Eternal Life Skills

Activate the Power

The Word of God is full of promises for you.  It has answers!  It is life!  It is powerful!  It contains promises of joy, victory, and success.  Here are some examples: 

Hebrews 13:5
Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.

Philippians 4:19
And my God will meet all your needs according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:13
I can do everything through him who gives me strength. 

These are wonderful, powerful verses, aren’t they?  The Word of God can profoundly affect our lives.  We should benefit from it.  But do you know that even though the Word is powerful, we can go our whole lives without getting any benefit from it?

We can live and die as though the promises of God were never made.  We can be brought up in a house of worship, go to a church or synagogue, or listen to the preacher or rabbi every week, and yet what we hear has little influence on our lives.

At the end of our lives, all that could really be said is that we did not benefit from it and we got no real advantage from it—even  though we heard the Word for so many years.

It has the power to give us joy, but we were not joyful.

It has the power to give us victory, but we were not victorious.

It has the power to give us success, but we were not successful.

            It didn’t affect our lives or hearts as it could have.

We can go through our whole lives and not experience the promises, the power, or the answers.  We can go through our whole lives and not experience all of the joy, victory, or success that we could have. We can go through our whole lives wondering why it is not influencing our lives the way it should be.

How can this be?  How can we go through an entire life of hearing the Word of God and not benefit from it?  Is there a magic formula, a missing ingredient, or some special thing we need to know about?  We can get the answer right from the Word of God itself.  The apostle Paul tells us,

Hebrews 4:2
The message they heard was of no value to them, because those who heard did not combine it with faith.

The missing ingredient
The message—the Word of God—was of no value because those who heard it did not combine it with faith!  Here we find the missing ingredient!  It is faith!

So, what exactly is faith?  How do we know if we have it or not?  Noah Webster defines faith as to trust, to persuade, to believe, to obey.  A visual example would be walking over a bridge or sitting in a chair.  You trust they will hold you up when you walk on or sit in them.

This kind of faith is easy because you can see the bridge and the chair—you can see that they are solid, and so you walk over the bridge or sit in the chair.  Faith in God’s Word takes more trust and imagination because you can’t see it.  But, be assured that the Word is as real as the chair you are sitting in.  It is even more real because it is eternal.  The chair you are sitting in is not!

Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible, and receives the impossible.  Faith is dead to doubt, dumb to discouragement, blind to impossibilities, and knows nothing but success in God.

To have faith is to believe that something is real and to act as if it were so.  This is an important point.  Can you believe in something and then act as if it weren’t true?  No.  If you really believe in something or someone, then you act as if it were true, right?  You don’t doubt it.

Faith acts this way on other subjects as well as religion.  If we believe that that there is such a place as London or the Bahamas, it leads us to act as if it were so, even though physically we may have never been there.  If we believe that we will make money in the stock market, we will act as if it were so and invest in it.  If we believe that a medicine will help us, we will act as if it were so and take it.  If we believe in the honest character of someone, it leads us to act as if this were so and we trust them.

As long as the faith continues, whether it is well founded or not, it gives all the force of reality to that which is believed.  We feel and act just as if it were so, as if we saw the object before our eyes.  We need to be careful what we have our faith in, don’t we?

To have faith in the Word of God is to believe it is true and to act accordingly.  That is to trust it, rely on it, love it, and cast our care upon it.  We do not see God, or heaven, or the angels, or the redeemed in glory, or the crowns of victory, or the harps of praise, but we have faith in them, and this leads us to act as if we see them.  And this is the fact in all who live by faith and who live under its influence.  They believe God’s Word simply because it is God Who said it!

You see, faith is the activator, the catalyst that makes the promises of God real in our lives.  The power of God’s Word is released in our lives through faith.