The Fourth Wall - Day 1

Imagine . . .

Imagine those moments when you are lying in bed, and you find yourself inundated with great and warm feelings about your faith. These are the moments that we find peace in our faith. These moments hook us into the idea and experience of faith. Admittedly, these moments are too few and too far between for many of us.

Now, imagine a very different experience: Waking up at night feeling a bit overwhelmed by doubt, anxiety, feelings of emptiness, and loneliness. No matter how hard you try, you cannot shake the feeling that we are all alone in our experience of the world, that there is no God and to even comprehend God’s existence is beyond your ability to cognitively capture.

When you look at the world and see the foolishness, the pain, the suffering, and heartache, it is hard to imagine a God who cares, let alone a God who even exists. You stare up in the dark and all you get in return is the darkness of the night.

That seems pretty terrible, and it seems like a strange way to begin a series guide that is supposed to give us hope in the midst of everything that is happening. However, this is often how many of us feel.

Does this mean that we have faith that first night, but none that second? Is faith a matter of being able to imagine or feel that God exists?

I don’t think so.

God’s existence is not dependent on our belief in it, whether strong or weak one day or the next. Faith is not the same thing as being able to imagine God’s existence from one day to the next. We are often unequal to the task of imagining God anyway.

This is why the prayer in Ephesians 1:17-18 is often so important to us:

“17 asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. 18 I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance.”

In this text, the author, Paul, is asking that those people in the Ephesian church might have a greater revelation into who God is and how God exists at all. Beyond that, he is also asking that they be given “light”, which I would interpret as a sense of God’s presence, so they might continue to look past what the world is offering them and they might be able to see how God inhabits the world around them.

This is the same prayer that I pray for Crosswalk. That we may understand God in ways that transcend what we seem to be given every day as we look at the news, worry about our families, and stress over our jobs and politics in the world. We hear about wars and worry about the next war that might begin. This is a prayer for the presence of God in your lives. A presence that continually tears our walls of reality down so that we can see that, despite what it feels like, we live in the kingdom that God inhabits.

Remember, Jesus already told us this when he said in John Chapter 18:36 Jesus answered, “My Kingdom is not an earthly kingdom. . .”

There is more to this world than simply what we see.

1. How do you feel about the existence of God? Does it change as circumstances in the world change? 
2. How can we be sure there is more than what we simply see? 
3. Can we share the hope that we have, even when we struggle with that hope?