Worship
How God Develops Your Faith (Part 2)
Faith is an inseparable part of your ministry. You can’t please God without it (Hebrews 11:6). But how do you develop the kind of faith that God wants you to have?
By pursuing the ministry dreams God gives you.
Last week I shared with you three of the six stages that God will take you through as he gives you a dream and eventually fulfills it.
- God gives you a dream.
- You make a decision.
- You experience a delay.
But God doesn’t leave you in that delay pattern. Here are the final three stages of how God grows your faith as you pursue his dreams for your ministry.
Stage #4 — You encounter difficulties
Usually, you’ll have two kinds of troubles as you pursue God’s dream for your ministry. First, you’ll have circumstances that pull you down. Second, you’ll face criticism.
Throughout Scripture, God’s people faced difficulties as they tried to chase his dream for them. Read the stories of Moses, David, and Joshua. Each had to overcome painful times in their journeys. You won’t escape that pain either.
But you can know that God will work through those difficulties to help you reach the dream he has given you.
Peter describes how God uses trials in the faith-building process: “There is wonderful joy ahead, even though the going is rough for a while down here. These trials are only to test your faith, to see whether or not it is strong and pure” (1 Peter 1:6-7 TLB).
At this stage, God tests your faith. Remember, though—the testing is only temporary.
Stage #5 — You hit a dead end
During this phase, your situation will move from difficult to impossible. You’ll be backed into a corner and exhausted. You’ll think the future of your dream is hopeless. You’ll be at a dead end.
The greatest Christian missionary in history, the apostle Paul, faced plenty of dead ends in his ministry. He said he felt crushed, overwhelmed, and scared of death. But that was good, he said! “As a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:9 NLT).
If God can raise the dead, he can turn around any impossible situation in your life. When you face a dead end, you need to trust God to fulfill the dream he put into your heart.
Stage #6 — God delivers you!
Just when it looks like the impossible situation will never come to fruition, God performs a miracle as you place your trust completely in him.
Right after Paul wrote about placing his faith in Jesus when he faced an impossible situation, he said: “He has delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us again. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us” (2 Corinthians 1:10 NIV).
Not only did God deliver Paul, but the apostle knew he’d continue to do so.
God is faithful. I saw it over and over again as pastor of Saddleback Church. Many times, I thought we’d hit a dead end along the way. I thought there was no chance we’d be able to start the church, get land, or build. But every time our backs were against the wall, God came through.
He will come through for your dream as well. It may not happen as you expect, but God will always deliver you!
I don’t know where you and your dream are in these six stages, but God will take you to stage six. You’ll get there. If God gave you this dream, he will fulfill it.
