To help the audience understand the access to God that Christians have been granted, Moore used an object lesson of a chair onstage representing the throne of God. A curtain in front of it represented the barrier between God and people that Jesus opened through his death and resurrection.
Moore encouraged attendees to be bold in prayer and to pray for faith if they or others lack it. “God assigned nothing with any more liberty than he did faith,” she said. “Faith cannot under any circumstances be forced. It cannot. Forced faith is false faith.”
Drawing parallels between Jesus and the role of the high priest as described in the Old Testament, Moore emphasized how incredible it is we now have access to God through the blood of Jesus. The veil that formerly separated us from God is now wide open. In light of that, she asked, “Why on earth would we not have prayer lives?”
Q&A With Beth Moore
During the final session on Saturday, Beth Moore took questions from the live audience, as well as from people joining via a simulcast. One of the first questions she addressed was from a woman who said her husband had died seven years ago and that he had been cremated. The woman wanted to know Moore’s thoughts on cremation as she had heard negative opinions about it suggesting that people who are cremated will not go to heaven.
“I don’t think there’s anything theologically wrong with it,” said Moore, who mentioned that in the past she had stronger opinions about cremation than she does now. She observed that the Bible describes people dying in all kinds of ways, citing the deaths of the martyrs in Hebrews 11 and the phrase “The sea gave up the dead that were in it.” She also noted that Apostle Paul was beheaded. “[God’s] having to put bodies back together, whatever state they’re in,” she said.
Moore said that she personally would not have her husband, Keith, cremated because of a traumatic event involving fire that he went through as a young child. But she would never judge anyone else who chooses cremation, particularly since burials are expensive.
Another person asked for advice on what to do when we know God has called us to do something, but we just do not believe that we can do it. Moore said that when the Israelites initially did not go take the Promised Land, it was not because they did not believe in God, but because they did not believe in their own strength. Sometimes, said Moore, addressing our unbelief means making a decision to reject it. “Sometimes it’s a matter of going, ‘I choose to turn from my unbelief,’” she said. Other times, we need God to change our hearts. But, said Moore, there is nothing like persevering in faith and then seeing God come through for us.
Another questioner wanted to know if there had ever been a time in Moore’s life when she felt that God was far away from her or that she was far away from him. If so, how long did that experience last, and how did she come out of it? Moore answered that she had gone through an experience of feeling distant from God. Prior to that happening, she had always dreaded it and had viewed God’s silence as something that she could not survive.
Moore said that pretty early on in her life, perhaps because she had many untrustworthy people around her, she came to depend on Jesus for everything. Even if she was in sin and he was convicting her to repent, she was comforted knowing that he was speaking to her. When she did end up going through a period of time later in her life where God felt distant, that episode taught Moore not to base her faith on her feelings. “It was miserable,” she said. “But you know what? It didn’t kill me. And it taught me to know what I know instead of know what I feel.”
