How To Turn The Flywheel of Fearless Faith

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When I was in my early twenties, I remember being afraid that God would ask me to be a missionary to some scary place where I’d have to eat bugs to survive and go without a hot shower for months. Maybe that sounds outrageous, but God has asked people to do even crazier things than that, even martyrdom. And because we all know that, untamed fear can really gnaw at our souls. Fear, closely followed by pride, is perhaps our number one barrier to trusting God.
Think about it for a moment, if you could completely remove your ability to be afraid, is there anything that would hold you back from any adventure, situation or challenge? When you ask God to change you or speak to you through the power of the Holy Spirit, how much of you do you actually hold back because you’re afraid that He might actually follow through on the request? How would your reaction change if you could become truly fearless?

While I’m light years away from being fearless (truly, I think my brain is hardwired for worry), isn’t that the kind of faith we all desire, but are often too afraid to actually pursue? So many times, I think I have advanced my trust level to meteoric heights, and then life throws me a curve ball, and I find myself deep in a pit of worry rather than relying on God. Ok, so there might be a little bit of pride creeping in there as well, but as I thought about the mechanics of faith building, one concept kept coming to my mind over and over… the flywheel. Flywheels are notoriously difficult to get going. If you don’t know what one is, picture an extremely heavy metal wheel at least four times taller than you are mounted on an axle. Now imagine that your job is to push on it to get it spinning. Those initial efforts will be painfully slow. In fact, it may take you hours to make a single rotation. But after a while, it starts to get a little easier. Then, ever so gradually, the flywheel will begin to store up rotational energy, and the more you turn it consistently, the easier it becomes. Finally, momentum works in your favor, and although you are not pushing any harder, the flywheel is spinning at a rate you can hardly keep up with. 

Building a faith that becomes fearless is similar to the flywheel, with one gigantic difference: we don’t push it on our own. We can’t do it ourselves, but neither will God do it without our participation. In this symbiotic relationship, lies one of the greatest mysteries described in the Bible. How can we come to faith by grace alone, yet God asks us to expend effort “to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” in Philippians 2:12? The key is in the next verse: “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” We have to turn the flywheel, but God has to move in us in order to motivate us to turn it. I Corinthians 15:10 Paul talks about how hard he’s worked, but then he says “but it wasn’t I” that did it. That is the paradox of the symbiotic relationship. It is and it isn’t — all at the same time. We have to bend our will, which certainly takes a great amount of effort at times, to invite the Holy Spirit to take control of our lives, but then God performs the transformative work itself. John Piper once said of faith, “It is a doing, whose doing is the will to let another do all the doing.” Ephesians 2:8-9 says, "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."

Time is the other key factor in the flywheel’s mounting energy. It can take a lot of it to get the flywheel going, but the effects last even longer. Unfortunately, time is not something most of us like to expend. We want a miracle now. A magic pill. Instant improvement. But the work of the Holy Spirit is more often slow and steady than immediate — and that’s to our benefit. When we have to invest ourselves for long periods of time, our knowledge is deeper, our experience more indelible, and our appreciation more enduring. The beautiful thing is that the more we move and operate under the Holy Spirit’s guidance, the more we will desire to move and operate in under His guidance. The Holy Spirit magnifies our efforts and the flywheel turns all the more efficiently, producing even more for the Kingdom. 

How the Flywheel of Faith Works
The other reason the flywheel is such a great example of building faith, is because it is circular. It all begins with the first step of faith: trusting in a specific promise we find clearly stated in the Bible. Then, as we take God at His Word, we begin to act on stated commands in His Word, the scriptures. As our faith increases, we begin to learn how to trust the “still, small voice” we hear in prayer time. Once we’ve grown accustomed to His voice, both in the Word and prayer, we advance into hearing Him throughout the day, guiding us and asking us to be the hands and feet of Jesus. And with each small step, the flywheel gains more and more strength, focus and energy. It may be something seemingly small, like learning to obey when the Spirit whispers, "talk to that cashier at the grocery store. She needs encouragement today.” But each act of obedience builds up to the bigger steps that revolutionize our lives. With each step, you may think you’re not ready, but by yielding to Him, God will make you ready in ways that will astonish you. I often hear people ask, “how do I know God’s will?” The answer is: start with what’s been clearly commanded in the Word, obey consistently, and as your faithfulness grows, He will reveal Himself to you in greater and greater ways. Scoffing at the little things because we’re longing for God to give us something “grand” to do, is one of the surest ways to prevent the flywheel from ever turning at all. 

As the days and years roll by, we simply need to patiently keep repeating what He’s asked us to do, over and over. God’s work in us may be mysterious, but His directions are simple to understand. The difficulty comes in the following and the trusting. Each time we repeat a step of surrender and obedience, the boldness of our belief and execution increases and our consistency improves. Eventually, what seemed so difficult in previous turns, becomes remarkably satisfying. We become more joyful in the execution. And finally, we learn to trust in God's wisdom, what He provides, and in the calling He’s laid on our lives. When we surrender our wills to His guidance, He fills us so that we not only do it well, but we find immeasurable, deep, and inexplicable pleasure in doing the very thing we didn’t want to do in the beginning. Of course, as our faith flywheel ramps up, the things the Holy Spirit asks us to do get more and more challenging, but the amazing thing is that we are more and more ready for them. In time, when you look back at the trail of things that got your flywheel going, you come to realize that some of the most arduous ones are the very things you actually savor and relish doing now. 

The Flywheel in Action
When I first started tithing, I freaked out every time I wrote the check. But God was teaching me to obey, one week at a time. I wasn’t joyful or content about it in the beginning (and that’s an understatement!). But the more faithful I was, the more God increased the fruit of faith in me. Now, tithing is pure joy for me as I worship God in giving back to Him. This blog post would be a mile long if I told you all the ways I’ve seen positive changes in my life through the practice of tithing. Considering money —and the potential lack of it — is a debilitating fear and source of pride for many people, the flywheel of faith applied to personal finances could radically alter their perspectives over time. 

Perhaps the ultimate demonstration of faith fearlessness is Mother Teresa. I know she’s a bit of a cliche, but her flywheel was spinning beyond comprehension. It’s the only way she could’ve done what she did. Most of us remember her at the peak of her global popularity and admiration. People of all faiths around the world were awestruck by her sacrifice and would say, “I could never do that.” But there was a time when young Anjezë (that was her Albanian birth name) also had to push her first turn of the flywheel. And I bet it was hard for her too. She didn’t start pushing her faith as Mother Teresa. She began as an ordinary girl with an emerging belief, just like everyone else does. 

Lamentations 3:22-23 says that God’s mercies are new every morning. The Message translation says His merciful love is created new for us every day. In the same principle of the flywheel, God’s mercies will change, grow and multiply to suit the tasks He’s called us to do. As our prayer life grows, the requests get bigger, but so do the miracles. As the leading of the Spirit becomes more challenging and we obey, our fears become less and less. The mercies Mother Teresa received each morning in the streets of Calcutta, are different than your mercies, or my mercies. And we cannot store them up — like the manna God provided to the Israelites in the desert — we are only given enough for today. We also cannot “feel” the mercies of tomorrow. They will be given to us in the portion that we need them on the day they are needed. That’s what faith is all about. Trusting God that He will give you the wisdom, strength, endurance, hope, peace, and love for each day as it comes — and to be comfortable operating not on what you know or feel right now, but on what you believe God will do — is what is meant by Hebrews 11:1 when it says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  
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