Wasted Faith
It all sounds great. Er.
You’re ready to leave the lesser life behind and open yourself up to the greater life God has for you. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few objections floating around in the back of your mind.
Like, what about when the rain doesn’t come? What about when you’re working what you’ve got but it just isn’t working?
Then there’s this: Is going after a greater life even biblical?
After all, didn’t John the Baptist base his entire ministry on the motto “He must become greater; I must become less” (
The reason I suspect you are thinking some of these things is that I’ve thought them myself. Over the next few chapters, I’ll address them head-on. Not always with tidy answers. But from a biblical perspective.
They are questions worth asking. I certainly don’t want to chase a greater life only to get there and find God isn’t in it. And while you’re in hot pursuit of God’s best, I don’t want you to get tripped up by experiences that may seem to contradict everything I’ve been saying. As we’re about to discover, our questions and doubts can actually serve as some of God’s greatest tools to strengthen our stakes and increase our faith.
Greater Faith, Worser Situation
We’ve established that the path to greater things is rarely the path of least resistance. It’s not like I’m trying to sell you a used car here. I’ve been up-front about the challenges of living this way. And yet we have explored at length the rewards of a life of obedience, the blessings that are on the other side of doing what God asks of us. An avalanche of Scripture passages reveals the ways God honors obedience. The greater path really is the better way.
But the stark reality is this: The journey toward greater things is marked with setbacks and real suffering. Sometimes as your faith is getting greater, your situation is getting worser.
Sometimes you pray in great faith, act in great obedience—and the miracle still doesn’t come. The ditch stays dry. You still have only one jar of oil. Sometimes you’ve done everything you know to do, and in the end you’re left with a sense of disappointment with God, even a sense that God has failed you. And if you have never experienced a moment like that, well, quite honestly you haven’t lived long enough.
The road to greater things is not neat and linear. It is marked not only by the messiness of real life but also by tragedy. Sometimes the rain doesn’t come the next morning as you thought it would. Now not only is your body thirsty; it’s sore and stiff from digging all night. Sometimes the heavens are silent.
Maybe you’ve tried to think inside the box and work the marriage you have. But your spouse left you anyway. And it blew your box to pieces.
Maybe you’ve left behind your small and limited conceptions of God and prayed for great things, like your child’s cancer to be healed. But the doctors couldn’t get the entire tumor.
Maybe you’ve launched out in faith and started a new business, believing God called you to it. But then it failed, and you were back to square one—or worse.
In these times it is tempting to say something quaint like “All prayers are answered, just not in the ways we want them to be.” But truthfully, there are also moments where there is no discernible answer.
It’s baffling the way God sometimes shows up in dramatic fashion to orchestrate the most minute details of your life to get you where you are supposed to go…and then in your most dire moments seems almost absent. Those who persevere on the long and greater road will not only find themselves baffled by God’s power but also at times dumbfounded by His restraint during times of real need.
The faith of all the saints through the ages is not enough to eliminate the reality of suffering. Because suffering is not a detour on the road to greater. It’s a landmark. Discouragement is a marker, often not of being on the wrong path but of being on the right one.
Don’t get me wrong. Like you, I’m no masochist looking to suffer. We are realists who recognize that even though we have witnessed great moves of God, we will also experience pain, dark nights of the soul, and the death of hopes and dreams.
Even great prophets like Elisha sometimes come up short.
Her promise from God is lying dead on the bed of the man who gave that promise to her. As she stares at the horror of a miracle gone wrong, she remembers the first time she met Elisha. The dead son on the bed—the bed she had made for Elisha years ago—was an agonizing confirmation of her greatest fear and deepest suspicion: those who ask God for greater things only end up disappointed in the end.
The Bible gives her no name. She is just known as the woman from Shunem or the Shunammite woman. (You’ll find her story in
She is wealthy but generous of spirit. She loves to cook. So whenever Elisha’s ministry travels brought him near her family’s hometown of Shunem, she insisted on having him over for dinner. She and her husband loved to show their hospitality to the enigmatic prophet, making a home for a man who never seemed quite at home in this world. For the itinerant man of God, this was a safe place to experience the laughter and comfort of family, surely a welcome break from the high highs and low lows of all-consuming prophetic ministry.
Her heart was so tender for Elisha that one day she told her husband they should build a room onto their house just for him. They constructed a small roof chamber with walls and added a bed, table, chair, and lamp so Elisha wouldn’t have to stay at the Shunem Motel 6. That room became a second home for Elisha.
One day as he lay in the bed inside the room built just for him, Elisha called for his servant, Gehazi, and asked him to bring the Shunammite woman. Longing to give her something for the incredible generosity she had shown him, Elisha was reminded that the woman did not have a son. So when she stood at the door, he prophesied over her: “About this time next year…you will hold a son in your arms” (verse 16).
Most people would have reacted with either unrestrained jubilation or somber gratitude. But not the Shunammite woman. A baby? It was too late for her. Her husband was too old. To anyone outside their intimate circle of friendship, her instant reply probably would have smacked of irreverence. She objected, “No, my lord. Don’t mislead your servant, O man of God!”
In other words, “Don’t joke with me about this, Elisha. It’s not funny.”
We’ve all been there. When you’ve lived with lesser long enough, any promise of a greater possibility smacks of the potential to turn out hollow.
But Elisha wasn’t joking. In due time the Shunammite woman bore a son as had been prophesied. Her only son, the object of her absolute affection—she loved him in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
Everyone has high hopes for their children. But what kind of hopes does one have for a son who was not supposed to be, who was born out of a word from God? Everything about that squirming, vulnerable little body was swaddled in promise. Surely the God who so mysteriously provided a son would be faithful to protect him.
I Didn’t Ask for This
The morning, years later, when her son gets up to help his father among the reapers seems like any other morning. But that day out in the sun, he is overcome by a sharp, piercing pain. “My head! My head!” he cries (verse 19). Concerned but hardly rattled, his father sends him with a servant back to his mother to lie down. Surely he just needs a nap.
The Shunammite woman cradles and rocks her son, feeling the warmth of his little body—the promise of God snuggled in her arms.
Around lunchtime he dies.
With his last breath, the sweet taste of God’s faithfulness turns to sand in the mother’s mouth. She had long ago learned to endure the social disgrace that marked a childless woman in her culture. She had loved Elisha like a brother and had never asked the traveling mystic for anything, much less for a son. She had begged him not to deceive her with hope. Now, in a moment, she is filled with rage.
She carries her son’s body to the bed they kept for Elisha. Then, after saddling her donkey, she rushes toward Mount Carmel, where the man of God lives.
When Elisha sees her, he knows something is wrong. She falls down before him and takes hold of both his feet. Gehazi tries to intervene, but Elisha stops him.
“Leave her alone! She is in bitter distress,” he says (verse 27).
At that point she explodes in precisely the way you aren’t supposed to talk to a prophet.
“Did I ask you for a son, my lord?” she said. “Didn’t I tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes’?” (verse 28).
It isn’t really a question. It is an accusation. It is a way of saying “I didn’t ask for this.”
Elisha doesn’t waste a second. He tells Gehazi to take the prophet’s staff and run ahead to Shunem. “If you meet anyone, do not greet him, and if anyone greets you, do not answer. Lay my staff on the boy’s face,” he says (verse 29).
The prophet and the woman follow behind.
What is she thinking as she travels homeward? Upset as she is, I don’t think she cares if the staff-on-the-face plan is a glorified magic trick or anything else. It could be his staff, or it could be a tennis racket—who cares?—as long as she can hold her son, living and breathing again, in her arms.
Gehazi goes ahead and does as Elisha directed, and when Gehazi comes back to meet the woman and Elisha, I think hope has already risen again, along with the color in her face. Anticipation rises. Faith bubbles up. Not looking her in the eye, Gehazi delivers the report with dazzling understatement: “The boy has not awakened” (verse 31).
Curse you, Elisha.
Sometimes people hear from God, or think they hear from God, and they burn their plows. Or they dig their ditches. Or they pour the one jar of oil. And instead of being given beauty for ashes, they are given ashes for ashes. All they seem to get for burning their plows is the smell of smoke in their clothes. All they seem to get for digging ditches is muscle spasms for weeks to come. And pouring out their little bit of oil doesn’t fill more vessels but only wastes what precious oil they had to begin with.
When God asks for something and you don’t get anything back, it can feel like sacrifice. Or it can feel like you just got robbed.
I know a guy who felt certain God had called him to fulltime vocational ministry, so he quit his comfortable job in the music business. He wasn’t chasing fame and fortune. His heart was as pure as it could have been. But his decision cost his family dearly and created tension between him and his wife. After years of languishing, long after burning every plow he ever had, he went back to his former business, embarrassed and unrewarded. He had to provide for his family.
One of my closest friends in ministry and his wife have been married many years without children. For years they longed for kids, but finally they came to feel at peace with the idea of never having any. Their lives have been rich and fulfilling, populated with many spiritual sons and daughters. They were content with the apparent fact that biological parenthood was not God’s route for them—until people all around them began to share words of alleged prophecy from God about the child they would bear. Sincere women regularly accost my friend’s wife, asking if she is okay with not having kids. Some who barely know her ask if she has physical issues that keep her from having children. As their family, or lack thereof, has become a regular topic for everyone from parishioners to visiting preachers, they say it’s getting hard to be okay with it anymore. And still there is no child.
I could share hundreds of heartbreaking stories about unfulfilled desires in the lives of believers. When you’re a pastor, you wade waist deep in them every day. But some stories hit closer to home than others. And whether you can relate to their specific struggle or not, I think you’ll find something to relate to in the story of the Bishops.
Back-and-Forth Faith
John and Heather Bishop are two of my favorite people at Elevation Church. They are one of the original couples who burned their plows and moved to Charlotte with us to start our church. John built the first deck I had on the back of my house. I take great joy in frequently giving him a hard time about overcharging me for it, but it was a nice deck. Heather was the first ministry assistant I ever had. She also ran the children’s ministry and the entire church office while managing to put up with me. She did it all gracefully. I love the Bishops.
So when they struggled with fertility issues for several years, it wasn’t just a general prayer request in our church. It was a personal call to faith for Holly and me—to believe God on behalf of this couple who are so precious to us. I remember how nervous I was when my wife laid her hands on Heather at a staff retreat and asked God in bold faith to give the Bishops a baby. I asked Holly in the car on the way home, “Did you have to pray that one out loud, so specifically, in front of people?”
“I felt like God told me to,” she replied. Then she smiled at me. That was the end of that conversation.
I was relieved, and Holly was vindicated, when Heather announced in 2007 that she was pregnant. The struggle was over now, wasn’t it? It certainly seemed that way. The Bishops bore a son. They named him Jeremiah. He was completely healthy and very handsome. And the Bishops were elated. They weren’t the only ones.
Six months later, full of expectation, they began trying to conceive again. After all, once you’ve seen God do greater things, it’s addictive to believe Him for more. Remarkably, Heather was reading the Shunammite’s initial promise of a son from 2 Kings when she felt like God supernaturally spoke to her that she would have a son in a year. And they believed. And prayed. And waited.
Nine months later, she still wasn’t pregnant.
Still, the Bishops aren’t the kind of people to feel sorry for themselves. They stayed busy doing God’s work and enjoying the son God had given them. They knew they were already far more blessed than they deserved.
That same month John got on a plane with me, and we flew to Uganda to check on one of our church’s international partnerships. It was John’s first time in Africa. And for the entire week he was there, he was moved by the joy he saw from believers in the midst of dehumanizing poverty, by the hope he saw in communities ravaged by HIV.
On one of the last days of our stay in Kampala, while we waited at a busy intersection, John looked out the window and noticed a small boy, about eighteen months old, sitting on the sidewalk with his little hands cupped in front of him, begging for money. John rarely heard God impress anything on him more clearly than in that moment. He felt God telling him, That boy needs a father.
In that moment John resurrendered his plans to the Lord. He realized he had been trying to hold God hostage to his plans of having a second child their way. Now he sensed God gently trying to reveal that He had a different plan for their family.
That night, November 15, 2009, he skyped with Heather. After he told her about his experience, he came right out with it: “I think God is calling us to adopt a child.”
When he got home, he and Heather had a conversation about the possibility of adoption. They were nervous—as nervous as anyone who takes a bold step of faith—but they decided they couldn’t settle for less than what God wanted for them. And so they started the adoption process, deciding to adopt locally.
After months of meetings, paperwork, reference letters, and long conversations with Jeremiah about the prospect of a new baby brother or sister, they finally got the call. A mom had picked their profile, and she wanted to meet them. So on October 2, 2010, they met Karrine (not her real name). In spite of their fears, they bonded with her instantly. It just felt right. The baby’s due date was November 15—the one-year anniversary of the Skype conversation John had with Heather when they solidified their desire to adopt. It all seemed so perfect, what some call a “God thing.”
A few weeks later John and Heather got the call that Karrine was in labor. They went to the hospital and helped her through the entire delivery. It was overwhelming for all of them. The Bishops wept on Karrine’s shoulder after the baby was born. She hugged John and said she knew she had made the right choice. She was glad he was going to be her baby’s father. Together, they named him Malachi David Bishop.
A few days later John and Heather brought Malachi home from the hospital. They had waited two and a half years. Struggled through infertility. Wrestled with doubts, frustration, anxiety, anger, and resentment. And now God had blessed them with the baby they’d been praying for.
I wish I could say the story ended there, but as many have experienced, God’s greater plans don’t always go the way we would like.
On her way home from taking Malachi to his newborn doctor’s appointment, Heather got a call from Karrine. She wanted to see them and the baby. Since John and Heather wanted to make the process as easy as possible for Karrine, they happily drove to her house.
But when they got there, things had changed. Karrine said everything she could think of to make a difficult situation easier, but the gist of her message to them was that she could not be away from Malachi anymore. She wanted to be his mom. She was reversing her decision, which she had a legal right to do within seven days of the delivery under North Carolina law.
Devastated and in shock, John and Heather loaded Malachi into his car seat and drove home with him. That night they sat down with Jeremiah and told him that Malachi was not going to be their baby anymore. John kissed Jeremiah on the cheek, and he asked some questions they did their best to answer. But after a while, they couldn’t hold it in anymore. They broke down and wept as a family.
The next day, one week after they helped with his delivery, Malachi was taken away. They spent the day cleaning up all the baby stuff they had bought or received from friends. And in the midst of all the grief, they started asking God why.
Why had He let His promise be taken away from their house?
An entire winter came and went, and the Bishops didn’t hear anything new from the adoption service. They started to wonder whether God really wanted them to adopt at all. They were tired. Was God’s greater plan more trouble than it was worth?
Had their faith been wasted?
The Holy Ground of Grief
Because it’s an issue that touches the deepest part of my heart, I’ve shared several stories throughout this book about parents and children. But you have your own broken dreams and broken hopes—and they may have nothing to do with a child. Perhaps you hoped for a man or woman you would meet, marry, and live with happily ever after. Perhaps you have offered prayers for healing in earnest faith and yet you lost the person you loved anyway.
I would never attempt to insert something as blasphemous as an answer into your sacred grief. When Jesus’s dear friend Lazarus died, Jesus came to the scene where the sisters and the mourners were grieving. And in one of the most profound moments recorded in Scripture, the wisest teacher in history did not offer a word of explanation or even comfort. What He did was cry with His friends (see
Because God meets us when we grieve, grief is not sinful but can in fact be holy ground. Now, of course, you are reading a book about God’s greater plan for you—even though you already had your hopes up and then your hopes were kicked in the teeth. If you prayed…then hoped…then lost, what could possibly be the point in asking God to move in your life now? And what could possibly convince you that His plan could somehow be greater when your dreams have been unfulfilled? Or, worst of all, your nightmares have come true?
When we pray in faith for something and it doesn’t happen, we naturally tend to believe our faith was wasted. That’s the source of the real pain for me. It’s one thing not to get what I want. Fine. But it’s agonizing to feel like “Are you kidding me, God? I prayed, invested, believed all that time for what? For nothing, that’s what.”
We don’t want to bother to believe ever again. We chalk it up as wasted faith.
If that’s where you are, please trust me for a moment as I share one of the most comforting insights I’ve ever discovered about how God works. See, there have been plenty of times when I have prayed for God to do something specific and didn’t get an answer even close to what I prayed for. I prayed earnestly for God to help me sell a house that continued to stay on the market for more than two years. And that was after I lowered the price three times and promised God to give whatever little bit of profit I made back to Him.
Okay. So that’s a lightweight example. Here’s a better one. Ten years ago I prayed for God to heal my dad’s liver cancer. I rejoiced when the transplant was successful. Only to feel a little like God was playing games with us a few years later when much more serious health problems picked up where the liver cancer left off, causing my dad to lose his livelihood, his ability to walk, and almost his sanity. Just a few months ago the diagnosis we feared was confirmed: my father, at age sixty, has ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. They’ve given him about one to three years to live.
I know what it feels like to ask God to move in someone’s life, then slam the phone down on my desk when I get the text saying that person’s situation actually took a turn for the worse. “But thanks for praying, Pastor.” In those moments I feel as though I might as well have poured my faith on the floor.
But the story of the Shunammite woman’s son, the story of John and Heather, the medical twists and turns in my dad’s life, and your stories of dashed hopes have one thing in common. In not one of those instances did God misappropriate His children’s faith.
Not an ounce of it was wasted.
Even when it seemed as if He was deaf to their prayers, He was collecting their faith and making a plan to use it in a greater way.
I think of this as a heavenly trust fund. And the way it can impact our view of what it means to trust God has revolutionary implications.
Excerpted from Greater by Steven Furtick. Copyright ©2012 by Steven Furtick. Excerpted by permission of Multnomah Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
