It's All About Faith : Corresponding Actions Series

A. When you begin investing your faith in the Word of God, your life is going to take on a supernatural dimension in terms of the unfolding plan of God for your life. The only way Satan can stop that or slow it down is to bring enough adversity to bear that he begins to shake your faith and cause you to change what you believe.

B. Every man has a measure of faith when he’s born into this earth. Brother Hagin calls that measure “saving faith” or the capacity to receive the redeeming grace of our Lord, even though it can’t be empirically validated. Once you are saved, you can begin growing that faith up.

C. According to Romans 10:17, faith comes by hearing and hearing the Word of God. In order to mature in the Lord, grow in Christ, and grow in faith, we need to hear the Word as much as we can: in church, at home through podcasts and CDs, through godly relationships, and from our own mouths. Our belief system is shaped and developed by what we hear the most.

D. The final principal component of your faith is in James 2:17: “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.” What you believe needs to begin constraining how you behave so your faith can produce the fruit both you and God desire.

E. It is a whole lot easier to say, “I’m going to change my behavior” than it is to actually do it. That is why God gives us a scriptural key that unfailingly will enable you to modify your behavior, permanently, once and for all.

F. Joshua 1:7 says, “Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law [the Word], which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest” (KJV).

G. God says you’re going to have to be strong and courageous to be a doer of the Word. If you do, you will prosper. You don’t have to pray for it. You don’t have to strain your faith for it. It will happen.

H. We gain more insight in verse eight: “This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.”

I. That word “meditate” just means to fill your mind. Before you can be a doer of the Word, you’re going to have to fill your mind with that Word. When you see your life through the prism of God’s Word, it changes your behavior. The key to changing behavior is changing patterns of thought. Whether the sun is up or the sun is down (“day and night”), think about how your life will be when it is in line with the Word of God.

J. This verse also shows us that right thinking leads to right speaking. Keeping the Word in your mind will enable you to speak in line with the Word. Seldom do words tumble out of a person’s mouth without thought.

K. It is interesting to note that the phrase “meditating day and night” is used interchangeably with the phrase “being strong and very courageous” in the previous verse. We can conclude that if you want to be strong and courageous, you should meditate or think on the Word and its principles day and night.

L. When your mind is filled with whom the Bible says you are in Christ, when you know that you’re more than a conqueror, when you know that you can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth you, fear goes out the back door and you begin walking out the Word of God.

M. Second Corinthians 10:4–5 says, “(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ....”

N. If you didn’t have the capacity to take charge of your thought life, God wouldn’t tell you to do it. This is where the war to undermine your faith begins—in your mind.

O. Psalm chapter one says that the blessed man is the one who delights in the Word of the Lord. How often does he meditate on the Word? Day and night. Again, the picture being painted here is that you fill your mind with what God says about you continually.

P. It’s interesting that word “meditate” in Psalm chapter one is the same Hebrew word rendered “imagine” in Psalm 2:1 where it says the heathen rage for they imagine a vain thing. That shows us that the word “meditate” literally means “to imagine.” God has given us the mental capacity to generate an imagination of what might lie before us. Many people imagine the worst, but when we use our imagination to build a picture of our lives experienced in line with the Word of God, then it says we will be like that man in Psalm chapter one, planted by rivers of living water and prospering in whatever we do.