By Sandra Bost
I have the opportunity to speak at a women’s conference this weekend in Louisiana. When my friend called to ask if I’d come, I was instantly torn. I felt a deep excitement for the message and opportunity to see my friend, but my immediate inner response was reluctance—a predictable little pattern I notice whenever an opportunity threatens to expand my comfort zone (or my platform). It’s easy to blame this hesitation on a humble feeling of “unworthiness,” but if I’m being brutally honest, it actually stems from a lack of faith. By focusing entirely on my own inadequacies instead of God’s authority, I realized my spiritual posture was (and is) a lack of faith.
The conference is ironically entitled “Faith to Move Forward,” with a deep dive into Isaiah 54. As I started reading and praying through the scriptures for direction, the irony wasn’t lost on me: God was telling Israel to actively trust Him while sitting right in the middle of a barren wasteland, mirroring my own reluctance.
For some context, before this passage takes place, the Israelites had been conquered, Jerusalem was in ruins, and the people had been dragged off into exile in Babylon. They felt completely abandoned, hopeless, and culturally bankrupt. Enter Isaiah 54:2-3. God uses the metaphor of a barren woman and tells her to radically change her physical posture to match a massive promise He is about to fulfill.
He tells her: “Enlarge the place of your tent, and let the curtains of your habitations be stretched out; do not hold back; lengthen your cords and strengthen your stakes. For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left.” (ESV)
Basically, God is telling them to act on the assumption that an abundance is coming. The catch? He tells them to do all this while the tent is still completely empty.
It’s easy to buy a bigger tent after the blessings arrive and space gets tight. It takes real, gritty faith to stretch out your curtains and hammer down stakes when you’re still standing in a desolate, empty room. It requires active obedience in a barren place. It requires preparation.
This act of preparation—building the tent before the blessing shows up—is exactly where intellectual belief turns into active faith. But as we step out into that open space, we quickly realize that faith doesn’t look the same in every season. Throughout scripture, our Biblical brothers and sisters modeled this in very different ways. As I was packing my bags, three specific postures of faith came to mind.
The first belongs to Abraham, who stood on a mountain of absolute certainty. When God asked him to sacrifice his only son, Abraham didn’t hesitate. As he was packing up the donkey, Genesis 22:5 notes that he told his travel companions that he and Isaac would go up the mountain to worship, and they—meaning both of them—would return. Abraham’s posture was rooted in the absolute guarantee that God keeps His promises. He believed that even if he went through with the sacrifice, God was fully capable of pulling off a resurrection right there on the altar. That is a wild, unwavering certainty.
The second posture belongs to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (though I prefer their Hebrew names: Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah), who found themselves smack dab in the middle of a fiery furnace. When the king threatened to cook them alive for refusing to bow to his idol, Daniel 3:16-18 tells us these guys didn’t flinch. They told King Nebuchadnezzar that their God was perfectly capable of delivering them from the flames. But then they added the ultimate mic-drop phrase: “But even if He doesn’t…” This is the posture of unconditional trust. Their faith wasn’t transactional; it wasn’t dependent on a miracle. They knew God could save them, but their loyalty was fixed, even if His plan involved letting them perish in the fire.
The third story is where I found myself when that phone call came in—the posture of honest, struggling faith. It’s the desperate father in Mark 9 who was exhausted from trying to find healing for his son. When he begs Jesus for help, Jesus replies, “All things are possible if you believe.” And then verse 24 hits us right in the feelings. The dad cries out, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”
Unlike the mountain-moving certainty of Abraham or the unwavering resolve of the three Hebrew boys, this father brings his raw, exhausted reality straight to Jesus. He desperately wants to believe, but he is completely upfront about his doubts and his weakness.
My favorite part of the entire story is that Jesus doesn’t reject him for his hesitation. He doesn’t tell him to come back when he has more confidence. He meets him right where he is, accepts his highly imperfect faith, and heals his son anyway. It shows that even a fragile, struggling faith is plenty when it is placed in the right hands.
When God tells us to enlarge our tents and stretch our curtains, our reluctance usually looks at our empty hands and says, “But I don’t have enough fabric.” Faith prepares the space anyway, trusting that God will not only provide the canvas—He will supply the hammer, the stakes, the longer ropes, and the strength to build it. And then, He sends the promised blessings to fill every single square inch for our good and His glory. And that is a promise we can definitely pitch our tent on.
Connect with Bost on social media platforms by searching for “Sandra Mullins Bost.”
