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.
Q. There’s not a person alive who hasn’t had a fearful thought or two, but it’s what you do when negative thoughts come that is extremely important. Matthew chapter six says we take thoughts when we put words to them. So when you get a wrong thought, don’t speak it. Cast it down, and begin speaking something in line with the Word of God.
R. Nowhere is it more significant to keep your thoughts right than when it has to do with the Word of God spoken to you by the Holy Spirit. This is an area where mature believers are usually more vulnerable because, after all, we can’t confirm specific direction to our lives in the Bible. I want to show you something about what you can do with your mind that is absolutely awesome when it comes to the will of God spoken to you by the Holy Ghost.
S. Look at Genesis chapter 11. This has to do with the unregenerate people building the tower of Babel—yet God had to come down and confound their language and scatter them because they were doing something counter to His will. This is what the Lord said about it in verse six: “Behold, the people are one and they have all one language and this they began to do and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.”
T. We need to understand the creative power of the human imagination. These people were unregenerate people, yet God created man so that he has the capacity to use his imagination in a powerful way. If he focuses on a particular place that he thinks his life should go and imagines himself stepping into that arena, it generates a momentum that is almost supernatural toward what he is imagining. These people took a basic scriptural truth and perverted it, but God says we have the capacity to mentally image our lives experienced in a particular way.
U. When you use your mind to magnify and focus upon what God has said to your heart, you may not have a foggy notion how you’re going to get there, but it doesn’t matter. It will generate a momentum in your life in that direction.
V. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians 2:9, “eye hadn’t seen, ear hadn’t heard, neither has entered the heart of man the things that God has prepared for them that love him.” He has a plan for you that is eye popping and mind boggling, but if eye hasn’t seen it and ear hasn’t heard about it, how do we learn about the plan God has for us?
W. First Corinthians 2:10 says, “But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.” The Holy Spirit will show you these things. He’ll give you an idea. You may not have any idea at all how you’re going to get there, but it doesn’t matter. Keep the vision before you, written somewhere where you can refresh your memory to it every day. This generates a supernatural momentum in that direction.
X. You want to know why He says the will of God for you is a mystery that can only be revealed by the Holy Spirit? He’s not going to show you more than a couple of steps at a time because if He did, you’d blab it to the enemy. The enemy would then set up some roadblocks and make it a lot more difficult to get there. He’ll show you as you need to know. What keeps you on track is keeping the vision before you, filling your imagination with what God has shown you because then nothing will be restrained from you that you have imagined to do.
Y. This principle about the imagination works for evil as well as good. You can’t fool around with your imagination. A lot of people think, I’m safe in the realm of my mind because nobody knows what is going on there but me. That’s terribly dangerous to think because your imagination takes your life in that direction. Your imagination is given by God to direct your life in line with the will of God. You cannot live by faith without taking charge of your thought life. Only when you understand this and begin using it this way will your life truly prosper in God.
