We can all say we love God when things are going well, but how does our faith stand when it is truly tested in adverse circumstances.
Malcolm Wild, senior pastor at Calvary Chapel Merritt Island
It is often in difficult, even terrible, circumstances that we discover how strong our faith really is.
How’s your obedience when God asks you to do something extremely difficult? How do we respond when He asks us to do something we really don’t want to do? It’s only then that you discover whether or not you truly do trust God. It’s only then that you actually reveal how much you understand of His character.
If we fail to obey God and trust Him, all of our learning is in vain. We have denied to goodness of His character.
Someone has well said, Faith was never more sharply tested and never more triumphantly stood the test (God’s test of Abraham in Genesis 22).
The devil likes us to focus on our failures, our shortcomings and gets us to believe that God can never use us and so he ends up putting us out of commission. He makes us ineffective and we’re defeated believing God has changed His mind regarding us or rather God will no longer use us.
Doubt/mistrust, is sin.
Do not ever take Satan’s side and agree with him which we do when we doubt God’s faithfulness to keep His promises. If thought’s flood your mind as to the faithfulness of God, hold on to God by faith, remember the Scriptures. God keeps His word.
If we don’t have trust in God’s word and rather, we are governed by feelings or emotions leading us to confusion believing that God has changed His mind, if we’re governed with such thoughts and not faith, do you know what our unbelief is saying? It is saying God’s not good enough. God can not be trusted. Unbelief is not just the matter of not believing, it’s an insult against God’s character, against His attributes of love and mercy and goodness.
When you are faced with doubts and things you don’t understand, go to those things you do understand, the things that God has done for you, the things that you know to be real. Pastor Chuck Smith to Pastor Greg Laurie when Greg’s son died – “Don’t let the things you don’t understand rob you of the things you do understand.”
We walk by faith and not by sight and there will be situations, there will be battles that you will face that will be new to you.
Don’t you feel foolish when God comes through, and you were whining?
Stop doubting. Go to the things God has done for you in the past. These things prove the faithfulness of God. If all you have is that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, then that’s enough.
Trials often follow great blessings. The enemy will come against you when you’re being blessed. And when the enemy comes in against you, remember the Lord will raise His standard against him. And just like our Lord, Jesus Christ, when the enemy comes and tempts you take out the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, and put Him on.
Faith and action go hand in hand. It’s the only way we know we have real faith.
By our fear, our unbelief, our disobedience we are saying to the world that our experience with God is not real.
Always look to the Lord – what’s God doing in this? Through our unbelief, we get our eyes off of Him.
We talk ourselves into unbelief. We keep repeating the problem over and over again. We’re basically rolling over and letting the enemy walk all over us. When we lack faith like that, when we lack the obedience, when we’re filled with disobedience, we’re saying through our lives we don’t really believe what we say we believe.
Faith is not affected by our circumstances. In faith we cling to the word of God and our past experience and our knowledge of Him.
God might ask you to do something hard. He might ask you to go through something really difficult, something that involves suffering (Philippians 1:29). There is a resurrection.
Be careful because in a moment it can be taken away and what right do we have to say, “God, do you know what You’re doing?”
You don’t really know until you come out the other end whether you’re a warrior or a wimp.
Transmit to your children that God and your faith is more important than life, than anything else.
God should be more precious than anything, obedience more important than life.
Whatever is yours, if it’s committed to the Lord, it’s safe with Him. Lay it all on the altar. Are you ambitious or are you serving the Lord?
Is God’s presence more important to you than His promise? God’s presence should be more important to you than His promise.
When God calls you, do you say. “Yes Sir, I’m on my way?