Faith or Foolishness?

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The senior pastors of the larger Wesleyan Churches met together on Thursday for an "iron sharpening iron" conversation.

A recurring theme of our discussion was how to discern the difference between great faith and plain old stupidity. It seems like there's a fine line between the two!

John Maxwell and Bill Hybels joined us for dinner, so we asked them the question: When it comes to making big decisions and vision for the future, how do you know the difference between faith and foolishness?

Bill responded, "Success. You won't know for certain until after the fact. If it flies well -- great faith. If it crash lands -- great foolishness. You will know in retrospect. Hindsight is 20/20."

"Seek God's will in prayer," Bill continued, "and then proceed boldly with what you feel called to do. If it flubs, then admit it -- don't hide it. Apologize. Go before the people and say, "We really thought we had God's leading on this, but apparently, it was something else. We messed up and we're sorry."

He further explained that trying to "cover and hide" a dumb mistake just makes it worse. Everybody knows it's a mess up anyway, so you might as well own up to it and learn from it.

John added, "One other thing -- if ego is involved, it WILL be a failure -- even if it looks like success. Before you embark on a great step of faith, you'd better examine your heart and make sure you're doing it with pure motives."

Comments

  1. Anonymous6:27 PM

    Agree with Bill's total response.

    Especially - coverups never work.

    Ego - after all it is God's work not our own.

    ReplyDelete

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