{"id":11353,"date":"2020-08-27T15:07:35","date_gmt":"2020-08-27T15:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pjhmail.wordpress.com\/?p=11353"},"modified":"2020-08-27T15:07:35","modified_gmt":"2020-08-27T15:07:35","slug":"judges-119","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/11353\/judges-119\/","title":{"rendered":"Judges 1:19"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pastor John,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I started listening to your reading of Judges this morning.\u00a0 The recording got to\u00a0Judges 1:19: “<\/strong>And the\u00a0Lord\u00a0was 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.”<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0And then y<\/strong>ou corrected that wrong idea about God.\u00a0 That verse seemed to say that God was with Judah, and because of that, Judah could overtake his enemies as long as his enemies\u00a0were weak, but when the enemy was strong, even with God on Judah’s side, Judah could not win.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

You made it clear that Judah did\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0fail to defeat the enemy because of the enemy’s strength, but that he\u00a0failed because he didn’t have faith in God.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jesus, while on earth, said that a little bit of faith in God can move a mountain.\u00a0 Jesus also said that an\u00a0absence<\/em>\u00a0of faith caused his Father not to respond\u00a0from Heaven so that Jesus could\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0work miracles in some places that he traveled.<\/span><\/p>\n

It made me consider what faith is and why folk are sometimes let down when they believe they have faith.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.’\u00a0 Faith is not the mustering of all your energy to believe in something that God has not told you, but that you think God\u00a0should\u00a0<\/em>do.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 If God\u00a0hadn’t\u00a0<\/em>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. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 And God is faithful to do what He says He will do.\u00a0 But if we read scriptures about situations that are not our<\/em>\u00a0situations, 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\u00a0us<\/em>, we are setting ourselves up for a terrible letdown.\u00a0 And we may not hear God if He\u00a0does<\/em>\u00a0speak to our hearts, because we have committed ourselves to believing our own ideas instead of waiting on Him to speak.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jerry<\/span><\/p>\n

=========<\/span><\/p>\n

Amen, Jerry.\u00a0 That is so true.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Pastor John<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pastor John,\u00a0 I started listening to your reading of Judges this morning.\u00a0 The recording got to\u00a0Judges 1:19: “And the\u00a0Lord\u00a0was 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.”\u00a0 \u00a0And then you corrected that wrong idea about God.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-netmail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11353"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pastorjohnshouse.com\/mailbag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}