Extraordinary Faith

Teaching the kids at AWANAs tonight about the faith of Abram (not yet Abraham).  He was told by God to leave his country, his kin, his people, his way of life and everything that made him feel secure and comfortable behind and go to a land where everything would be different for him.  Not easy today, but imagine the leap in Bible times, and the disconnect he was being asked to make from everything that made him who he was.

Fear did get the best of him on at least one occasion, and in the famine that came he fled to Egypt, but this only serves to remind me that he is no different than us.  No less human, yet his faith was extraordinary.  Thus the question: What makes faith extraordinary?

I could try to be cliche and say God is the little extra in the ordinary, but that serves no useful purpose for me.  As I thought about it, there is nothing that separates regular faith from extraordinary faith.  It is all faith passed down to us from God.  In our minds, we make the difference based on our circumstances and the possible consequences.  For instance, Abram had “extraordinary faith” to leave everything familiar and travel into an unknown land, but today, we just have “regular faith” if we give to the church, however, the difference is illusory.  Let me see if I might illustrate.

Allowing someone to put you in a wheelbarrow, and traverse Niagara Falls on a high wire would be “extraordinary faith” in the person, but falling backwards with eyes closed into someone’s arms is “regular faith” because the circumstances are different, and the consequences could be drastically different.  Fall on your back and you risk a bruise and maybe a minor injury, but a fall from the wire is near-certain death.

However, both require those simple elements of belief and then action.  Belief that the person in charge, the person in whom you trust, can do what they say will lead to action – either falling backward, or getting in the wheelbarrow.  If we truly believe God can do anything, then the faith given to us at salvation is all we need to trust God for the rest of our lives, no matter the circumstance, and no matter the potential consequences.  Point is, once you really “get it” then the differences between “extraordinary faith” and “regular faith” vanish.  There is just you and God, and your willingness to trust Him or not.

The difference gone, we see either that you have faith in God, or you do not.  Extraordinary and regular are the differences in our own minds.  1 John 5:9 “If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which he hath testified of his Son.”  Why not trust an Almighty God when we are forced to trust fallible men on a daily basis?