Pastor John,
I started listening to your reading of Judges this morning. The recording got to Judges 1:19: “And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.” And then you corrected that wrong idea about God. That verse seemed to say that God was with Judah, and because of that, Judah could overtake his enemies as long as his enemies were weak, but when the enemy was strong, even with God on Judah’s side, Judah could not win.
You made it clear that Judah did not fail to defeat the enemy because of the enemy’s strength, but that he failed because he didn’t have faith in God.
Jesus, while on earth, said that a little bit of faith in God can move a mountain. Jesus also said that an absence of faith caused his Father not to respond from Heaven so that Jesus could not work miracles in some places that he traveled.
It made me consider what faith is and why folk are sometimes let down when they believe they have faith.
As brother Tom Traughber once said, “Faith is believing what God has told you about a situation; it is walking in a manner that says ‘I believe what you told me, Lord.’ Faith is not the mustering of all your energy to believe in something that God has not told you, but that you think God should do.”
God really spoke to Abraham and made promises to Abraham, and Abraham had faith in what the Lord told him, and that is what God counted as righteousness. If God hadn’t spoken to Abraham, it would have been foolish for him to expect God to give him children when Sarah was old and past her childbearing years.
If God speaks to our hearts about a situation, and we believe and we live in a manner that demonstrates confidence in Him, then we have faith. And God is faithful to do what He says He will do. But if we read scriptures about situations that are not our situations, and we read promises from God in the Bible that were not spoken to us, or commandments from God that are not our commandments, and then we decide that God will do those things for us, we are setting ourselves up for a terrible letdown. And we may not hear God if He does speak to our hearts, because we have committed ourselves to believing our own ideas instead of waiting on Him to speak.
Jerry
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Amen, Jerry. That is so true.
Pastor John