The Holy Father gave the world a profound Truth document early in his papacy: The Catechism of the Catholic Church. In it you will find a summary of the teachings of the one true faith, presented in an orderly and clear fashion, backed up with ample scriptural references, as well as references to the teachings of the Church Fathers and doctors of the Church such as Saint Thomas Aquinas. It's available online or at any major bookstore, If you can read, you can understand it. The truth is not complicated, even if it is rich, many faceted, and beautiful.
Christopher Cross Doctor Faith
And that's pretty classic. We've read that, we know it, scripture mastery, but we need to dive into this verse and we're going to cross reference it and jump down to verse 27. So let's go down to verse 27. And what I want to do is as we read verse 27, I want you to mark the steps of faith that are outlined in this verse. I'll read verse 27 and I want you guys to mark it and then I'm going to ask you to share what you marked.
She said to me, "So how are you going to get across the swamp?" And I was like, "I'm gonna go around it." And she said, "Well, that's not the fastest way." And I said, "But I don't wanna gonna get dirty. I'm not going to go through the swamp." And she looked at me and she says, "You can't be afraid of the muck. Going through the muck will make it faster. You might get dirty, but you've been avoiding the muck your entire life." And I was like, "You are so right. Like, I can't believe that the muck was what was causing me to lose my faith." That was the changing point. That was when I was like, "I'm gonna get married to him." And then we did. But yeah, that manure, the muck, that is what strengthens us. It's part of the whole plan.
And I think about that a lot that like he can't work with us if we're not in action. We can't, you know, Jenny's story from earlier, she couldn't just decide, "I'm going to have faith that God's gonna heal me." She had to go to her doctor, "Sign me up for that treatment. Give me that medication." Like she had to act and I think we all do. Faith and showing trust requires movement on our part. It requires something to offer up to God to work with.
So for me, I actually think prayer is the single best way I exercise my faith. If you think about it, it's a pretty remarkable thing what we do. Like we think that we can utter words that will reach the creator of the universe, and he will hear them and respond. It's kind of astounding. And one of the things that taught me about the results piece and what I'm really capable of having faith in, one of the things that's done is it's caused me to actually pray about what to pray about. It's been four years ago that we lost my dad to a very fast, aggressive cancer. And from diagnosis to his passing, it was 10 weeks. And we didn't know at the beginning of the diagnosis that it was terminal. And I remember the day that we were going to the doctor and I just had this feeling like this isn't going to be good. And I remember kneeling down in my bedroom to pray and I so desperately wanted to ask the Lord to spare my dad's life. "Just please give us this miracle," and I had the distinct impression in that prayer because I said in my prayer, "Can I pray for a miracle? Is there a miracle here?" 2ff7e9595c
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