Now faith is......

It seems to me that it is hardly possible to read through the pages of the bible, and to search through the gospels as we see Jesus ministering to people with the power of God, without being made aware of how important our faith is to God.
From Genesis to Revelation it is the cord that ties men and women to God, it is what gives us a "good report" and we are told that which pleases God.
By faith we are told the old testament saints of God subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness,obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,quenched the violence of fire,escaped the edge of the sword,out of weakness were made strong,became valiant in battle,and turned to flight the armies of aliens.
In other words they overcame and received Gods powerful hand of deliverance from death and destruction, and worked the righteous works that God had ordained for their lives all by faith.
And we are surrounded the bible tells us by this cloud of witnesses who are cheering us on now from heaven, to excel and run the race of our callings taking their example and bearing our own testimony to it,by the works that we will do by faith.
Paul puts it the most bluntly in the new testament when he says that whatever is not of faith is sin.
Having said all this it is therefore a tragedy to see how little faith and the development of faith in a believers life is taught or emphasised in the church.
A multitude of misconceptions swirl around the head of many Christians when it comes to the subject of faith, what it is and how we can grow in it, and exercise it to bring glory to God.
Some people reject what they call faith teaching citing it as presumption, others dismiss their own struggle for faith with the excuse that some Christians seem to have more than others and evidently they are one who does not have much faith.
Yet others think that the path to grow in their own faith is through greater prayer and fasting,while yet others view those who are bold in their faith as arrogant and boastful.
It is important for us to root out those areas of unbelief in our own hearts because they are what will hinder us in going forward in our obedience with the Lord.
When was the last time that you honestly prayed that the Lord would root out the areas of unbelief in your heart and replace it with strong faith?
When was the last time that you heard a sermon dealing specifically with the call to relinquish unbelief and to embrace an attitude of faith that was directed to believers and not to the unsaved?
I venture to say for many it would be a long time if ever.
In this blog I would like to begin a call and challenge to all who read it to rise up and become the men and women of God that we have been called to be, and we can only ever achieve that by growing in our our capacity to use and exercise faith.

A number of years ago I know a woman who had a spiritual experience where she was "taken "by God in a vision and looked down upon many nations and continents as if she was flying over them.
In this vision she saw a great darkness covering people and nations but here and there she began to see lights piercing through the darkness.
She began to recognize these bright lights as Christians and the light as the presence of God and the Glory of God radiating out of them to all in darkness around them.
She also was made aware of other Christians in this experience however instead of having this aura of light surrounding them they seemed to be under a weight of heaviness and affected by the darkness that was surrounding them.
In the experience she sensed almost overwhelmingly the heart of Gods griefs for those in the vision who were still in darkness, and imagined that it must be for those who were lost.
The Holy Spirit spoke to her and said that His grief was for those Christians who were still succumbing to the darkness and she was given to understand that the Christians who walked in great light were those who walked by faith.
These were the ones who trusted God implicitly and took Him unfailingly at his word.
Those Christians who were not taking God at his word were not radiating the light of His Glory in the same manner and to the same degree.
This encounter which happened over twenty years ago deeply impacted this woman of God and is I believe a powerful illustration of how our faith appears in the spirit realm not only to God but also to the forces of darkness.
I have seen this in my own life as I have observed people of great faith there is an aura of joy and inner strength that seems to pour out of them, and a tangible sense of the presence of God.
So why is there so much misconception about this vital subject of faith?
In part I believe that it is because our enemy the devil has assiduously tried to muddy the waters to put stumbling blocks before believers so that they will not take their responsibility to exercise their faith as they can and ought.
And he accomplishes this through lying to them.
There is as I have said a common but insidious misconception about faith that runs along the lines of thinking that some people have more and some less.
God however is no respecter of persons and the bible says that he has dealt to every man the measure of faith.
"For I say,through the grace given to me,to every one who is among you,not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think,but to think soberly,as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.(the authorised says "the measure")
God is most emphatically no respecter of persons.
He did not come to us when we were saved and decree "To you I give one portion of faith, and to you I give four measures", and yet again turning to a third person say "And to you I apportion ten measures of faith"
Spiritual gifts and callings are different but when it comes to faith the bible is clear and unambiguous, that he has dealt to every one of us a measure of faith.
Irrespective of who you are when you got born again the Holy Spirit placed within your spirit a measure of faith.
How you develop that faith in order for it to grow is up to you, but nobody was dealt insufficient faith when they were born again.
This scripture in Romans chapter 12 lays to rest the misconception that God arbitrarily doles out faith in different portions and in different measures.
That is therefore that first root of unbelief that we need to lay the axe to in our thinking.
Another very informative scripture is found in Ephesians chapter 2 and verses 8 - 10 which says,
"For by grace you have been saved through faith,and that not of yourselves it is the gift of God,not of works,lest anyone should boast.
For we are his workmanship,created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them."
In this scripture we are told that our salvation was a free gift not by works but by grace and it came through faith.
But the faith itself by which we are saved is also a gift for we are told,
"By grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves it is the gift of God."
Faith, the faith by which we are saved is a gift of God.
When you made Jesus the Lord of your life the Holy Spirit deposited this saving faith into your spirit and faith in God was kindled inside of you.
God in that moment imparted to your spirit a brand new nature and one of the fruits of that nature was faith.
Faith is a real substance, it is a spiritual force that resides on the inside of every child of God and as we learn to grow in our faith and put our faith to work it is the primary key in our spiritual lives by which we learn to overcome.
I believe that one of the reasons why the woman that I cited saw an aura of Gods powerful presence surrounding those Christians who walked in faith is because faith is what enables us to overcome whatever obstacles life may throw at us.
We are not meant to be under life's burdens but rather to experience victory in the midst of every challenge that life throws at us, and faith is the key to this victory.
John the Apostle put it this way
"Whatever is born of God overcomes the world and this is the victory that has overcome that world even our faith." 1 John 5 ,vs 4
Do you realize that as a christian you have world overcoming faith in you.
Because you have been born of God and are His child and have this gift of overcoming faith abiding inside of you, you can face squarely every one of life's challenges and crisis with the joyful expectation that you have already overcome, and therefore the challenge that you are facing can never destroy you.
Peter in his epistle calls this faith "exceedingly precious"and to be sure it is,far more so than any other earthly or material treasure that we may find.
How tragic then is it when Christians go through life with this exceedingly precious gift of faith lying dormant and barely believing God for anything at all.
The truth is that much of the church is still living by sight and not by faith inverting the order that God intends for us.
Rather we should be walking by faith and not by sight, for we live in a supernatural realm, the world of the spirit,and faith is the main thread of this spiritual life.
If we do not live by faith in God then we will live very much within the "safe" boundaries of our five physical senses of what we can touch and taste and handle and feel and see and appreciate by the evidence of our natural sight and natural reason.
That is like a goldfish being won at a fair and brought home in the confines of the plastic bag that it is kept in, and instead of be placed in a tank kept in the bag, eventually it would perish.
We are created to walk in the spirit realm and live in that realm, not in some mystical way but to live and abide and walk in the spirit which means to live by faith in God out of this new life and out of the new center of this new creation which God has given birth to inside of us.
It means to live with your spirit and not your soul in the ascendancy.
Imagine if that fish was let lose in an ocean and free to swim as far and as fast as it desired to.
This is or should be a picture of a believer living in the spirit and walking in the spirit by faith.
Faith has to grow, because it was designed by God to do so.
However you and I know that if you were to take any seed and plant it in the wrong environment and fail to water it it simply will not grow
Our reborn human spirits are the soil out of which our faith grows and what we feed our faith on makes all the difference in the world.
In 2 Thessalonians Paul writes
"We are bound to thank God always for you,brethren,as is fitting,because your faith grows exceedingly,and the love of every one of you all abounds towards each other."
Paul commends these believers in Thessalonia because the initial faith which they had received has now grown, and grow not just a little but exceedingly.
This is the expectation of our heavenly Father for each and every one of us.
There is a phrase in the scripture which I quoted from Ephesians chapter 2 that is of paramount importance to us in understanding how faith operates in our lives.
"For by grace you have been saved through faith,and that not of yourselves;it is the gift of God"
This faith that God deposited inside of us when we were born again is not of ourselves it is of God.
What does this mean.
It means that it is faith from God and of him, not a human faith but a spiritual supernatural deposit of the faith of God himself that came out of His heart and was measured to you.
There is a law called the law of reciprocals.
When you take a magnet and place the right end on end they lock together but if you try and invert the ends they actually repel each other.
This faith which we posses is not of ourselves, that is it does not belong to human nature.
It only locks in to God and to what he has said.
It is designed to be attracted to the living God and the words of his authority.
It will never work if we are placing our faith in human words or human ideas or human circumstances.
It was never intended to do so.
It is not of ourselves it is of God, and feeds and grows when it is built upon Gods word and nothing else.
Many people say "You should have faith in me"
No I should not.
I do have a responsibility to love you and to pray for you but I only am meant to place my faith in God.
Others may say "I have faith that my circumstances will change",but again we need to be careful over our wording.
My faith is never to be placed in my circumstances but only in God and in what he has said.
Certainly we can believe that God can change our circumstances but my faith is set upon him not the circumstances changing.
The word of God is the spiritual food that we must feed upon in order to grow in our faith
"So then faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God"Rom 10--vs 17
In Hebrews chapter 11 which has often been regarded as the great faith chapter we read the following words,
"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,the evidence of things not seen."
Notice the insertion of the word now.
Now faith is.
Like the children of Israel who daily collected the manna in the desert faith is always for now, it never reminisces over yesterdays blessings or daydreams only about the future being different.
Rather faith now is.
It is never "I used to believe",or "I will believe",rather it is always "I do believe"
Faith reaches into the future and affects it for positive change,but it is rooted and grounded in what we currently believe and what we are presently thinking
Faith is something that we must exercise "Now" in order to change our tomorrow's.
The passage in Hebrews continues,
"For by it the elders obtain a good report.
By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible."
What a powerful sentence.
Everything that we see around, all of creation, every leaf and flower and living organism and natural resort, every piece of furniture carved from wood that came from tree that grew out of the earth came originally from what God said when he spoke these things into existence.
"The things which are seen were not made of tings that are visible"
In other word there is a prior greater reality behind everything that is visible and that can be seen and it is the greater reality of Gods word which at one point was spoken and brought all these things into existence.
So faith always builds upon the unshakable foundation of who God is, upon His throne and the Word of His power.
"By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God"
And by faith we understand that our worlds are framed by what God has said and that everything is subject to change when we believe what God has said and hold fast to our confession of his word unwavering until the end.
The Genesis account of creation shows how God framed the worlds by his word,
"Then God said,.............And there was "
The entire creation account reveals this pattern of God the creator speaking forth his heart and minds intent and so it became.
And the book of Hebrew reveals to us that it is by that same word that all that he has created is being upheld and sustained.
Can we not see the centrality of Gods word to the development of our own faith?
Gods word has lost none of its power or force to create and bring change and transformation and new life.
It is full of Gods life and the book of Hebrews tells us living and active.
Not an archive of past events and dead.
No living and active.
Able to bring change into your life and into mine if we will speak it and confess it over the circumstances of our own lives.
And if we will become completely assured of it truthfulness where we are concerned.
You may say "I would never doubt the bible"
However if we believe what God has said then there is always a corresponding action to our faith.
James says that faith without deeds is dead.
We cannot say "I believe" and then by our actions negate and deny our confession.
If we truly believe then our lives very often would be different and then we would bear more fruit to God.
Abraham understood this principle so well as he was placed in the position of having to believe for the impossible, in this case a son.
Then after the son of promise was born he needed to exercise his faith in the power of God to literally raise his son from the dead after he had slayed him with a knife and offered him up as a burn offering upon the altar of sacrifice,which is fully what he expected to do.
He also believed that through his seed a nation would be born, and Jesus said that "Abraham rejoiced to see my day, he saw it and was glad."
So it is also evident that Abraham's faith was in the coming redeemer who would be given birth through his natural line of descent.
Not bad for an elderly man who could not by the law of nature have a son with his elderly wife.
Everything that God has called you and I to do that originates from him is humanly speaking impossible, and therefore will always require faith to bring it to pass.

"Well the things that I have been doing are not humanly impossible",you may say.
Then you are very likely not following Gods best plan for your life,because He always requires faith in us to bring these things to pass.
We can see the way that Abraham took hold of Gods word and brought it to pass, and certainly we also can take great encouragement to do likewise.
"He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief",
the book of Romans tells us, but
"Was strengthened in faith,giving glory to God,and being fully persuaded that what he had promised he was also able to perform."
He became "fully persuaded"
It did not matter if his wife was to old to conceive and barren when she was not too old.
It did not matter whether he was physically too old to sire another child.
It did not matter that the promise that God had spoken was almost twenty years old, yet he became fully persuaded.
I do not imagine that Abraham got there overnight but thank God he did get there.
I have no doubt whatsoever that had Abraham not been fully persuaded he would not "have become" a father of many nations.
God required him to develop and exercise his faith in the promise of God in order to become what God had called him to be.
The higher the calling upon a persons life the more it will require faith to bring it to pass.
Had Abraham not believed I believe that God would have raised up someone else to carry the promise but thank God he did believe and persevere.
There is too much fatalism in the body of Christ masquerading under the supposed guise of the sovereignty of God.
I firmly believe in the doctrine of the sovereignty of God, however I also see how much the scripture places the emphasis on our faith to change our circumstances and to enter into what God has for us.
The doctrine of the sovereignty of God does not change this it simply under girds it.
God will do according to his will both among the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.
It is also true that there are certain things that God has planned for our lives that we can go to heaven never having fulfilled if we remain in unbelief and disobedience.
John Wesley once said,
It seems that the devil has counterfeited real heart faith in the church for mere mental assent.
Many christians are living in the realm of mere mental assent rather than with real heart faith and therefore are never able to come to the place of rest that the scriptures call "being fully assured"
When we come to that place we know that our confidence is in the Lord and in his word to come to pass in our lives and we refuse to be either discouraged or swayed by any circumstance in our lives that would seem to contradict it.
Becoming fully persuaded only comes by a process of heeding Gods word and giving it great respect.
Someone once said that many people read Gods word as if they need to consider whether they can embrace what it says and listen to the news as if every word is gospel truth.
This is completely distorted and needs to be the other way around.

There are three foundational principles upon which strong faith is solidly built, and the first of these is always a heart that believes.
In this blog I have touched fairly extensively upon this.
In my next blog I want to develop the other two foundational principles.