Filed under: Confirmation one
What Is Confirmation?
God’s Word is a Light For Your Path! Psalm 119:105
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Confirmation is
- Ownership – claiming the Christian faith as our own.
- Transition – changing our faith from that of a child’s into an adult’s faith.
- A Journey – our faith journey is not done when confirmation is over. We’re just beginning.
- Fellowship – we’re all in this together, learning from each other, sharing steps along the journey. And every one of us is a gift from God, helping us hear His voice.
- Seeking – confirmation is a safe place to ask the hard questions about faith. That is how we build a firm foundation so that our faith will not be shallow.
- Commitment – your faith cannot be given to you, and your questions cannot be answered without your effort. You can only get out of confirmation what you are willing to put into it.
Who We Are, the Way God Sees Us
We start our journey and let’s to take a look at ourselves, to see honestly who we are, so that we can approach God the way He sees us. God sees both the outside and the inside, as long as they are really us (God doesn’t see the phony stuff we put out there if that’s not really us). God knows us as we really are.
What is Faith?
We are starting on a faith journey, let’s see what faith is. Some of the concepts we get from the Bible about faith are:
- Faith is believing without proof
- Faith is assurance of things hoped for
- Faith is conviction of things not seen
- Faith is trusting in God
- Faith is confident, expectant
- Jesus frequently responded to people’s faith. See Luke 5:20, 7:50, and 8:48.
There are ”Three Dimensions of Faith”
- Belief – knowledge, faith of the head
- Trust – emotion, faith of the heart
- Commitment – action, faith of the hands and feet
Can We Really Experience God?
As Christians we believe that we can experience the living God in many ways.
- Seeing God in Everyday Events – we live most of our lives “on the surface”, kind of going through the motions. But every now and then something happens that knocks us off the surface and we go deeper. In those moments, God is at work.
- Hearing God’s Word – God can speak to us directly, but only if we listen. In our prayer life we shouldn’t do all the talking. We also have God’s word in the Bible, and God’s word became flesh and lived among us in the person of Jesus Christ.
- Seeing God in the World Around Us – we see God’s hand at work in creation. Read Psalm 8, about how God created the natural world and connected us to it.
- Feeling God’s Love – God’s love is not expected, nor deserved, nor earned by us. But He loves us perfectly.
- Meeting God Through Service – Matthew 24:34-40 tells us that when we reach out to help each other, we are encountering God.
God-Incidences
When we experience God, hear his word or feel his guidance, it is not coincidence. It is God-incidence. Sometimes we only discover them by reflecting back on what has happened to us, but when we do we can find them.
Testimony helps us remember and re-affirm the fact that we have experienced the living God, and it helps others understand what such an experience is like. In Mark 9:17-27 we read how Jesus responds to our honest attempts to find a deeper faith. And Matthew 7:7-8 promises that if we make the effort, God will answer.
Experiential Prayer
We can read stories in the Bible where people experienced God. Genesis 28:10-17, Exodus 3:1-12, and 1 Kings 19:9-13 gives us insights into the ways God reveals Himself to us and the ways we should respond.
Consider what it would be to encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus as the two disciples did in Luke 24:13-35. Let us ask Jesus to walk with us on our journey, and may we heach feel His presence.
