Welcome to Faithfield Living.

This is your host, Kristen with Faithfield Living.

This is your host, Kristen.

Today is a solo episode for me and I want to talk about taking another look or looking again at what is right in front of us or what is going on in our lives and what can we gain or ascertain or learn from that?

And we'll look at what does the Bible say about looking again, looking closer and looking more carefully at what's around us or right in front of us or what we're doing, hopefully still believing to happen.

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So I don't know how many of you are gardeners, but I have had an herb garden for many years, probably decades.

And off and on I've done.

I've grown vegetables and things like that.

So this year I have.

In last year I've grown beans, mostly pole beans, but sometimes bush beans.

And actually my favorite bean is a rattlesnake bean.

And it's so it's a green bean, but it has like this purplish kind of specks on it that makes it look more like snakeskin.

But anyways, the reason I bring beans up is when I was in the garden the other day, I was thinking to myself, every time I come out to check the bean vines, it's really just a big arch with just bean plants covering it.

You know, it's.

It almost looks like I'm camouflaging what's underneath it.

So there's an abundance of green bean plants or vines.

But every time I go out there, I find green beans that I did not notice the time before.

Now sometimes I see ones that are really small and they're not ready to be picked, but Guaranteed, if I go out later in the day or I go out the next morning, there are full size beans that I did not see.

And I believed that the morning of or the day before I looked everywhere and saw all the beans that needed to be picked.

But that isn't the case.

And so I started thinking about, wow, you know, we really do have to look again at so many things, our perceptions we need to look at again at the things around us, maybe what we think, what we're asking God for.

And so as I started to think about those beans on the bean plants and thinking about, wow, I have to look again.

Because every time I look, I see something new.

I see more, I it is more plentiful, there's more abundance.

And it made me start thinking about what does the Bible say about look again, what does it tell us?

So I'm going to share with you three scriptures and examples in the Bible that talk to us about looking again.

And it really saying to us, look again in your faith, look again and be persistent.

And I think it's also saying, look again but keep believing God for what he says he's going to do and how he's going to work, what he promises.

Okay, so the first one I want to talk about is, it's in 1 Kings 18, 43 and 44.

I'm going to pull that up so I can read part of it to you.

Let's see.

So in 1 Kings 18, the prophet Elijah is talking to a woman, I'm sorry, talking to his servant, and goes and asked him to look for rain.

Go out to the hill, I think, and look for rain.

So here's what it says.

Go and look toward the sea.

He told a servant.

And he went up and looked.

There is nothing there.

He said seven times.

Elijah said, go back.

The seventh time, the servant reported, a cloud as small as a man's hand is rising from the sea.

So Elijah said, go and tell Ahab, hitch up your chariot and go down before the rain stops you.

And so it says, meanwhile the sky grew black with clouds and the wind rose and a heavy rain started falling and Ahab rode off to Jezreel.

Well, here is basically what happened is when the, when the servant said, I don't see anything.

And then Elijah said, look seven times.

And the servant finally saw the small cloud appear, which then it started to rain.

He was telling him to keep looking again, right?

He's saying, have faith that it will happen.

Right?

Believe God for the promise that we are going to that it's going to rain.

I know it's going to rain.

So that was the first one about looking again.

Sometimes we don't see it.

Sometimes it doesn't happen as quick as we want.

Right?

What God promises us the next is, it's in Mark8.25, and it's where the blind man asked Jesus to heal him.

And so here's what it says.

He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village.

When he had spit on the man's eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, do you see anything?

He looked up and said, I see people.

They look like trees walking around.

Once more, Jesus put his hands on the man's eyes.

Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.

Jesus sent him home saying, don't even go into the village.

So once again, it took a second time, a second look, for the blind man to see clearly, for him to believe that God had healed him, for his eyes to get into focus.

And I think sometimes that's what happens to us.

We believe God for the prayer to be answered or the promise to happen for a short period.

But then so many times we want.

We don't want to if we don't see it happening, if we don't see how God's working, we don't want to try to fix our focus.

We don't want to keep our sight focused on God and believing him and knowing that he's working on that promise or that prayer or whatever it is.

We don't know when that will be answered.

We don't know how soon.

But he wants us to believe him, even for the impossible.

Okay, the next example is in 2 Kings 4:1 through 7.

And it's the story of the widow who's left with a or facing crushing debt from when her husband passed.

So let me pull that up.

But basically this is talking about we need to have the faith and then take action and be obedient to believe God can do impossible things in any and every situation.

So this is what that says.

The wife of a man from the company of the prophets cried out to Elisha, your servant, my husband is dead.

And you know that he revered the Lord, but now his creditor is coming to take my two boys as his slaves.

Elisha replied to her, how can I help you?

Tell me, what do you have in your house?

Your servant has nothing there at all, she said, except a small jar of olive oil.

Elisha said, go around and ask all of your neighbors for empty jars.

Don't ask for just A few.

Then go inside and shut the door behind you.

And your sons pour oil into all the jars, and as each is filled, put it to one side.

She left him and shut the door behind her.

And her sons, they brought the jars to her and she kept pouring.

When all the jars were full, she said to her son, bring me another one.

But he replied, there is not a jar left.

Then the oil stopped flowing.

She went and told the man of God, and he said, go sell the oil and pay your debts.

You and your sons can live on what is left.

I love this example about it's not just look again, right?

It is look again.

Because she didn't have oil that would have filled all of those vessels.

But yet there was enough.

It was enough to have abundance.

And so it required her to have faith and then to take action for what the prophet was saying to her and be obedient.

That he said, just do this.

And once again, God is saying to us, turn.

Or I mean, sorry, that's that scripture saying, turn to God first listen to what you're being told to do.

And in your faithfulness and in your action.

And when we look closely, when we look carefully, when we take action, and we do it out of faith, and we do it most importantly, I think, out of belief, we keep believing God that He can do miracles, that he can do the impossible, that he can provide for us, he can provide for us abundantly.

Even when things seem dire, even when that woman, the widow, thought she was going to lose her children, after she lost her husband, after she thought she had no way, no possible way to pay off this debt, then something that she already had in her possession was multiplied and she was able to live and have, you know, what she needed to keep her sons and keep her home and keep going.

How amazing is that?

And so I think the idea that we need to look again in our lives both for, like I said, the promises, for the prayers that were waiting for them to be answered, for abundance, but also we need to look again at our hearts.

We need to look at again, at our perception about things.

We need to think about, how are we seeing God?

Do we see God so powerful and almighty and all knowing that we know he is bigger than any problem, any circumstance that we are walking through, because I know that myself and so many of us tend to see God as smaller than he is.

We see our problems as so mighty, and we focus on the problem instead of focusing on the God that can conquer all.

And so I bring this up to share that with you.

And to remind you and to encourage you, look again and to ask yourself, what do I need to look again at in my life?

What do I need to believe God for?

Do I need to believe in a bigger way?

Do I, do I need to where do I need to grow my faith and believe God for everything that he can do and will do in my life?

God also wants us to praise him for the prayers we're asking for him as if he's already done the work, right?

He wants us to have so much belief that we know and we are believing him, that he is.

It is done right, that it has already been done, even if we don't see it yet in our human timeline.

And the last thing I would say is I read something pretty interesting the other day that was.

It was a biblical finance person, and they were explaining that there is often times where we have a skill, a talent, an ability, maybe a resource right in front of us, but we do not recognize it for something that can create more abundance in our life.

And there's obviously other examples in the Bible of this.

But I just remind you, if we look again at everything with new eyes, you know, look at them from a biblical, biblical perspective, what can we see?

How can we find that what we already have, a resource we already have, a talent we already have, can be turned into more and especially more for the kingdom.

And so I just want to encourage you today and remind you.

So I just want to encourage each of us to just look again, to pay attention, to change our perspective, to reread or to pray on or meditate on God's Word.

And actually a practice that this reminds me of is one where you actually read the same Bible verse three times, which is called lectio divina, which means divine reading or sacred reading.

But it's basically four steps.

And what it is is you read the passage slowly and carefully, often more than one time, and you're kind of looking for what stands out to you.

Is it a word or a phrase?

And then you just take time to reflect and meditate on that word or phrase that caught your attention.

You know, that maybe God's trying to show you or speak to you.

And then you respond to God by praying to him, by, you know, thinking about or sharing what you.

What's come up for you for that reading.

And then last is just contemplating it.

So going beyond what the, what the words are that you were pulled out from that scripture and just, you know, sit with it, just, you know, let it kind of get into your soul and so once again, that practice is another way to look again, right?

Or to let it get inside of you.

Because when we read scripture one time, or a devotional, which I do regularly, I mean, read a devotional, it may not hit, right?

Or we don't give it enough time to settle for us to notice.

So really, when we say look again, we're saying, look closer.

Look more carefully.

Be obedient and take the time to hear God trying to speak to us.

And then how is he prompting us in our lives to take action and to be obedient in faith?

And so that's maybe one little thing you can try if you've never tried, that is doing that, you know, reading the scripture three times and walking through those steps.

But once again, that is what God's saying, right?

It's just look again and keep believing him for what he tells us.

Keep building our faith, right?

We want to look again at all of this part of our lives.

We want to look again at what scripture's saying to us and what it's speaking to us.

Until next time, I hope you have a great week.

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