Maturing In Faith
The past few weeks I’ve been studying the life of Peter. I wanted to write this post about him because throughout my study I realized he was an amazing example of someone who wanted so badly to be a mighty man of faith but stumbled multiples times, however, in the end God used him to do incredible things. We can all relate to Peter. Maturity takes time and devotion, we can’t expect it to happen overnight. We will fall short time and time again, but we must learn from our failures and instead of letting them discourage us, we must mature through them. Peter genuinely thought he was mature in his faith, he loved Jesus, and really thought that he was ready to give his life up for him. He was so confident in his faith, but Jesus knew his faith was not mature yet. How many times have you thought that you were making great progress in your walk with God and then you stumbled? If you’re like me, you can’t begin to count the amount of times you’ve felt like you have failed God. The amazing part of all of this is that Jesus forgave Peter, and he forgives us! Even after Peter’s betrayal, Jesus chose him out of all of the disciples, to lead His people back to Him. Jesus knew Peter loved Him, but because he was human and was not mature in his faith yet, he failed. Jesus did not give up on him though, and He hasn’t given up on you! You see, Christ knows the plans he has for us. He knows what we are capable of when we dedicate our lives to Him, maturing in our walk with Him daily. Don’t let your failures and weaknesses paralyze you. We give up because we let feelings of guilt and inadequacy overwhelm us. I think of the guilt Peter must have felt after he denied Jesus, the replaying of that moment in his head over and over, yet, he did not let his failures paralyze him, he kept going! He matured, over time, in his walk with Christ and dedicated the rest of his life to furthering the kingdom of God. Ask your loving God for forgiveness for your failures, dedicate your time to maturing in your faith, and ask him to use you like he used Peter! When we learn to love ourselves as a child of our almighty father, and we realize the love He has for us, we realize how important we are to Him! We start to see that even though we are deeply flawed, we are still capable of maturing in our faith and doing amazing things to bring glory to HIM! God can use you and your brokenness to do great things for His kingdom! No matter how broken or flawed you think you are, He still loves you in spite of it. He doesn’t care about what you did in the past, He cares about what you will do now!
