Owning Our Faith

I don't always put my heart into everything that I do in life, but my faith is one thing I am passionate about.  It makes me want to learn, pushes me to grow as a person, and inspires me to care more about others.  The challenge to know God in a more personal way than I ever thought  possible is a task that I gladly welcome.  I have the joy of uncovering His mysteries every day and taking pleasure in what I find.  Now that I have experienced the joy that is mine through Christ, I would never want to distance myself from my faith.

I haven't always felt this way, though.  I used to be complacent and happy to move through life only pretending that my faith was important.  I knew all the Sunday School answers and Bible stories that I had been taught from a very young age.  Singing the books of the Bible was only slightly harder than singing my ABC's.  Yet, all that I knew meant very little to me.  My relationship with God was only a Sunday morning routine.  My pastor owned his faith.  My parents owned their faith.  I simply tried to live off of their faith as if that would fulfill my soul's desire to be close to God.  I eventually realized that their faith wasn't able to provide me with a personal relationship with my heavenly Father.  I said the sinner's prayer when I was a child, and what Jesus did for me that night was very personal, but I hadn't quite grasped what it meant for Him to be a personal, relational God.

It took me about thirteen years to realize what it meant to have a relationship with God and to experience it for myself.  If you haven't gotten to that point in your understanding of God, you might want to take a serious look at your faith.  Before I owned my faith, I only went to God for help.  I rarely talked to others about Him.  I obeyed the Ten Commandments simply because it was the right thing to do.  Hearing from God was completely foreign to me.  This all changed when I began to want God.  I stopped asking what He could give me and started asking for more of Him.  Once I did that, I started seeing God show up in my life.

If you're wondering where God is in your life, try asking yourself how much you are owning your faith.  Is God more than a character in your mind?  Are you seeking Him?  God is constant.  He never changes which means that He never moves away from us.  We, on the other hand, can move closer to or farther away from Him.  So, don't be complacent.  God is the one who created you and longs for you to know Him more. When you begin to desire His presence in return and to own your faith, you begin to experience God.

"Come near to God and he will come near to you."
James 4:8