walking by faith

More and more it dawns on me how careless we Christians are with our words. We are always taking the Lord's name in vain, we are always spewing forth bitter and sweet water from the same fountain.

I used to wonder if God answered prayers but when I really consider what people do when they pray I realize that so few of us actually are praying the way Jesus told us, and few of us are actually doing what the Bible told us to do.

A friend of mine who always went to psychics was told by a psychic that some horrendous thing would happen. Of course she believed it, although she was a Christian. Her faith in her psychic was greater than her faith in the Bible's promises. Of course some bad thing happened. She had faith for it to happen.

Another friend, a sweet Catholic lady, was diagnosed with cancer. She had faith, her friends had faith. But how did she pray? Always by saying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy and the Hail Mary and prayers to the various saints. Never once did she pray as Jesus told her to pray, "Speak to the mountain and tell it to pick itself up and throw itself into the sea." In the meantime, instead of taking heed to what she heard -- which Jesus told us to do-- she went online and studied every aspect of her disease. She trusted what man said about disease more than what Jesus said about health. Of course, we all trust what man says more than what Jesus says...but we are not supposed to. We must trust God and not lean unto our own understanding.

Then there were folks in my evangelical church who prayed all the while for God's mercy. Oh God, please heal your servant, etc. The entire prayer time asking for God's mercy instead of simply believing that God has already given mercy. Instead of saying to the sickness in the sick person, "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus. By Jesus's stripes this person was healed! Therefore you have no right to bother
her. Leave her alone and take your symptoms and your roots and your seeds and leave this woman's body."

But in the meantime, although they kept praying to God to heal her, during coffee hour what do they say? "It's all in God's hand whether he decides to heal or not. I'll prepare myself just in case I hurt." Then when these folks die everyone said, "Look, they had faith and nothing happened." I just want to scream at the way people blame God for stuff when we humans are not doing what God told us to do.

Pray, water the word with thanksgiving, rebuke the sickness, see the invisible, walk by faith in God's love, power, and care.

I was just talking to some neighbors who just came from church. I so wish negative conversation wasn't a part of our "normal" conversation. I'm always hearing about how bad it is for black people, and when I look at what is happening in their lives I want to challenge them and say, "the Bible says 'you will have what you say!' Do you see that perhaps your habit of saying about your son 'if it weren't for bad luck, he'd have no luck at all' is not helping matters?"

God wants us to fly. The world weighs us down.

The Bible declares, "Let God be true and every man a liar." If we want miracles, that's what we have to do.

I know how tough it is to say things or do things that one's church doesn't do. But if you read the Bible and see what God demands of you, then you won't care what the people around you do?

Speaking is so important. Jesus said, we should have what we say. Not that we don't get what we pray for silently, but if speaking is a weapon, why not use it? We are told to speak to the mountain not to think to the mountain. We can talk to God about the mountain, but we must talk to the mountain about the promises of God and about the blood of Jesus.
So many places in the Bible talk about talking.

He who orders his conversation aright
I will say of the Lord He is my refuge and my fortress
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so
Let the weak say I am strong.
Death and life are in the power of the tongue.
In Revelations, the sword comes from Jesus' mouth.
The sword of the spirit is the word of God.

Jesus has chosen preaching which seems foolish to humans but which is powerful. Jesus wants us to preach to humans and to mountains and to demons. Tell every creature about the great gospel.

We must not be dominated by what we see, hear, taste and feel. We must know that God does things and we don't necessarily see it.

Just another point. Many of us are carnal Christians. And we have to learn that when we use spiritual weapons we aren't battling the air, we are actually doing battle. Most Christian people walk by sight and if they don't see what they're doing (or the effects of what they're doing), they think nothing is happening. Most of Christianity is carnal and hasn't learned truly that we walk by faith. When you speak Scriptures, you are slashing the demonic world -- sickness, debt, demonic, whatever-- with the sword of the spirit. Something is happening in the spiritual realm. When we praise God, something is happening. When we speak in tongues something is happening. We must trust that God wouldn't speak so much about speaking the word and meditating (in hebrew the word for meditating also means mumbling and speaking aloud to one's self) on the word .

There is a spiritual world around us and God's people should know that. Our faith creates a bridge which brings the spiritual blessings of Christ's cross into the physical realm. Speaking Scriptures show that we acknowledge that there is stuff going on around us and we are warring spiritually. We must acknowledge the spiritual realm. God is spirit and he works in the spirit and we must worship him in spirit which most of the time means we are to do things we may not understand yet believe that something is really happening. -C