Step 2: What about Their Faith?

The faith of the people that you select for your team is extremely important. Faith gives a person the ability to stand and believe even when things feel hopeless. Faith is a rock-solid belief that God has the ability to act even when there is no reason to hope. Faith is the strength of the hopeless, the infirmed, the discouraged, and the broken. You need people of faith on your team.

In Mark Chapter 2, we see friends gather together and hatch a plan. The plan was simple. They were going to carry their paralyzed friend to Jesus so that he could be healed. Picture it for a minute. See them gather together. See them stoop and see them lift their friend. Maybe it was a bit rocky at first as they shifted the load between them. And that is the way it is with a team of people. They must find a way to carry the load for a little while. And that's what the paralytic’s friends in Matthew did. They carried their friend. This was not a terrible burden to them, but a burden of love. These men had faith and they were determined that if they could just get their friend to Jesus that he would be healed. Now we all know that deadweight is heavy and that a paralyzed person is by definition deadweight. Yet they carried him. And as they did so, I would guess that they felt the burden more deeply as their journey continued. They may have stumbled and even nearly fell.  

But their muscles didn't give out and their faith didn’t falter. They had formed a plan and they were sticking to it. We all know that most plans have barriers, but we find ways around them.

The paralytic’s friends’ barrier was that there were too many people standing in the way. There were too many other people who needed Jesus’ help. And there were no disabled entrances through which they could enter. So these men of faith made their own entrance by opening up the roof wide enough so they could drop their friend down on ropes right at Jesus’ feet.

You will not heal completely without people of real faith on your team. You will need people who have the ability to come up against barriers and use wisdom and faith to break them down.

 

Next Time: Together Form a Plan