Creating a Life of Faith: Faith Soaking Episode Nine

Receiving Jesus for salvation is the first step to a lifestyle of faith. Discover who you are in Christ and begin to chase God's promises for your life. Don't let obstacles prevent you from achieving and becoming all that God has for you! The obstacles in life are what will cause you to rise!

Transcript

According to God's Word, "...faith brings our hopes into reality and becomes the foundation needed to acquire the things we long for. It is all the evidence required to prove what is still unseen" (Hebrews 11.1 TPT).

Believing God at His Word establishes our righteousness or right-standing with God (Romans 4.3). Why? Because our righteousness can never come in our own strength, through our own merit or by our own wisdom. We gain righteousness by believing in the redemptive power of the Finished Work of Jesus Christ alone. This is the foundation of the Christian faith and the pattern for all our life's decisions. If we are walking in obedience according to our belief in God's promises, we will always be holding onto faith--hoping and believing in something unseen until it becomes a reality.

The first thing we must do to begin this life of faith is put our belief in Jesus Christ, so our eternal souls will be saved and placed into God's family in heaven. He gave His life, taking our sins to hell, and leaving them there when He rose from the grave. Through Jesus' Finished Work on the Cross, our sins have been erased and we have been given Jesus' perfection (2 Corinthians 5.21). Our relationship with God is restored through Jesus, and we can now have His Holy Spirit in us and leading us (2 Corinthians 5.18). This is the beginning of a lifestyle of believing God for the impossible (Matthew 19.26).

Next, we need to ask God who we are in Him. How did He design us? What is the best version of ourselves? And what promises does He have for us? These answers will take a lifetime or even until the fruition of all time on earth to discover, but we will find our value, purpose and meaning as we walk in God's preplanned purposes for our lives (Jeremiah 29.11). Once we know how God designed us, we can begin to seek the purposes He has for our life.

Then, God will give us His promises (2 Peter 1.4). These promises may be small, and we can take little steps of faith to achieve them. However, many times the promises that God gives us, which are directly tied to our destiny, will be big and take a leap of faith. In fact, these promises will seem so big that we realize we can never achieve them without divine help. Once God gives us these big promises, He will in essence darken the path--only allowing us to see a few steps directly before us. He knows if we saw the full scope of our destiny that 1) we would give up before we even started because the journey will look too treacherous and too long and 2) we won't learn how to rely on Him if we knew all the steps.

Finally, there will always be obstacles in the way of us achieving God's promises. These obstacles create for us a twofold blessing (though, going through difficulty doesn't feel like a blessing while enduring). First, obstacles mature us into the image of Christ. This life is much like a gym where resistance causes us to build our faith muscles. We are in essence becoming the people we will be for eternity, and overcoming obstacles shapes us into our best selves (Romans 5.3-5). Second, obstacles cause us to rely on God. Nothing is impossible with God (Matthew 19.26). As we lean on His strength, we can ask all things in Jesus' name, and mountains of obstacles will be thrown into the sea (Mark 11.23).

Faith is the cornerstone of a Believer's life. Our faith in Jesus for salvation is just the beginning of an entire existence based on faith. Jesus wondered if He would find faith on earth when He returned: "I tell you, he will grant justice to them quickly! But when the Son of Man returns, how many will he find on the earth who have faith?” (Luke 18.8 NLT). So let us be a people who live each day by faith as we lean on God, believe in the impossible and overcome every obstacle because Jesus has already given us the victory (1 Corinthians 15.57).