And after walking so closely with him they know his character, they have seen his word ring true time and again, and have sensed his fidelity to them through all the seasons of change. They trust him.

Although they speak with great faith, they aren’t exempt from pain or hardship and never pretend to be. These are friends who are battling cancer, loss of a spouse, infertility, wayward children, financial stress, and caring for a loved one who has long since lost their faculties to mental decay.

Their words of hopefulness and assurance are not merely platitudes they recite to others to avoid the harshness of reality. No, their confidence is something tangible, familiar, and hard-won.

In the wake of losing his spouse, a friend once said to me, “Alyssa, God has been faithful to me thus far, and he will be faithful to me until the end. I have no doubt that he is still good.” I’ve often asked these friends of mine how they can respond with such an unmoving sense of assurance in light of the hardness of their circumstances. Many have often insisted that this confidence comes in waves, repeated reminders that God is really as big and powerful as he has been in the past. But that they are not exempt from moments of doubt. The thing that has always bolstered them up though, given them a more solid and unwavering confidence, has been a consistent and aggressive pursuit of knowing God. The more they know him, the more they can say, “thy will be done,” because they have tasted and seen that he is better than anything else their hearts may desire. I long for this kind of faith.

What my friends have taught me is that the pathway to great trust is not to ignore the realities of life, nor is it to blindly agree to trust in some unknown source of good. To trust in someone or something you must know the character of the one being trusted.

Over the past year, some friends and I started a challenge called the #biblestorychallenge. Our goal: simply to read through the whole Bible from cover to cover for the purpose of understanding the overall storyline of scripture—to grasp the unifying plot that weaves itself through every book. Our hope is to know Him more.

What I love is that the Bible is not just a nice story, it is a history that has marked the character of our God for centuries. What I didn’t realize when I started this challenge was how real, tangible, and confident my faith would become from rehearsing God’s faithfulness to others.  I have seen who he was to the to the wayward and sinful Israelites, the rebellious and passionate King David, the confused and longing Abraham and Sarah, the ignored and silenced prophets, the locked up and abandoned Joseph, the timid and unfaithful disciples. To all of them, he was faithful.

Over the years I have often feared the reality that the great common denominator among all of us is that we live in a fallen world, where we will meet trials of various kinds. We are guaranteed hardship in unique ways, no one is exempt. But we are also guaranteed a faithful God.

This is why Bible intake is so necessary. I love how Jen Wilkin said it recently: “Devotional reading is like chamomile tea—a soothing drink before slumber. But no one drinks chamomile tea before going to war. We need stronger drink to combat the world, the flesh, and the devil. We need battle cries as well as lullabies. We need the full counsel of Scripture.”

So brothers and sisters, feast on his word. Pour over its pages and watch with eager eyes as God proves his faithfulness to you. “Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him” (Proverbs 30:5).

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Dry chicken and undercooked potatoes were the cons Dry chicken and undercooked potatoes were the consistent theme of most of the meals I cooked in our early days of marriage. We lived in a tiny one bedroom apartment with a kitchen the size of a small walk in closet and packed our 4ftx4ft bistro table with as many chairs as we possibly could. On my best days, our meals were dull. On the worst, they bordered on peculiar.
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I didn’t particularly like cooking, but I loved people so I kept on making meals and opening our door and sitting for hours around that little table—listening to stories and sharing hope. This is the thing about a home cooked meal, it brings people together and invites them to linger. My growing love for the art of cooking started there, not because the meal has to be great, but because every investment of care and preparation in a meal is an act of love.
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Over the years I have found the sound of oil snapping and popping on the stove a deep comfort and gotten giddy over the mingling of spices and herbs as their aroma fills the air. I’ve taken a lot of joy in carefully constructing menus and nothing beats the delight of watching my friends finding satisfaction and rest around our dining table.
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My kids have started to share those passions with me so I began collecting some of our favorite recipes in this book to pass along to them when they are in need of help in the days ahead. While I love witnessing their faces as they learn to measure and pour and sift and chop, my heart yearns for them to not only grow a love for cooking but a love for people. On the first page of our family collection is this prayer from Every Moment Holy, a reminder to me that cooking is a labor of love first and an art second:

“As we perform the various tasks of washing, chopping, sifting, mixing, simiring, baking, and boiling, let those little acts coalesce into an embodied liturgy of service--an outworking of love offered for your purposes, that through us, your tender care might be translated into the comforting and cheery language of nurturing food and drink offered for the benefit of others... (continued int the comments) #exhalecreativity #everymomentholy
A prayer for my church from the words of John Pipe A prayer for my church from the words of John Piper and a pic of some of the cuties from @kxchurchoc: 
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“Oh Lord, by the truth of your Word, and the power of your Spirit and the ministry of your body, build men and women at [ @kxchurchoc ]...
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Who don’t love the world more than God...who don’t expect that life should be comfortable and easy...who don’t get paralyzed by other’s disapproval, who don’t return evil for evil, who don’t hold grudges, who don’t gossip, who don’t twist the truth, who don’t brag or boast...
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But who are ablaze for God, who are utterly God-besotted, who are filled with the Holy Spirit, who strive to know the height and depth of Christ’s love, who are crucified to the world and dead to sin, who are purified by the Word and addicted to righteousness, who are mighty in memorizing and using the Scriptures, who keep the Lord’s Day holy and refreshing, who are broken by the consciousness of sin, who are thrilled by the wonder of free grace, who are stunned into humble silence by the riches of God’s glory, who are persevering constantly in prayer, who are ruthless in self-denial, who are fearless in public witness to Christ’s lordship, who are able to unmask error and blow away doctrinal haze...who are content with what they have and trusting the promises of God, who are patient and kind and meek when life is hard.”
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And a few other prayers of my own:
May you, Lord, build a people who are intellectually hospitable, radically generous with their resources, passionately welcoming of the outsider, who are able to endure hardship with unwavering faith, who are more captivated by the person across the table than they are in their own reflection, who dispense grace quickly, who have eternity so encompass their thoughts that it would drive their every motivation and permeate every private, unobservable moment, who’s internal devotion would far eclipse their external worship.
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He is faithful to do all these things @kxchurchoc fam. May this bring you as much hope as it has me today.
A big day for Geneva Mae. We got all dressed up an A big day for Geneva Mae. We got all dressed up and took her out to get her ears pierced and now she looks so grown up and I just can’t stand how fast this is all going and I have definitely shed a few tears every time I catch a glimpse of her. 😭😍💛
334 days ago, on a gloomy Thursday afternoon in Ma 334 days ago, on a gloomy Thursday afternoon in March of last year, Chris got a phone call that would change everything for our small church plant. The school we rented space from was closing its doors for the next two weeks to slow the spread of the Coronavirus. Our first thought: "two weeks is such a long time to be separated as a church." Our team scrambled like crazy for the next 48 hours to find the best solution and we found ourselves with an option none of us felt excited about: online church. What was supposed to be two weeks turned out to be an indefinite season of homelessness for King's Cross.
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For the last 334 days we endured countless awkward zoom calls, distanced social gatherings (mixed with friends who disliked masks and longed for a hug and others who had to muster up all the courage in the world just to show up). We began gathering biweekly in a friend's backyard for church, enduring temperatures in the 100s before 10am and at times so cold that our toes went numb. We've broken bread in the rain just so we could be together and found a million creative ways to maintain connection with one another. But I won't lie, it has been so painful.
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If I knew that those two weeks would turn into 334 days of homelessness for our church, I would have been crushed. But the Lord, in his kindness, only allowed us to see what was right before us and in the meantime was weaving together something more beautiful than we ever could have imagined. In this past year our compulsion to be consumeristic with church was put to the test as our gatherings were stripped down and we gathered simply to worship and nothing more. Our temptation to keep people at arms length was drawn out, close to its furthest conclusion, and reveled how vitally important it is to have people in your life. The value of communion and the preciousness of gathering and singing out alongside each other were highlighted when it was taken away from us. This year only proved to strengthen our church and prove how valuable it is to have a people to belong to.
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Last night our 334 days of homelessness came to an end. We have a home and we are so excited to see what’s next! Love you @kxchurchoc fam!
These days we have been on a relentless search to These days we have been on a relentless search to discover what is good right before our eyes.
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If I'm being honest, this has never come naturally to me. I have always had an acute awareness for what is broken or lacking in the world and myself. This disposition fit well into my Christian faith early on. I began to discover that because of the fall, things really were broken all along, far more than I was ever aware of. Left to my own devices though, my vision could easily be plagued by pervasive pessimism.
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I think about this a lot, especially as I scroll through social media and engage in conversations about the world around us. Pessimism seems to be plaguing our days. The thing about it is, it subtly begins to color everything.
▪️It affects the way we view our friends. Is our natural disposition to identify how they could be better or impulsively celebrate evidence of God's grace in their life?
▪️It affects the way we view our circumstances. Is our natural bent to feel as if our unique set of vocational challenges, family dynamics, financial limitations, unmet desires too hard for others to identify with? Or do we allow those things to draw us to the Lord and shape our empathy toward others?
▪️Pessimism can affect the way we engage with people unlike ourselves. Are we inclined to be skeptical, or do we give people the benefit of the doubt?
▪️Do we comb through the headlines and fret over the widespread effects of sin, or do we search for evidence of God's good work in the world?
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While Christians surely are heralders of truth, unafraid to acknowledge the dark, we are surely also the only ones fixed to shine a light in it. The truth we proclaim is one of hope, not of despair.
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Maybe you’re spending your days fighting crime or changing diapers or teaching bored high schoolers. Regardless, Paul’s correction to the Philippian church has been ringing in my ears and I think it’s a good exhortation for us all: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Phillipans 4:8). #everymomentholy

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Homegoing is the online home of Alyssa Poblete, a writer in Southern California.

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