Posts Tagged ‘Believe’

“He said to his disciples, ‘Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?’” (Mark 4:40, NIV 1984).

I settled into a chair in the hotel lounge away from the crowd so that I might catch up on my email, with some real anxiety over the news that email was bringing me. Earlier in our mission I had prayed that each of us might be ready for God’s work of interruption. Just so, an Albanian medical student saw me sitting there alone and asked, “Are you busy?” As he sat down, he reflected on an earlier talk I had given and asked, “Which level of happiness are you experiencing?” As we talked, I asked him about his own faith experience. He described, “I am a Christian. My mother is a Christian who believes. My father is a Christian who does not believe. I am more like my father.”

“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer…” (Philippians 4:6, NASB).

Paul married a girl I grew up with. They worked in Christian ministry together, and then he developed cancer and died. While he was living with cancer, Paul sent out an update to friends and supporters. Within that update he wrote, “A few weeks after finishing my radiation treatments a friend asked me what I had come to know about God through my ordeal. I had been wrestling with many thoughts that very day, and I realized that everything came down to one thing: I had to either believe God’s Word, the Bible, or not.  I chose to believe. As a result, I understood in a new way that God is really sovereign and in control of my life and I am not.”