I love the story of Noah. The story of Noah reminds me that there are things that only God can do, and that ultimately his plan is perfect and provides for his people. Imagine being Noah in this story. God tells you that the earth is going to be flooded and you have to build a boat that is 450 feet long and 75 feet wide...that is more than four times the size of our church. When the church was being built we must have had over a hundred different workers put in some kind of work, and Noah and his three sons are supposed to build something four times that size by themselves!
Next, let's think about what must have been going through Noah's mind when God told them about all the animals that were going to be on the boat. I am sure his thoughts were similar to what I thought the first time I read this story: "How am I going to round up all of these wild animals and get them on this boat without killing them or myself?" But Noah had much more faith than I do sometimes. He knew that if he took the first step of faith in building the ark that God would take care of the next part. Sometimes that is all God wants from us is one step and then he opens a door for us. In the case of Noah, building the ark was a pretty big step, but still just one step.
John Ortberg wrote a book that I highly recommend called, If you Want to Walk on Water, You Have to get out of the Boat. The book walks through the account of Jesus walking on water. The thing about that story that this book really pointed out to me was that all Peter had to do was take the first step over the side of the boat and Jesus was going to take care of the rest. I mean it is pretty obvious that nothing in Peter's strength was going to allow him to do this himself.
The Bible is filled with stories like the accounts of Noah and of Peter. Stories where there is a God sized task looming in the distance and ordinary people are charged with accomplishing it. Our lives are no different today. We are charged with things like raising good kids in a sinful world, finding ethical standards in an unethical workplace, going on mission trip in a foreign land, asking our unbelieving friend to come to church and countless other things that we could list. God wants us to "build an ark" and he will take care of the rest. Ask today, what is my "ark" and what is the first step that I have to take to build it? God is faithful when he asks us to take a step of faith. Bear Creek is living proof of God's faithfulness to follow through when we take a step of faith. Our church is here because Brett took the first step of saying, "yes God I will go."
No comments:
Post a Comment
To help us in moderating our comments, we are asking all blog followers to e-mail michael@bearcreek.cc before their first comment. Please include in your e-mail your Blog user name. We are sorry for any inconvenience.