Today, Friday September 10
A Faith That Overcomes
1 John 5:4-5 “For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?”
Do you have a faith that overcomes the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil? A faith that leads you to constant victory? We read so much about faith in the Scriptures and yet I’m not sure that we really have the kind of faith that saves us, keeps us, and strengthens us in the day of battle. So how do we define and understand the faith that will keep us in the victory circle rather than having to stay defeated and discouraged with our Christian experience?
Hebrews 11:1 gives us as good a definition as we can find in the New Testament. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” A Biblical faith is a spiritual ability that is a gift of God. God has given us five physical senses that lets allows us to enjoy the physical world around us and also to navigate safely through it. They are of course our smell, touch, sight, hearing, and taste. With these senses we have the ability to “substantiate”, to make real the visible world around us. Faith is the spiritual ability to “substantiate” the invisible spiritual world around us! With faith we can see God, taste Him, hear Him, touch Him and even smell Him! We can live in the reality of a living God when we exercise our spiritual ability of faith.
Remember, we cannot please or even know God without faith. “But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.”(Hebrews 11:6). When you read the rest of Hebrews 11, you have the testimony and witness of those Old Testament saints who lived in victory and did great exploits because of their faith!
But faith is not simply saying that what God says is true; true faith is acting on what God says because it is true. Someone has said that faith is not so much believing in spite of evidence, but obeying in spite of consequence.
As a young believer, because of my immature love of God, I was trying to please Him by my works and all that I thought I could do for Him. I set tremendously high expectations for myself in the daily disciplines of reading the Bible, memorizing scripture, witnessing to others, fasting and prayer. And because I would often fail to keep my schedule or fulfill my expectations I would live in constant defeat and discouragement.
But as I began to grow in the Lord and in my relationship with Him, I realized that victorious faith is the result of maturing love. The better we come to know and love Jesus Christ, the easier it is to trust Him with the needs and battles of life. It is important that this maturing love become a regular and a practical thing in our daily lives.
Today, are you exercising a faith that overcomes?
God bless!