Waxing & Waning

I feel like a mini Mike Cope in that I'm at a church full of great teachers/preachers. (for those of you who don't know, Mike often shares about how blessed he is by the teaching and preaching of others at his church, Highland) One of my favorite is a friend by the name of Brian Miller. B-Mill is one of a handful of guys at Lake Cities that I would drive to Alaska with in a pick up with no radio. He's a great mix of brilliance and goofiness, confidence and humility, wisdom and wise cracks and one heck of a husband, father, and leader. He is the principle of Fort Worth Christian and Texas A&M alum. But getting back to the purposes of this blog, he is an incredible Bible teacher.

Last night he concluded a series called, Full Circle and came out of Hebrews 11. He made the point that often, our faith is like the moon, waxing and waning. Sometimes we are waxing - getting closer to the Lord, trusting him with more and more of our heart, following him with more passion, and loving him more. Other times in our lives are like the waning of the moon - we are skeptical, anxious, distant, and indifferent. But Brian pointed out that them important thing about our faith...is that we have faith. The degree of our faith cannot be judged well by outsiders. And it certainly cannot be measure by either victory or defeat. Some people with great faith fall often and some people with little faith seemly breeze through life. The important thing is that we live BY faith.

I was struck with the following thought as Brian was teaching:

What enables us to even see the moon at all is the sun. The moon produces no light of its own but rather reflects the light of the sun. Sometimes the moon is directly lined up with the sun and we call that a full moon. Sometimes the earth gets in the way of the sun and we can't see the moon at all and we call that an eclipse. I realized that I want to live a full moon faith and never a eclipse faith. But truth be told, I'm often waxing and waning. And according to my brother Brian and to the author of Hebrews, I guess that is normal.