Walking by Faith
One year at our annual Charis Bible College Expand Your Vision Weekend, as I was worshiping the Lord, I just knew in my heart that the Lord had entered the room.
I didn’t feel it, I just knew it.
I knew He had walked into the auditorium through the left front doors and right up in front of the stage. He stood there next to me for a moment, then He turned and started down the middle aisle and toward the back of the room.
I know the Lord promised He would always be with us and, in fact, lives within us. But there was a tangible manifestation of His presence. Very simply put, I believe what we call the anointing is just a manifestation of what is already true in the spirit realm. The Lord is always with us, but His presence isn’t always tangibly manifest. This time it was.
The presence of the Lord was so real, I opened my eyes to look and see if I could see Him. Within moments, people began to drop to their knees and worship the Lord in the same sequence that I had sensed Him walking through the room. People were rejoicing and sobbing out loud. It was a powerful time of being in the manifest presence of the Lord.
But here is the thing that was so special to me: I didn’t physically see or feel anything extraordinary. I didn’t need to. I knew it by faith. By the Spirit, I knew what was happening before I opened my eyes and saw any confirmation of the Lord moving through the meeting and touching people. I was just as satisfied to know these things by the Spirit as if I had been physically overwhelmed and pinned to the floor under the power of the Holy Spirit.
As the meeting continued, there were many people touched by the manifest presence of the Lord. It was one of those times that people want to build three tabernacles and just camp there (Matt. 17:4). Although I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience, I’ve come to the place where faith when God’s presence is not manifest is just as real as the special times when feeling confirms what faith believes.
That night I ministered from Luke 24 where the two disciples of Jesus were walking to Emmaus. As they walked along the road, the resurrected Jesus joined them, but they didn’t recognize Him.
The scripture says,
“And it came to pass, that, while they communed [together] and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them. But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.” (Luke 24:15-16)
These were Jesus’ disciples, and yet they didn’t know Him. How could that be? How could you not recognize a person you had lived with for over three years? Mark’s account of this same instance gives us the answer. Mark condenses this whole encounter into one verse and says,
“After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they walked, and went into the country”. (Mark 16:12)
The reason Jesus’ disciples didn’t recognize Him was because He was in another form. This doesn’t mean He looked like another person and had different physical features. That same day, just minutes after this encounter with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus appeared to His disciples in Jerusalem and showed them the print of the nails in His hands and feet (Luke 24:39). This was the same Jesus they had intimately known before. He bore the marks of crucifixion in His resurrected body. But they didn’t know Him because He was no longer in a physical body. He was in a spiritual, glorified body. They were looking with physical eyes that could only see physical things, and Jesus was in a spiritual body that could only be fully recognized with spiritual eyesight.
Here is an amazing truth: Spiritual things can only be perceived by our spirits. Jesus said to Nicodemus in
John 3:6,
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit”.
What Jesus was saying was, flesh is flesh and spirit is spirit. You cannot perceive the spirit through the senses of the flesh. They are totally different worlds, or realms, of reality.
The Apostle Paul made this same point in 1 Corinthians 2:14 where he said,
“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned”.
The physical senses can’t discern spiritual things. This isn’t speaking only of understanding spiritual truths with our minds; this also applies to seeing spiritual realities with our eyes or feeling spiritual things with our emotions. Of course there are exceptions where God opened physical eyes to enable people to see angels and even heaven, but normally the only way to access the spirit realm is through our spirits by faith.
Although special times of the manifest presence of the Lord do occur when we can feel in the natural what is always true in the spiritual, this is the exception rather than the rule. We are not to be more excited when we feel something than when we are just walking by faith in the promises of God. That’s a radical statement!
The Lord began to teach me this very early in my walk with Him. On March 23, 1968, the Lord manifested Himself to me in a tangible way. For four months, I was physically aware of the Lord’s love and presence with me in a way that took virtually no faith. I could feel it. It was awesome. But then that physical sensation left. Shortly thereafter, I was drafted and found myself in Vietnam. The absence of Christian fellowship and everything I was used to made my desperation for the Lord’s love and presence even more acute. I could truthfully say that I was desperate for God in the worst sense of the word.
Then one day, I woke up and felt like God was totally gone. I had no sense of His presence. Hopelessness and a fear came over me that I had never known. I remember someone coming into my bunker, and I hid under a stack of clothes. I was so afraid, I just couldn’t face anyone. I felt exactly like
Ephesians 2:12 says, “That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.”
It felt like God had died or at the very least deserted me. For three days I did everything I knew to do to try and regain God’s presence. I fasted and prayed and studied the Word constantly. Nothing seemed to make any difference. Then on the morning of the third day, I woke up and found myself kneeling beside my cot praying. Nothing special was happening, but the simple presence of the Lord was back. Or maybe it was simply that the fear and hopelessness was gone. Whatever it was, I had my normal peace back.
I know according to the Scriptures that the Lord never leaves us nor forsakes us, so I believe that this was only my perception that the Lord left me. However, this taught me a wonderful lesson. I discovered that I had taken for granted the everyday peace that the abiding presence of the Lord produces. I believe the Lord was tired of me begging for some special emotional experience. He was wanting me to start walking by faith instead of feeling. So, He removed my awareness of His presence and let me feel what hell (the total absence of God) must feel like. It had a profound impact on me.
I quit asking for some epiphany and just started thanking God for what I had. I got into the Word of God and began to believe that the Lord was with me and loved me, not because of what I felt, but because He told me so in His Word. I began the transition from feelings to faith, carnality to spirituality, immaturity to maturity. This is how I was relating to the Lord that night at our CBC Expand Your Vision Weekend.
I perceived the presence and ministry of the Lord apart from feelings. It was just a revelation from the Lord that I accepted by faith. When the manifestations confirmed what I knew by faith, I wasn’t more certain of His presence than I was before physical confirmation came. I wasn’t dependent on some physical experience. I had the everyday love, joy, and peace that I walk in, but I had faith that let me know God’s presence and love was with me in an infinitely greater way than anything I could feel or see.
I’ve had some awesome encounters with the Lord, and doubtless, I will have more. But regardless of what wonderful experiences you or I have with Him, they are limited. We’ve only scratched the surface or touched the tip of the iceberg of God’s great love and awesomeness. What we have inside is infinitely more powerful and wonderful than we can grasp, and it’s always that way. You may not always perceive God’s presence and peace with you, but it is. Even in the times when circumstances are yelling at you and affecting your emotions, God’s glory is right there inside of you, giving you love, joy, peace, and all the fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5:22-23.
You won’t always feel God’s presence. That may come as a shock or disappointment to you, but that’s the way it is. And if you are believing, unrealistically, for a constant tangible manifestation of His love and presence, you are out of step with God and setting yourself up for disappointment. That’s not the way He is. The Lord loves to work in subtle ways that only faith perceives.
Look at the way Jesus came to earth. He didn’t come in some grandiose style. He came humbly, as a child born to poor parents. His birth wasn’t announced to Caesar or Herod the king. It was heralded to lowly shepherds. Even Jesus’ physical body wasn’t exceptional.
Isaiah 53:2 says
“he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.”
When people looked at Jesus’ physical body, it took faith to believe that He was God. He wasn’t beautiful. He was natural. He wasn’t extraordinary. And when Jesus rose from the dead, He never showed Himself to a single person who wasn’t already one of His disciples. We would think He missed a great opportunity. Thousands had seen Him crucified just three days before. All He would have had to do was walk down the streets of Jerusalem or into Pilate’s judgment hall, and people would have been forced to bow their knees and acknowledge Him as the Christ. But that’s not the nature of God. Hebrews 11:6 says, “But without faith it is impossible to please him.”
Our God is a God of faith, and it takes faith to please Him. He could make a bird come sit on your shoulder and tell you He loves you every minute of every day. He could write your name with instructions on every cloud that passes over. He could have angels come visit you every morning and night to affirm to you that what He says in His Word is true. But that’s not faith, and that’s not God. Second Corinthians 5:7 says, “For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
We don’t just walk by faith until we get the sight we really desired. We walk by faith, period. When sight comes, we praise God and keep walking by faith.
The things I’ve tried to share with you in this article are profound. Not everyone will realize the importance of them. But faith is as far superior to feelings as true love is to lust. There really is no comparison. Yet lust seems to be more common and easier to come by than true love. Likewise, dependence on our feelings is more common among Christians than faith. We know what God said in His Word, but we don’t feel it, and therefore, we don’t believe it. That’s all wrong. Faith comes before feelings and always trumps feelings. Faith will produce feelings, not every time, but sometimes, and we need to enjoy them when they come. But being controlled by feelings is a BIG hindrance to true faith. We need to get to the place where God’s Word is proof enough without emotional confirmation.
I’ve made an audio teaching on this from Luke 24 entitled “Walking by Faith.” In this teaching, I share about this experience at the Expand Your Vision Weekend and my Vietnam story I shared in this article. I go into a lot of detail on this subject that I think could really make a big difference in your life. There is much more to this than I was able to convey in this article.
2020
The Reality of Faith
Many people think faith is acting like something is so when it really isn’t so, and if we do that long enough, then it will become so.
But that’s not it at all. Faith is real.
Hebrews 11:1 says,
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
Faith is substance. This is saying that faith is real. It is the evidence of things not seen. Notice it didn’t say “things that don’t exist.” They do exist. They just aren’t seen.
Even in the natural world, we’ve come to realize that there are things that do exist that we can’t see. We can’t see television signals, but they do exist. In fact, wherever you are right now, there are television signals right there with you. If you say “No there aren’t” just because you can’t see or hear them, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means you aren’t very smart. They do exist, they are just unseen. They are unseen realities.
A television set can make unseen signals visible. When we see the images is not when they became real. They were already there. A television set doesn’t generate images. The set just receives the signal and converts it into sights and sounds that we can perceive. But the television signals were already there, before we tuned them in.
Probably every person reading this letter has watched television when suddenly the picture went blank. What did you do? I bet you didn’t call the television station and complain about them stopping their broadcast. The first thing you did was check and see if everything was working on your television set. Was the electricity on? Was it plugged in? Did a tube go out or did some circuit melt? You checked your receiver to see what was wrong with it. You trust that the station broadcasts 24/7. You don’t question that until you eliminate all the possible problems with your set.
Likewise, God is real and does exist. He just can’t be seen. He is broadcasting all His power and blessings 24/7. It’s never God’s transmitter that is broken. It’s always our receiver that is the problem. If we ask God for something and we don’t see it manifest instantly, most people question why God hasn’t answered that prayer yet. They assume that because they haven’t seen or heard anything, nothing has happened. That’s all wrong. We need to have more faith in God than we have in a television station.
There is a very good illustration of this truth in 2 Kings 6. Elisha, the prophet of God, was revealing the Syrian’s battle plans to the king of Israel. Every time the king of Syria tried to ambush the king of Israel, Elisha would warn the king of Israel, and he would ambush the Syrian’s ambush. This happened so often that the king of Syria finally asked his servants to reveal who the traitor was. He knew that the king of Israel could not be maneuvering like he was without inside information.
When one of the king of Syria’s servants said that Elisha, the prophet of God, was revealing the words that the king of Syria said in his bed chamber to the king of Israel, the king of Syria sent his armies to capture Elisha.
Second Kings 6:15 says,
“And when the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, behold, an host compassed the city both with horses and chariots. And his servant said unto him, Alas, my master! how shall we do?”
When Elisha’s servant saw the Syrian troops, he panicked. He knew why they were there. They had discovered Elisha was the one telling the king of Syria’s battle plans to the king of Israel. They were in big trouble. Look at the response of Elisha to this situation in
2 Kings 6:16:
“And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.”.
People who don’t believe anything exists beyond their five senses would say Elisha was lying. He was confessing something was so when it really wasn’t so, hoping that it would become so. But that’s not the way it was at all. Elisha spoke the truth. There were more with him than was with the Syrian army. It’s just that Elisha’s forces were in the unseen reality.
The key to understanding this is to recognize there is another realm of reality beyond this physical world. Those who are limited to only their five senses will always struggle with this. They think Elisha was lying, and indeed, he would have been lying if all that exists is this physical world. You could count the Syrian troops by the thousands, and there was only Elisha and his servant. But Elisha wasn’t lying because there was another world of reality. If you looked at the whole picture, the physical and spiritual world, then Elisha was right on. In the spiritual realm, there were many more horses and chariots of fire around Elisha than there were Syrian troops.
According to 2 Kings 6:17,
“Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And he LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.”
Gehazi’s physical eyes were already wide open. God was opening his spiritual eyes. He was able to see with his heart into the spiritual world. And when the spiritual world was taken into consideration, then Elisha’s statement was perfectly true.
Those who see faith as an attempt to make something real which isn’t real will always struggle with those who see faith as simply making what is spiritually true a physical truth. Those who limit truth to only the physical realm would have called Elisha one of those “name it, claim it,” “blab it, grab it” cultists. But in saying such things, they condemn themselves. They show they only consider what they can see, taste, hear, smell, and feel to be reality. They are what the Bible calls “carnal.”
When Gehazi’s eyes were opened, the Syrians didn’t disappear. They were still there. The physical truth was still true, but there was a greater spiritual truth that emerged. True faith doesn’t deny physical truth; it just refuses to let physical truth dominate spiritual truth. True faith subdues physical truth to the reality of spiritual truth.
Because Elisha believed in the realities of the spiritual world, he raised his hand and smote all the Syrians with blindness. Then he led the whole Syrian army captive to the king of Israel. Praise the Lord! That’s not bad for an old prophet whom carnal people would say was all by himself.
Elisha was not just speaking some wishful statement, hoping that it would become a reality. He knew what was real in the spiritual world, and he controlled his emotions and actions accordingly. There is no indication that Elisha saw the horses and chariots of fire around him. He didn’t need to. He believed it. Those who operate in true faith don’t need to see with their physical eyes. Their faith is evidence enough.
There was a woman at a campmeeting who had a huge goiter on her neck. She went forward for prayer and knew that she knew she was healed. So, she got up in front of the audience and gave a testimony of her goiter being healed. However, the goiter was still visible. But the people praised God, thinking that the healing would manifest itself shortly.
The next year at the same campmeeting, the woman got up again and praised the Lord for her healing, but there still wasn’t any visible proof. This concerned a lot of people, but they didn’t say anything. Then the next year, the same thing happened. This was too much for most of the people, and it caused the leaders of the meeting to approach this woman and tell her she couldn’t testify of this healing again until the goiter was gone.
The woman told the Lord that she knew He had healed her, and she didn’t have to see visible results to believe it. But for the sake of the unbelievers, she asked the Lord to physically remove the growth. It disappeared and the woman showed them what she already knew was true. You can get that strong in faith. Your faith is substance and all the evidence you need. Faith is real.
I’ve experienced this in my own life. When my youngest son, Peter, died on March 4, 2001, my wife and I spoke our faith and said,
“The first report is not the last report.”
We spoke resurrection life back into Peter’s body, and then we headed into town. It was one hour and fifteen minutes from the time we got the call until we got to where Peter was. During that time, I was operating in faith. I remembered prophecies that had not yet come to pass in Peter’s life, and therefore, I knew it wasn’t time for Peter to die. I rejoiced by faith, seeing Peter alive and well.
My oldest son, Joshua, met me at the door and said, “Dad, five or ten minutes after I called you, Peter just sat up.” Thank You, Jesus! This is the point: I didn’t rejoice more once I saw Peter raised from the dead than I did while I was still driving. During the drive, I knew Peter was alive, and I was rejoicing with all my might. It was actually anticlimactic when I saw in the physical what I had already seen in the spiritual. Don’t get me wrong; I was blessed and I rejoiced to see my son raised up after being dead for five hours. But the physical reality wasn’t more real to me than the spiritual reality of faith.
This is the way I live. I know it’s not “normal,” but I’m not getting “normal” results either. I’ve been believing big, and there have been big results from that believing. When we moved into our new offices, and when we see the warehouse finished, that was, and will be, anticlimactic. I’m seeing all these things in the spirit now. When they manifest physically, others will be impressed, but I’m impressed now.
I’m not believing for something that isn’t real to become real. I’ve seen into the spiritual realm by faith, and I’m simply making what I’ve seen in the spiritual world manifest in the physical world. All of the things I’m seeing with my physical eyes now, I have already seen in my heart. I saw it on the inside before I saw it on the outside. This is a wonderful way to live. This is the normal Christian life. This is walking by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7).
2020
Faith Is Based on Knowledge
“Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord, According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” (2 Peter 1:2-4)
These verses say that all things that pertain unto life and godliness are given unto us through the knowledge of God. Certainly, faith must be one of those things because without faith it is impossible to please God (Heb. 11:6). So faith must come through the knowledge of God. That’s the reason Romans 10:17 says faith comes by hearing the Word of God.
The amount of faith that you operate in is directly proportional to the revelation knowledge that you have of God through His Word.
Many people have found it very difficult to operate in faith. That is because they either don’t have the real knowledge of God’s Word in them, or they have let the Word slip and be choked by the knowledge of the world.
Fear comes through carnal knowledge, just as faith and all things that pertain unto life come through godly knowledge.
Most Christians today (even Spirit-filled Christians) are full of the knowledge about how to operate in Satan’s system but are really deficient in the knowledge it takes to prosper in God’s system. So, it is not really a faith problem that exists, but it is rather a Word problem.
Galatians 5:22 states that faith is a part of the fruit of the Spirit. Have you ever seen a plant struggle to bring forth fruit? Have you ever heard a vine moan and groan and complain about how hard it is to produce grapes? Of course not! It’s the nature of a vine to produce grapes. If the vine is protected and given nourishment, it will automatically produce fruit, unless it’s starved or attacked by some outside force. So it is with the Christian. Faith will automatically be the product of our abiding in the Word, which is Jesus (John 1:1, 15:1-7).
The problem has been that the knowledge of God’s Word has not been abiding in us, or the carnal knowledge of the world has choked the Word of God that was there. You cannot serve two masters (Matt. 6:24). A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. He cannot receive anything from the Lord (James 1:7-8).
Matthew 6:22 gives us the promise that if the eye is single, we will be full of light. That means that if all your attention is focused on God through His Word, then the only thing that you will be full of is God and what His Word produces. This is a Bible law that is repeated in Romans 8:6, which says, “For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” If we are experiencing anything but life and peace, it is because we are carnally minded. You cannot have life and peace without the knowledge of God. On the other hand, you cannot experience any form of death without the knowledge of the devil and his system.
The carnal knowledge that we dwell upon in our thought lives is Satan’s in-road to us. I am convinced that one of the main reasons that the first men that walked upon this earth lived to be as old as 969 years is because they didn’t know how to die. They didn’t even have a family until they were over 300 years old! They didn’t know that there was supposed to be a flu season every year. It took many years for Satan to pervert the knowledge that was in man so that he would accept defeat. Most of our battles could be avoided if we would just be wise concerning that which is good and simple concerning that which is evil (Rom. 16:19).
Hebrews 11:15 says that if Abraham had been mindful of the country that he came out of, he might have had opportunity, or might have been tempted, to have returned. But, since he refused to think on Satan’s knowledge, he could not be tempted to turn back. Praise God! If Abraham could do it, we can do it too. Second Corinthians 10:4-5 says we can bring every thought into captivity and under the obedience of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But, since our minds have already been grounded in the knowledge of this world, it is impossible to just cast that carnal mind out. You have to be thinking on something. Romans 12:2 says, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Our minds have to be renewed, and that is done by meditating on the knowledge of God as revealed in His Word.
Your mind is similar to a computer. It simply acts upon the knowledge put into it. If all you have is carnal knowledge, then all you can be is carnal. But praise God, you can reprogram yourself with the Word of God.
You are not incapable of living a life of faith. Quite the contrary, if you have been born again, you have already been given faith as a part of the fruit of the Spirit. But, you can’t function in it if you don’t know that it’s there or if you don’t have knowledge of the laws that govern it. The laws of aerodynamics have been in existence since creation, but man didn’t have knowledge of them until recently. Many people scoffed at the idea of flying, just as many people ridicule the faith message today.
They used to say, “If God meant for man to fly, He would have given man wings.” We’ve seen that assumption proven false.
It wasn’t God who was keeping us from flying, it was our ignorance of the laws that govern flight. It hasn’t been God who failed to give us faith, we have all been given the measure of faith (Rom. 12:3), but God’s people have been perishing because of a lack of knowledge of how that faith works.
Mankind didn’t learn how to fly overnight. There have been many failures, but now no one doubts that the laws of aerodynamics work. You won’t learn all the laws of faith instantly either, and you may fall flat on your face a few times before you start seeing faith produce as it should. But, the law of faith, which created everything, is a thousand times more sure than the laws of aerodynamics. The knowledge of God and how faith works is hidden for you, not from you, in the Word of God. Pray Ephesians 1:15-23 with me, as a prayer to receive the knowledge of God. Believe that you receive, and watch faith begin to be produced in your life.
“Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints, Cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers; That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him: The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power, Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, Which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all.” (Eph. 1:15-23)