Tag Archives: faith comes by hearing

Living by Faith, The word of God

Eating the Word of God

Leave a comment

“My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work.” (John 4:34)

When we eat bread, or any other food, the body converts it into energy, and the energy turns to action. So it is with the word of God: we “eat” by believing, then we turn that belief into action by our obedience. This is the dynamic of living faith. We know from scripture that “the word of God s living and powerful” (Heb 4:12). The Greek word translated as powerful, or “active” in other translations, is energes. The Word, like physical bread, delivers the energy to act. James is very clear when he writes to the church about action:

“But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.”  And he was called the friend of God. You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.”  (James 2: 20-24)

The flabby church
When we eat our fill but are inactive, the food we consume turns to fat and not to energy. We can become flabby and inert. If we fill ourselves with scripture and teaching and do not act on what we have read and heard, even though we believe it to be true, we risk turning into a flabby church, rich in theology but poor in active faith. When Jesus addresses the seven churches in the book of revelation He begins each message with the statement: “I know your works.” He didn’t say, “I know your theology or I know your worship meetings; He said “I know what you do.” The church at Laodicea thought that they were “rich” and that they needed nothing – they had got everything right – but Jesus called them “wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked” (Rev 3: 17). Because their works were lukewarm Jesus said He would ‘vomit them out of his mouth’ if they did not repent of their ways.

Laodicea was a flabby church. Great worship, great teaching, but not much action. It contrasts with the church at Philadelphia, of whom Jesus says: “I know your works. See, I have set before you an open door, and no one can shut it; for you have a little strength, have kept My word, and have not denied My name.” (Rev 3: 8-9). The word translated here as strength is the power-word “dunamis,” used almost exclusively in the NT for supernatural, miracle working power; the power of the Spirit. Clearly they saw some signs and wonders. Not a lot, but they did see a little. Moreover, they “kept His word”. They didn’t just hear His word, but they obeyed it. They “kept (His) command to persevere” (Rev 3:10). Their faith was active. They were a church of Word and Spirit, those whom the Father is seeking, who “worship in Spirit and in Truth.”

“Go your way, your son lives.”
The account of the nobleman’s son that I was also looking at in the last post (From Faith to Faith) (John 4: 47-54) Illustrates this kind of active faith. The man had begged Jesus to come and heal his son. “Come down before my child dies.” He wanted Jesus to come to his house and physically heal him. In his mind Jesus had to come with him to his house for his son to stay alive, but instead Jesus simply tells him  “Go your way, your son lives.” His faith was not just to believe in His power to heal, but to act on that faith by walking away and not trying to persuade Jesus to come with him. Verses 52-53 is significant: “Then he inquired of them the hour when he got better. And they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” So the father knew that it was at the same hour in which Jesus said to him, “Your son lives.” And he himself believed, and his whole household.”

There were no mobile phones in those days. This was a two day journey. Every step was a step of faith: he had to believe the word that was spoken to him if he was going to see his son alive again. What if…? What if…? And here in this short account is a model for the prayer of faith. We pray: (Lord, come down and heal my son!”); God answers (Go your way, your son lives); we believe the word He has spoken, but we have to wait to see that answer fulfilled (two days’ walk); yet as we wait we believe that the healing has already taken place. For new covenant Christians it was at the Cross (By His stripes we were healed), and for the nobleman’s son it was when Jesus released His word of life (Your son lives) and with it the command to believe (Go your way).

Believe, receive, and obey.
Very often our prayers don’t follow this pattern. We usually start well, in that we go to Jesus with our prayer; but we often miss the next step in this story, which was to hear the words that Jesus (by His Holy Spirit) speaks in response to our prayer. So our faith remains at the level of generalities: we hope Jesus will heal (or provide or whatever) because we know He can, rather than knowing what He has said to us about our situation and believing the word He has spoken into it. So for the first scenario we are “hoping and praying” for an eventual outcome: we endeavour to put our trust in who God is, but we don’t have an answer that He has spoken into our relationship with Him now, so there is no dynamic element to our faith.  In the second scenario we have met with Jesus in that moment, we have heard what He has said, we are believing that the word that has been spoken has already changed the situation in the Spirit, and we are walking towards seeing it in the flesh just as the man walked towards his restored son. We are in the reality of Mark 11:24: “Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.” We receive the answer to the prayer in the spiritual present, but we walk towards it in the material future.

The man received the healing of his son the moment he believed the word that Jesus had spoken, but he also had to obey the command to go his way in order to see it manifest. There is a very famous painting by Holman Hunt, picturing the words of Christ “Behold, I stand at the door and knock…” These words are generally applied to the state of the unbeliever’s soul, waiting for Jesus to come in with salvation. However He actually spoke them to believers, specifically to the Laodiceans, whom He had just chastised for their lukewarmness: “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.” (Rev. 3: 19-20)

Jesus had set before the Philadelphians “an open door, and no-one can shut it.” By contrast, the Laodiceans had a closed door, which He was waiting for them to open. I think many of us may be more keen to have the experience of hearing God’s voice than we are to opening the door to actions of faith and love; but if we want to dine with Jesus we need to do what He says, and not just listen to His words.

Living by Faith, Prayer and Spiritual Warfare

The Prayer of Faith

3 Comments

“The effective fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” (James 5:16)

When the heavens are made of brass

I often wonder, as I’m sure you do, why so many prayers just don’t seem to be answered. We can, and do, find all sorts of ways to justify the lack of change in our circumstances, or in the circumstances of those we prayed for even when we spent a long time on our knees (or however, you pray – I hardly ever actually get onto my knees . Perhaps I should do more often…) But the fact is it often doesn’t appear that heaven is manifesting on earth, or the Kingdom of God is coming  as a result of our prayers. Sometimes it is a matter of timing, and there are many powerful testimonies of long period of time elapsing before the prayer and the answer: years, and even decades. God dwells outside of time, and we know that His timing is always perfect, and our timing very often leads to disappointment and frustration. And sometimes there’s a battle to be fought in the heavenlies, such as we see at work in the book of Daniel and the opposition of the “Prince of Persia“ to Daniel’s prayers being answered. These are not the situations I am talking about. And I’m not talking about the times when we console ourselves with the thought that the answer is “No,” or that it comes gradually. I am referring to those specific needs that arise within a specified timeframe, outside of which they cease to exist, and yet where God does not appear to do anything. I’m talking about the times when the heavens seem to be “made of brass.“

Yet we know they aren’t, we know our God of Love does not ignore his children, and we know that He is faithful. As Smith Wigglesworth famously put it, our God loves to answer our prayers more than we love to ask. James 5: 16 tells us “the effective fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.“ If this is what the Bible says, it must be true. So if our prayers don’t seem to avail anything (let alone much) it must be either because they aren’t effective and fervent, or because we aren’t righteous. And since we are “the righteousness of God in Christ,” (2 Cor 5:21) that can’t be the issue; so it has to be to do with whether or not our prayers are effective and fervent.

The Electric Current

Actually it all comes down to one word, because the phrase “effective fervent” (This is the new King James translation: NIV says “powerful and effective.”) is only one word in Greek, which is energeo, meaning operative, putting forth power. Our word energy – think of an electric current – obviously comes from it. If we want to know why some of our prayers don’t “avail much,“ I think we need to ask ourselves what it means for a prayer to have energeo.

We can get some light on this by seeing where else it’s used. In Ephesians 4:16, Paul says that the body (the Church) grows in Christ according to the “effective working“ by which every part does it share. It’s the same word: “effective working” is what enables all the joints in the body to work together and grow in love.  And here’s what struck me: energeo is what enables every part – that is each member of the body – to do its share. The word for share  is metros. Effective working is something that is meted out to each one of us, so that we can function in the power of the Spirit and the life of Christ can flow in His body. What do we all have a share (metros) of?  

 Paul writes: “For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.” (Romans 12:3. My underlining.)

What God measures out to us is faith. I think that this is the key to energeo. A prayer isn’t “fervent and effective” because we have spent hours in crying out to God fervently, or because we have used words that we think are effective because other people have used them effectively: a prayer has energeo when we know that we know that God has given us the answer. Not because of our theology, and not even because it’s written in the Bible, but because He has told us personally. We might still have to cry out for hours to see that answer manifest, but we cry out in faith because the powers of darkness may need to be cleared out of the way, not in desperation because we think we need to get God’s attention. The full context of  James 5:16 is this:

“Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” (James 5: 14-16)

The effective fervent prayer is the prayer of faith. Churches that apply James 5: 14-16 to prayer for healing tend to focus on the oil and the eldership, and hope that these two will carry the faith. But 2 out of 3 won’t work. In the time of James, the elders of a church will have been people who knew what it was to pray with energeo, and so it was safe to assume that their prayers would be answered, and the body of Christ built up in love (Ephesians 4:16) as a result. Unfortunately that is not necessarily the case today. Without energeo, the elders and the oil avail nothing.

Seeing and Hearing

We all know Hebrews 11:1 “ Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” The evidence of things that are seen is what our eyes have witnessed. When we say “I saw it with my own eyes,” it is not my eyes or the thing that I saw which are the evidence, but the fact that I saw it. My sense of that reality tells me and tells others that it exists. In the same way, faith is the sense by which our spirit experiences the unseen dimension. We also know that “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the word of God.”  (Rom 10:17) How do we hear the word of God? From the Good Shepherd, whose voice we hear, and whom we have decided to follow. (John 10:27) We can’t follow Him, unless we’re close to Him, so being close to Him must be our first priority. And when we are close to Him our sense of faith is sharpened, and it is in His proximity that we can hear His voice, sometimes through and always agreeing with the word of God.  Biblical hope is not a wish; it’s a destination. When we hear Him speak and our spiritual sense of faith perceives the substance of the answered prayer that we are hoping for, we have that Mark 11:22  mover of  mountains; the faith of God.

“So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. “For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.” (Mark 11:22-23. The Greek translated “in God” is actually the genitive case “of God.”)

Faith is always a gift of God: we can’t draw it out of our own thinking, our own understanding. Jesus tells us that faith as a grain of mustard seed is enough to uproot and move a tree. The Bible is a whole sack full of seeds in lots of different packets – seeds for healing, seeds for provision, for victory and so on. I believe we can only see which seeds to sow when the Holy Spirit shows us the life that they contain. We need to see the mustard tree in the Spirit and not just read about it on the packet, and that can only come from God, and not by leaning on our understanding – even if it’s our understanding of the Bible. When God has shown us the tree inside the seed and we have evidence of it with our spiritual sense of faith, that is the faith of God that Jesus tells us will move mountains.

So it is in that place of mustard seed faith, granted by the Holy Spirit through a word from the Shepherd, that we can pray the effective fervent prayers that avail much. We are so often like people going into a dark room and groping around to we find the light switch. There can be a lot of hidden wires carrying electricity (energeo) in the cavity of a wall, but there is only one switch that activates their power. The power is there: it’s been given to us. The entire circuit is the gift of God’s grace, and Jesus flipped the mains to a permanent “ON” at Calvary. But in the dark rooms where we can find ourselves we need to learn to seek and find the switches, instead of just tapping at the blank wall blindly and wondering why the light doesn’t come on.

Discipleship and witness, Living by Faith, The word of God

Stained Glass Windows

Leave a comment

Seeing Jesus

When Philip and Andrew told Jesus about the Greeks who wanted to see him, His response was not “Okay, bring them to Me,” but a long discourse about what it means to see.

How did He respond?

“But Jesus answered them, saying, “The hour has come that the Son of Man should be glorified. Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also. If anyone serves Me, him My Father will honour.” (John 12: 23-26)

Jesus is not interested in being “seen” by people who want to satisfy their curiosity or whose academic interest is aroused. He is looking for disciples who will serve Him by doing what He asks, follow Him by walking in His ways, and fellowship with Him by being attentive to His whispered instructions. We see Him when we walk with Him; not when we gawp at Him. We can’t take those steps of obedience unless we die to our own will and say, “Lord, Let your will be done, ” but when we do, and we let our own grain of wheat fall to the ground, the eternal life in the Word of God bears fruit and we see growth and multiplication. It is when we truly see Jesus that our lives become fruitful.

Children of Light

The next question that Jesus didn’t answer was when they asked Him what He meant by the statement:

“And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself.” (John 12: 31-32)

“What do you mean?” they say. But just as the Son of God is not interested in being looked at as an object of interest, he is never interested in explaining Himself just for the sake of it.  Every word that Jesus speaks is from the Father. (“Whatever I speak, just as the Father has told Me, so I speak.” (John 12:49-40) What Jesus- and through Him, the Father – said to them, was:  “A little while longer the light is with you. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness overtake you; he who walks in darkness does not know where he is going. While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become children of light.”

He is still talking about spiritual sight, and, as is so often the case, He is not just addressing the people standing around Him, but every soul down the centuries who would seek Him. He has come as Light into the world, and His strategy for spreading that Light, and ultimately filling the earth with the Father’s glory, is to multiply children of Light. Psalm 119:130 tells us that the entrance of His words gives light, but here He says that the light is only with us for a little while. God will always accomplish His word, but He will only accomplish it through us if we respond to it while we still have that light of His word burning in our hearts. Believing in the light isn’t just knowing it’s there, but it’s active faith. “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Romans 10:17), and at the same time we are to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only, (James 1:22). So If we don’t do what He says the light will eventually dim, and darkness will overtake us. The stark truth is that if the Light around us isn’t increasing it’s because we’re following or own inclinations, walking after the flesh and not after the Spirit. Whether these are worthy works of the flesh, or unworthy ones, is immaterial.

So we see Jesus when we lay down our lives in order to do what he says. The Greeks wanted to see Jesus for the sake of the spectacle. Jesus wants us to see Him by walking with Him in His light. When we are where He is, we see Him; and when we see Him we are walking as children of light.

Stained Glass Windows

We can see images of Jesus in stained glass windows all over the Western world, and we can look at Him mentally on a Sunday, like those Greeks probably wanted to; we can think how wonderful He is, then we can walk out of our church services without being changed. We associate stained glass windows with traditional church buildings, but we all have our stained glass windows: they can be the humanised images of Jesus that we can look at without letting them touch the way we live, or they can be the patterns of our particular brand of religion or our cherished church structures that remain unchanged when the cloud of God’s presence has moved on. We can be looking at a stained glass window whatever the state of our hearts.

One of the brightest lights of the modern church age was the one that shone at Azuza Street from 1906-1908, which spread round the world in the Pentecostal movement and which is still shining today. Led by a black preacher in a time of segregated churches, a constant in the miraculous manifestations of God’s power and presence during that revival was the unity and love between black, white, rich and poor, among the thousands who queued up to throng the benches in that simple building. Attendees at the time reported that the love that flowed between the people there was tangible. The unity commanded the blessing – and when God commands, what can oppose? However darkness did overtake the light at Azuza Street. Increasing numbers of church leaders preferred their stained glass windows to the move of the Holy Spirit, and turned their congregations away from attending. Why did people believe what they were told by men instead of believing the works of the Father that that had seen? I think it’s because a fault line had appeared in the unity among the people: the circulation of the “Apostolic Faith” publication that had come out of the revival had skyrocketed, and an argument arose as to who owned the rights to it. The unity was broken, the command of blessing was withdrawn, and darkness was allowed to overtake the light.

At the moment we all “see through a glass, darkly.” What Jesus wants is for us to walk in the light that is shining through the glass, and hasten the time when we will indeed see Him face to face.

“If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7).