THE POWER OF FAITH 8

We looked at a lot of scripture last week to prove a point…let me give you the first one and then, eventually, the last scripture in the sermon and jump right in to what I think God has for us today:

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (NKJV)

You can’t have biblical faith until you first have biblical hope. What are each of you in this room trusting God in faith for? Is there a mental image of hope in your mind that your faith is going to build on.

Every one of us in this room have great needs in some area/s of our lives. Its part of what is means to be human. For some the needs are obvious and immediate. Dire physical needs or perhaps hanging on the edge of a cliff financial needs. For others… your needs are just quietly, slowly, gnawing inside you. Perhaps its decisions you need to make about your future or inner characteristics that you know need to be changed. Perhaps it’s has to do with those you love…. or those you don’t want to love. Maybe your issues are how you relate to authority at work or at home or how others relate to your authority.

The truth is, all of us, are living with some level of unanswered challenges in our lives… and many of us are not living with a clear mental image stamped on our mind of what God wants to do, followed by a clear reaching out to God in faith until we become sure that He has heard and is answering our prayer even though we haven’t seen evidence of it yet.

Many of us live in a state of worrying over our situations…which is not the same thing as getting from God a clear mental image stamped in our minds and grabbing hold of God’s provision in faith…

Even worse many of us live right on the edge of fear… which is the exact opposite of faith. Fear- is faith in failure!

Satan loves to plant worry and fear in your mind…and as long as you are nurturing worry and fear, the evil one is winning.

You can’t be nursing worry and fear in your mind and be giving birth to hope followed by faith at the same time.

The more clearly God is able to stamp the mental image of what he wants to do in your future…. the less you will feel fear about your immediate circumstances.

What I’m offering to you is not some sort of experiment… Some church last week put up a sign that say’s “Try Jesus”. Every time I see it… it grinds on me. If you’ve tried Campbell’s Spagettio’s with meatballs, and Jif’s creamy peanut butter and they haven’t brought complete satisfaction… then try Jesus!

What I’m offering to you is not some sort of experiment… it is the eternal answer to the rest of your life! Every single person in the Bible who accomplished anything eternal with their lives used this exact formula!

Faith is the substance of things hoped for!

How does all this come about? I shared this with you last week but I need it again to launch us into the rest of this message.

At the end of last week’s message… here is the conclusion we came up with:

I read a story this week about a man whose big life issue was finances. He said he had spent his whole adult life living on a shoestring. He was in debt up to his ears, living each day in worry and fear. He said, finally one day, in desperation he took his Bible and some preaching tapes on faith out into the garage and ask his wife to leave him undisturbed. He would come out and eat and sleep when needed but wanted no other contact. He said he was out there a whole week…but when he came out… in his mind was stamped an image that his faith, then, built on that has defined the rest of his life. He then described how God had brought him out of all debt and eventually led him into the position of pouring millions into Kingdom work….. that really spoke to me!

I don’t doubt for a moment that God has answers to every one of our desperate life situations. I’ve often used the example of how God allows our faith to stretch by leaving us with one foot planted on the ground and one foot planted in mid-air.

I would like to modify that teaching…. There comes a time when God wants to sear on our minds an image of what he is getting ready to do in/through us… and he wants us, then, to believe him for the impossible until it becomes reality. That’s the example of every person of faith in Scripture!

B) Following the Blueprint

God hardwired us all to live our entire lives following mental images. If I say the word cow to you… you don’t picture the letters C O W. Your mind brings up the picture of a cow. If I say “New York Strip Steak” you move from the picture of a fat cow walking through the meadow to a sizzling, perfectly seasoned, plate-filling, slightly seared, aroma producing juicy steak…. If I play the theme enough you will leave here and drive straight to Outback….Advertisers are counting on your “mental image hard-wiring.”

One of the reasons God gave us His Word was so that it could produce in us the eternal mental images that we would follow to lives of righteousness and holiness. Those who have none of the Word… in here.. have no pathway to Biblical hope..

Ephesians 2:12 In those days you were living apart from Christ. You were excluded from citizenship among the people of Israel, and you did not know the covenant promises God had made to them. You lived in this world without God and without hope. (NLT)

I can’t stress this enough… if you are looking for God to answer your prayers in the life situations you are agonizing over… you are almost certainly not going to find those answers in a TV sitcom. I actually had a lady look me in the face, one time, and tell me that she spent each afternoon watching “soaps” because she felt like she was then able to understand her life more clearly.

If you want to get an eternal perspective on your life you must spend time in the one place where God clearly states that He put all the answers.

As God’s promises etch their way into your soul they begin to form an inner picture of what God is intending to do in/through you and over time that inner image becomes more real to you than what is going on around you. At that point you have covered, more than, half the distance to seeing God’s miraculous provision in your life…. The substance of faith forms around the hope… and God’s answer to you is on the way.

Think again about whatever came into your mind 7 minutes ago… that issue that is larger than life to you…. the thing that controls much of your thinking throughout the day….

The huge problem…or unanswered challenge in your life.. What if…what if…

I convinced you that you could get to the point where God would stamp on your mind a sharp image of what he wants for you that increases in clarity each day until all the distractions in the world can’t turn you away from what you know to be your personal truth directly from the mind of God.

What if, all the times in the past when you thought you had an answer that failed to materialize faded into nothingness and lost their ability to make you doubt the present.

What if you could become so absorbed in your expectations of what you knew God was getting ready to do in your life that you began to lose touch with the life of constant worry and the fear of failure that has ruled you up till now?

Many people…even those who have been Christians for years, know little about that kind of burning expectancy…. Yet it is at the very foundation of what every single person has been offered, by their Creator, as the starting point of their relationship with God.

Let’s use our finances as an example. Everyone relates to that from the teens here with their first job to the elderly trying to live on a fixed income. I saw on the news this week that more than 60% of all Americans are two paychecks away from financial ruin.

If you’ve been around long, you know that I am not one who teaches that God wants everyone to be rich. Lots of Faith = Lots of Money?

I’ve spent way too much time in third world countries watching godly people spend the whole day foraging for enough food to feed their family.

If you are a student of church history (I am) you clearly see the path that Christianity took to get us to today more often than not involved the loss of everything, rather than the gaining of everything. Much of what we enjoy is based on the total, all out, sacrifice of those who have gone before… and it sound beyond shallow to me to equate God’s favor with lots of money or possessions. If that’s true, God has a lot of apologizing to do to those who have gone before us.

Having said that…. There is still the issue of your finances, the unpaid bills, the burden of mounting consumer debt, the pressure relieving ,house refinancing followed by the accumulation of even more debt…. many of you know the cycle…

What if God wants something more for you and he’s trying to break through the cycle of worry and fear, like the guy I talked about earlier, and get you to first hope for and then, in faith, believe him for a debt free, give it away to others type of lifestyle. Wouldn’t that be something????

You can’t find the concept in the Bible that God’s greatest priority for your life is for you to be filthy rich…but you can find this other idea in the Bible.

2 Corinthians 9:8 And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work. (NIV)

I’ve used this passage a lot…it’s one of my favorites… and if you’ve read it before you know there is a context here that is very important:

2 Corinthians 9:6 Remember this-a farmer who plants only a few seeds will get a small crop. But the one who plants generously will get a generous crop. 7 You must each decide in your heart how much to give. And don’t give reluctantly or in response to pressure. “For God loves a person who gives cheerfully.” 8 And God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others. 10 For God is the one who provides seed for the farmer and then bread to eat. In the same way, he will provide and increase your resources and then produce a great harvest of generosity in you. 11 Yes, you will be enriched in every way so that you can always be generous. And when we take your gifts to those who need them, they will thank God… 13 As a result of your ministry, they will give glory to God. For your generosity to them and to all believers will prove that you are obedient to the Good News of Christ.

What God loves to do.. what he did in the man’s life we talked about earlier, is to make his children into conduits that he can pour his resources through. The text is clear, that if you hoard it to yourself… the conduit shuts down.

Let’s just say someone here is like that guy in the television commercial where he is driving his riding lawnmower in front of his huge house, and talking about his house, cars, kids private educations, etc, and he asks, “How do I do it?”

“I’m in debt up to my eyeballs.” …..“Somebody help me.”

Let’s imagine that your inner pictures are not images of hope but are images of fear, despair, and ultimate failure…

If that is you… there is little doubt what God would like to do in your life..

Would he like to free you from fear? Without question!

Would he like to remove your sense of despair and failure? Undoubtedly!

Would he like to move you out of the bondage of debt? Yes, he would!

Would he like to give you extra to give away to the needy? What the Bible says!

What would be your pathway from here to there? It would look a whole lot like this:

You are saying that God could put a visual image of hope in my mind of me being free of debt and giving money away to Kingdom building across the world that my faith would then build into a reality?

Deuteronomy 28:2-12 You will experience all these blessings if you obey the Lord your God: 3 Your towns and your fields will be blessed. 4 Your children and your crops will be blessed. The offspring of your herds and flocks will be blessed. 5 Your fruit baskets and breadboards will be blessed. 6 Wherever you go and whatever you do, you will be blessed.

This is the same type of Biblical truth that God wants to etch into your soul..Whatever your situations are…God given hope followed by faith is the answer to your life… It is the pathway… the only Biblical pathway God uses to bring about eternal things in our present lives.

Apostle Paul grabbed this mindset like few others. Even after failure he would go right back to Biblical hope and faith. If he were here today… this is what he might leave you with:

Philippians 3:13-14 Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, 14 I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (NIV)