Saturday, July 17, 2010

The Process of Becoming a Believer

I've written on a lot of subjects over the years that God has placed in my heart for all of you. It's all been good, but there are times when God brings a Truth that just over shadows other truths and this is one of those times. The following message is long but filled with truth that will forever change your life. Take your time with this and let God show you what He says about true believing. Unless you understand the following and do it, your ability to believe God will be for naught. God wants you to believe Him, let Him show you the way......

You know the Word, you agree with that Word as being true, but this is not believing. Believing only comes from meditating on the word ( this is what plants the seed of the word into your heart). Faith (Believing) comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God (Rom 10:17).



Now Jesus calls the Word a seed in Mark 4:3-4 & 14. When the seed of the Word is sown in a man's heart, that seed begins to grow and what is growing from that seed is man's (your) ability to believe (God). You keep meditating upon the truth of the Word until faith grows up to the place where you can really believe the Word. This is a place that is beyond knowing and agreeing that the Word is true, this is the place of real (the God kind of) believing and now it is harvest time (Mk 4:29) for what you are believing for. Now is when you receive what you believe.



You had nothing to do with the believing process other than availing yourself to the Word of God. God's only requirement of you to be a Believer (in the truest sense of this word) is for you to look upon His Word by seeing it and hearing it. That is all that we do. God is the One who enables you to believe. (You can not believe apart from Him). You just can't make yourself believe by choosing to be a believer, you become a Believer by choosing to meditate God's Word day and night (Josh 1:8) until that seed of the Word grows up faith on the inside of you to the point where you can believe the Word you are meditating on. God is the only One who can get you to this point of believing. Even at the very beginning of your walk with God, Eph 2:8 says God gave you the gift of faith (or the ability to believe Him by what you heard Him say about His Son Jesus) and you believed Him and then you received His Son as your Lord and Savior. Now God gave you the gift of faith to get you started with Him, but faith for you now to walk with God does not come by way of a gift, it comes by the seed of the Word of God planted into your heart and God making you responsible to water that seed by continually meditating it until you believe (it).



The source of believing comes from the Word. If the Word does not get into your heart, you can not believe it. You can know it by memory, but you can't believe it that way. Believing comes from the heart, not the mind. This is why the Word of God is the target of the enemy of your soul. You are a three part being (1 Thess 5:23). You are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. Your soul is made up by your mind, will, and emotions and it's your mind that the devil attacks. Truly the battle field is your mind and that is where you fight the good fight of faith, by casting down the ungodly thoughts of the devil, and you bring into captivity by only thinking what God's Word says about it in His Word. (2 Cor 10:3-5) The devil is after that seed that is sown in your heart and he gets it by way of your mind (your soul) if you will believe him rather than God.



Satan knows what enables you to believe, so he comes after the Word you've heard before it gets planted to deep into your heart and starts sprouting roots, because he knows that Word will grow in your heart, and one day you'll believe it and use it against him and he will be no threat to you any longer.



Joshua 1:8 is the key to believing. You can't will yourself to believe. We all start out as born again children of God and the first thing we try to do is believe God. We think that because we have seen a truth in His Word and now we know it and agree with it, we think we are now believing it, but we are not. And when the Word fails for us because we think we are believing it, we become discouraged and open the door to the devil and begin listening to his lies about how the Word of God is not working for you and he (the devil) will take you on a path away from being able to believe (God), and you will become frustrated with God, and blame Him for the failure of the promises of His Word coming to pass in your life because you think that you really believed God's Word, and that it didn't work for you, so you quit considering God's Word by looking away from it to something else that you hope will work. You've allowed the devil to steal what little seed you had growing in your heart.



The real truth of this matter is, the Word is true, but you failed to believe it. Now you thought you were believing it, but you weren't. The Word failed to come to pass, and you blamed God for it, because you were convinced that you were believing Him, but you were not. You were only assenting and agreeing that what God said is true, but you didn't let the seed of the Word that was in your heart grow up to the point of where you could believe it. The devil stole it and he stole your hope right along with it. You got discouraged with God and His Word and then you turned away from it. This is the classic picture of the defeated Christian. God is painting this picture today for you and me to clearly see what a true believer looks like and why so few attain to that place of believing.

A verse out of the Lord's prayer speaks very clearly to what God has shown us this day about believing. Jesus says in Matt 6:11, "Give us this day our daily bread." Jesus reveals to us the one and only true source of believing. We must consume daily the manna from heaven( did you know God's people could only take one days worth of manna to consume. If they took more than that, it would spoil and be unusable. That's why you must consume the Word every day (Matt 4:4) for if you try to store it up than use it later, it will be spoiled, unusable, and powerless). Now this manna from heaven is the bread of life which is Jesus Himself (John 6:32-35), and the way you consume this bread from heaven is by consuming the Word, for John 1:14 tells us that Jesus is the Word made flesh. If you are going to believe God, then you must consume the Word daily.

Believing is a process, don't get in a hurry. You can't force it to grow faster. All you can do is water the seed (the Word) daily that lives in your heart by consuming more of the Word until harvest time comes and you believe that Word and now your believing receives from God what you are believing Him for.

I've given myself way too much credit over the years that I was believing God (the Word), but I wasn't and in the back of my mind I thought God was holding out on me or it just wasn't working so I got frustrated with God and His Messengers who were teaching the Word of God. The devil had me right where he wanted me. A frustrated believer, who wasn't believing, but thought he was. It took a long time for God to get me back on the right track to believing Him again, because I was hurt and offended by what I once thought was "believing God." But now God has opened my eyes to how one becomes a believer. I don't struggle with it any longer, for I know that I can't believe beyond the amount of Word that is on daily deposit in my heart.

I can't make myself believe, I must grow into being a believer and that takes all the pressure off of me for now I know that my part is to meditate the Word daily by hearing it and seeing it, and God's part is to grow my faith up to where I can believe the Word (Heb 12:2). This is the process of becoming a believer. It's the only way to believing. It's all so clearly outlined in Mark 4:26-29.

You might as well start right here with Mark 4:26-29 and meditate this scripture until you clearly see the process of believing God's way. Is it worth it to go through God's way of becoming a believer? Well, I'll let you make up your own mind about that by looking at this scripture. Jesus said in Mark 9:23, "IF you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes."

I say that should be incentive enough to meditate the Word daily. That's where you will find me, looking at the Word until I believe it. I pray you join me on this journey to believing God.

These signs will follow those that believe..........(Mark 16:17-18). What signs are following you?

Be Blessed..........!!!

Saturday, July 10, 2010

The Stand of Faith--What's That Look Like

When you are standing in faith believing the Word for what you need, it has the apearance that you aren't doing anything at all and the natural flesh man wants to be doing something. Always trying something. Always considering something because that is where hope comes from. It just might be that next thing that will meet my need. There is hope in that next thing. It's when there is no next thing that hope runs out for the natural man who lives his life by his five physical senses.

But when your hope is established in God alone and in His Word of Promise, your hope will never end. Mark 9:23 Jesus says, "If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes." There is no end to hope in that verse unless you choose to stop believing it. There is always hope when God's Word is present. And when that Word is in your heart and mouth (Rom 10:10), you always have hope, and if you have hope, you have a place for your faith to do it's work. (Heb 11:1)

What is the greatest thing that you could do as you stand before a mountain of adversity? Be still and know that God is Truly God, and that His Word is Truth, and that His Word is all you need. All your hope can be and must be in His Word alone. Don't move from His Word to do anything, until you are directed by the Holy Spirit to do something. The hardest thing for man to do is to "be still". Man's comfort in adversity is his doing something. Anything, but just doing something.

But God's comfort zone for man is totally different. God's comfort zone is a place of waiting upon Him and being still so that you can hear His voice. (Isa 40:31 & Ps 46:10) When you are still, you can keep your focus on God and that is where your help and answer resides.

Man wants to bolt into action, and God tells man to sit at the feet of His Son Jesus and look into his face (2 Cor 3:18) until you receive what it is that you need. What makes a man bolt into action? FEAR! What enables a man to sit at the feet of Jesus? FAITH!

Faith will save (heal) you. Fear will kill you. It's man's choice, not God's. (Not a whole lot of folks like hearing that) Victory or defeat is in the hands of the man who stands before adversity. What a man chooses will determine the outcome. God gave man direction in Deut 30:19. I want you to look at that scripture with your own eyes and receive it from God.

So you make the right choice (God's way), now what do you do? Read Josh 1:8, This book of the law (the Word of God) shall not depart from your mouth................. now you finish it. Don't let anything come out of your mouth and through your lips that does not sound like the Word of God. Always speak the Word in every situation. You want to say what God says about it, not what you think about it. Say what God says about it, and it will come to pass just as He says (if you believe what you are saying--Mark 11:23). When I choose to say something other than what God says, that is when I begin to sink just like Peter did. ( Matt 14:30)

Now stand in faith and be blessed!!!!!!