Expectant Faith

I used to meet regularly with the top leaders of the five largest national house church networks in China. We would talk about national level issues and opportunities and challenges.

On one particular day, when we were getting ready to meet, in my mind this was a particularly important meeting, because I was getting ready to go to the United States for an extended period of time and I didn’t know if I would ever get to meet with these guys again. (It turned out I didn’t.)

That was the last time I got to meet with them, but as we were getting ready to meet, the brother who was facilitating the meeting that day … his phone rang. So he talked for a few minutes and then he hung up.

He said, “We won’t be able to meet today, I have to leave.”

I said, “Can’t you at least stay for a couple of hours, so we can talk about the most urgent issues, because I don’t know when we’ll ever get to meet together again.”

He said, “No. I have to go right away.”

I said, “What happened?”

And he said, “Two of our evangelists up in the northeast have just been killed, and I need to go see if God wants to raise them from the dead.”

I said, “Oh”. I wasn’t sure exactly how to respond to that. Sort of took me by surprise.

But I began to think to myself, what would be my response if two of my organizations personnel up in the northeast had just been killed.

Hmm … well I think the first thing I would do would be call some of the other people up in that region to go take care of the bodies, comfort the families … things like that. Then I would place a call to our headquarters in the United States and have them start to notify their relatives in the U.S. Start doing everything they could to deflect any possible media connections, you know for security reasons.

That would probably be my first response.

But why? I believe God can raise the dead. In fact, I know numerous people who themselves or their spouses or their children have been raised from the dead. So why would my response be so different?

I can rationalize all I want to you but the fact of the matter is … it’s because I had a different quality of faith than that brother had.

You see, I believe God could do it … he expected God to do it. I was like the six hundred men gathered under the pomegranate tree with Saul, you know believing, yeah, maybe God can rescue us or at least it’s a cause worth dying for. But that brother had faith like Jonathan — an expectant faith — a faith not based on the earthly visible circumstances, but on the power of God.

So that kind of expectant faith leads to a different kind of life. You see things differently, you react to things differently, your life is different. That kind of expectant faith is the kind that God delights to multiply and we cannot be satisfied with anything less.

More Multiplication Concepts

This concept is part of the “Multiplication Concepts” series by Curtis Sergeant. Consider working through the entire series and challenging someone you know to do it with you. See an entire list of the concepts in the article titled “Multiplication Concepts”.

This same concept is taught in the Zúme Training course using video animation and is translated into 40 languages. This concept of expectant faith is addressed in Zúme Training session 1 called “God Uses Ordinary People”.

Zúme Training is an on-line and in-life learning experience designed for small groups who follow Jesus to learn how to obey His Great Commission and make disciples who multiply.