That word abide is so important. When Jesus told us to obey His commandments and keep His Word, He wasn't just telling us to follow a bunch of religious rules and regulations.
He was telling us to allow His Word—which is a living thing!—to make its home within us. He was telling us to spend time with it, to meditate on it, to fill our minds and our mouths with it, and to let it guide our every action.
When you're up against the wall, don't start begging God to break through it for you. That's not the way He works. He'll give you the plan. He'll give you the power. And He'll guarantee the victory. But your hand, not His own, is the instrument He's going to use to get the job done. You're going to have to stretch forth your hand by speaking and acting on the Word, even when circumstances are against you.
Don't center your attention on what you can see in this natural, physical sense realm. Everything you see is temporal and subject to change. So, put your faith in the unseen eternal realm. The things which are eternal are not subject to change.
God's Word is eternal and it contains 7,000 promises to cover any circumstance you'll ever face. And, no matter what happens in this shifting, changing world you live in, those promises will forever be the same.
I used to worry about making decisions for God. I used to be afraid to step out on faith and declare I was going to do something new that He’d shown me to do. I’d think, What if I fail? I was so scared of failing, I’d muddle around in indecision for weeks. Then one day I found out it wasn’t my power that was going to carry it out anyway. But it took my decision to move God in on the scene. Once I decided what I was going to do, and committed myself totally to it, God backed me!
Have you ever noticed that you are sometimes aware of certain things even before you know what the Word says about them? That’s because the Holy Spirit is inside you teaching you the truth. He speaks into your spirit. Then your spirit relays His promptings to your mind. Suddenly, you’ll have a new thought. I need to forgive that person, you’ll think, or I need to stop saying those unkind things.
One of the problems that hung around me for years was poverty. But I remember the day I decided I wasn’t going to be poor anymore. I was reading in the Word where it says that the blessing of Abraham has come upon the gentiles by Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:14). Then I got down to the 29th verse where it says, “If ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” Suddenly the truth hit me. I got so excited I could hardly stand myself.
Words won’t work without faith any more than faith will work without words! It takes them both to put the law of faith in motion.
Many believers don’t realize that. They’ll continually speak words of doubt and unbelief, then they’ll jump up one day and say a couple of faith words and expect mountains to move—and to their dismay, they don’t.
Why not?
Religious tradition says that God gets glory when we bear up nobly under the agony of sickness and disease. But that’s not what the Bible says. It says God gets glory when the blind see and the lame walk and the maimed are made whole!
We're surrounded by a world which is ruled for the most part by Satan. How can we avoid getting caught up in it? How can we stand apart?
You'll find the answer in John 17:17. There Jesus was speaking to the Father about all those who would believe on Him. "Sanctify them through thy truth," He says. "Thy word is truth." Sanctify means "to separate unto." So Jesus was saying, "Separate them by the Word." The Word separates!
Jesus said the Holy Spirit would guide us into all truth. Not just enough truth to get by on. Not just an occasional truth to help us teach our Sunday school classes. All truth!
If you're a businessman, that means the Holy Spirit will show you how to increase your profits and reduce your expenses. If you're a mother, it means the Holy Spirit will show you how to settle arguments between your children. If you're a student, it means the Holy Spirit will show you how to excel in your classes.
Did you know that, according to the Word of God, there is no lack in the Body of Christ? Everything we could ever need, every problem we could ever face has been covered by the blood of Jesus. His exceeding great and precious promises have supplied it all.
Why then do many of us keep on suffering lack? Because we haven't, as Hebrews 5:13 says, become skillful in the Word of righteousness.
Since God doesn’t save anyone against their will, does it really do any good to pray for people who consciously refuse to receive Jesus as Lord?
Yes. Yes! Yes! It does!
You see, in spite of the fact that most all unbelievers who have purposely refused to receive Jesus as Lord think they’ve made that decision of their own free will, the truth is, they haven’t. The Word of God says they’ve been blinded by Satan. He’s blocking their perception of the truth. So their decision hasn’t been freely made at all.
Have you ever been in the position in the past where every time you opened the Bible you received a river of revelation? Does it seem lately that the river’s run dry? If so, I strongly suggest that you backtrack to the last revelation God gave you. Back up and see if you acted on it, if you did what God showed you to do. If you didn’t, start again, digging in to that revelation and then putting it into action in your life. You’ll soon find new revelations are beginning to flow.
A lot of people have been playing games when it comes to the Word. They claim to be faith people in public. But, in private, they never open the Bible at all. Then, when a time of trouble comes and they try to stand on the Word, they fall flat on their spiritual faces.
Well, the time for playing games is over. It’s time for us to realize that real faith involves action. James 2:20 says faith without works [or corresponding action] is dead.
So many times when we need insight into a problem, we try to get it by focusing our attention on that problem. We study it. We ponder it. We examine it from every angle. But the Apostle Peter gives us a different approach. He says we should take heed (or focus our attention) to the written Word of God until the answer to that problem dawns on us through the light of revelation.
New Covenant. It's a familiar phrase to most of us. But do we really know what it means?
No we don't. Because if we did, every one of us would be faith a giant. Instead of struggling, "trying" to believe the promises of God, we'd be like Abraham: "Strong in faith...fully persuaded that, what [God] had promised, he was also able to perform" (Romans 4:20-21).
Most believers don't know anything about true humility. If you tell them they're the righteousness of God, they'll fight to keep from believing it. You can give them scripture references to prove it, and they'll still argue.
"Oh no," they'll say, "I'm not righteous. I'm just an old sinner saved by grace." They're making a sincere attempt to be humble. But they're sincerely wrong. They're so afraid of being exalted by pride that they've let Satan trick them into falling right into it.
We believers need to start watching our language! We need to quit throwing words around like they weren't important and start using them like our lives depended on it--because, according to the Word of God, they do! (Proverbs 18:21).
Too many of us have what Proverbs 19:1 calls a perverted mouth. Having a perverted mouth means more than lying and using profanity. It means having a disobedient mouth. It means saying things that are out of line with the Word of God.
Years ago, God spoke a phrase to Gloria's heart that I've never forgotten. She'd been asking Him to teach her to walk in the spirit, to operate more fully in the supernatural power of God.
In consistency lies the power, He said.
That revelation was tough for me. In the natural I'm anything but consistent. My human nature tends to be up one day and down the next. But, praise God, I don't have to depend on my human nature to get me by. I have Jesus Christ living within me and He's the same yesterday, today and forever!
Choosing to side with God's Word is a continual challenge. It's not something you do just once. It's a process of choosing to believe and act upon the Word of God over and over in every circumstance.