Rappelling and Faith in God

Rappelling and Faith in God

WALKING BACKWARDS OFF A CLIFF CAN TEACH YOU A LOT ABOUT YOURSELF

To be honest, the first time, I didn’t actually walk; it was more like a crawl… a shinny actually.  I was teaching at a college in Phoenix, Arizona, and one day several of my students approached me. “Mr. Anders,” they said, “we are going up on Squaw Peak to do a little rappelling off some of the cliffs on Saturday. Would you like to go?”

It was hard for me to say no. For one thing, I didn’t want to appear chicken. Besides, never having been rappelling before, I didn’t understand how truly terrifying it would be.  So, stifling every instinct to the contrary, I nonchalantly said, “Sure.”

When we got to the mountain the next Saturday, I’ll never forget walking over to the edge and looking down for the first time–the cliff was the height of a ten-story building!

They explained to me that the rope, which was the diameter of my thumb, was rated to hold 1200 pounds.

Uh-huh.

So they clipped me into a webbed diaper-like contraption made out of seat belt material, threaded the rope through a big paper clip attached to my diaper and said, “Just lean back against the rope, and walk backward off the cliff.”

Right!

I didn’t trust the rope. As a kid back in Indiana, we used to swing on ropes in the barn that were as big around as my wrist. Those would hold a guy. This little thing might hold – it might not.  And the big paper clip (carabineer) that held me in my seat belt diaper and attached me to the rope–well, it didn’t look strong enough to hold a Thanksgiving turkey. I didn’t have faith in my equipment, and I was terrified.

But there I was. Halfway over the edge. Too proud to climb back up; too scared to lean back and walk down. So I began to sort of shinny down, holding the rope so tightly that I didn’t even need any other equipment. With my legs wrapped around the rope, hunched over in a modified fetal position, I squirmed down over the edge.  Not a pretty sight.

Before I had gotten a third of the way down, my arms were trembling and almost useless. My kneecaps were sore from bumping against the face of the cliff, my hands and elbows were bruised and aching. I hung there, swinging gently like a ham in a smokehouse, lips and cheek pressed against the face of the cliff, wondering if I would ever see another sunrise.

With infinite patience, the leader of the group yelled down, “Lean back, Mr. Anders.”

In utter contradiction to reality, I yelled up, “I am leaning back!”

Finally, with exhaustion diminishing my will to live, I concluded that I would never get out of there alive anyway if I didn’t do something, so I did what he said. I leaned back against the rope until my feet were flat against the face of the cliff. Then I let the rope slip through the carabineer… and, I scaled effortlessly down the face of the cliff!

Once down, I rushed back up to go again.

What I learned that day was that when rappelling, you have to trust your rope. You have to believe that it will hold you, and act accordingly. If you trust in your own strength to get you down, it will sap every ounce of energy before you even get close to the ground, and leave you hanging helplessly in space.

When it comes to the spiritual life, we are like rappellers. The cliff is life. The rope is God. If we try to make it over the cliff in our own strength and enough things go wrong (and they will), it will sap the life out of us. But if we lean back on the rope, believing that God will hold us, we make it down the cliff of life.

God has put faith at the center of the Christian life in three steps:

  1. Reveal truth: God revealed His truth to humanity.  In the earliest days, He did this directly through prophets, dreams, visions, or direct contact.   However, He also oversaw the writing down of His revelation so that His primary means of revelation today is the Bible (Hebrews 4:12).
  2. Require faith: Many of the things that God asks of us in His revelation take us 180 degrees in the opposite direction of our natural inclinations.  Therefore, we will only respond appropriately if we believe God and trust His word. When we trust we obey (John 14:15).  When we do not obey, it is because we do not trust.
  3. Reward Obedience: We reap the consequences of our faith.  If we follow God in faithful and trusting obedience, God rewards us (Psalm 19:11).  If we do not, He chastens us (Hebrews 12:4-11).  HIs desire is to nurture our faith by rewarding us for obedience, strengthening our faith and increasing our readiness to obey.

Conclusion

We see that faith is the heart of the Christian life.  All God wants from us is to believe in Him and trust Him, to do as He says.

  • Without faith, it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.” Hebrews 11:6
  • The righteous shall live by faith.”Romans 1:17
  • We walk by faith and not by sight.” 2 Corinthians 5:7

So, just as a rappeller must trust the rope, the Christian must trust God, trust His word, believing that as we do, God will demonstrate His truth to be reliable.


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