Do you know how Abraham developed endurance in trusting God? All the difficulties, hardships and impossibilities Abraham encountered actually became stepping-stones of faith and opportunities to grow in his trust in God and bring glory to Him.
Please know that God has never changed His training method since Abraham. For our faith to grow in strength, God must give us opportunities to practice faith and tests to help us learn endurance. What motivates us to exercise faith? Have you ever noticed, in your own life, that faith is usually the very last thing we consider, only after we run out of all other ideas and resources in trying to solve a problem?
God knows well that we see little need for exercising faith unless we encounter a situation that is beyond any solution we can find. I am almost certain that if Abraham had a choice, he would have picked out an easier way to become the father of faith, rather than going from one desperate situation to another. And each time we do, we experience His faithfulness to His Word, and as a result, our faith grows. I hope that this will encourage you as God gives you opportunities to exercise faith, so you can grow in strength and endurance like Abraham did.
This content provider does not have additional content available right now. Please check back later to see if new content has been added. Thank you for being a Giving Member! Experience fruitful living with your unlimited content on iDisciple. What Makes Your Faith Grow? Gisela Yohannan. Description Faith grows not by theory but by practice—not just by talking about it, but also by exercising it. Dear Sister, Over these past few weeks, I have thought about the importance of faith in our walk with God.
With love and prayers, Gisela. Get an audio recording of the Bible, and listen to it as you go to sleep, as you get ready in the morning, or as you drive in your car. Get audio and video teaching from Bible teachers you can trust.
We have hundreds of teachings and media resources available to you for free on our website in the Watch section. Additionally, you can subscribe to our podcast and listen to faith-filled teaching on the go. You may have heard for years that Jesus is Lord. You may have grown up in a Christian home and been taught that since you were old enough to understand what your parents were saying.
But something happened the day you believed it. Everything changed. That goes for every part of your Christian life. You may be struggling with your health.
You may feel sick. I clocked him at one piece of trash a minute, which at that rate would have taken him longer to clear the grounds than it took to build the Great Wall. Where we visited included a maze of concession stands, tons of them—Great Concession stands. Someone told me that those who operated the stands employed principles of the free market, meaning that the more they sold and the more they charged for what they sold, the more they profited.
One of the women at the booths actually grabbed my coat and dragged me to her counter. It would be an understatement to say that it was a motivated workforce. The difference between these two workers was a chasm. One worked like a sluggard because he knew that he would always make the same amount no matter what he did communism. The other worker knew that her effort would be rewarded the free market. The doctrine of eternal security that we can never lose our salvation was never meant to negate the teaching of rewards.
In many places in the Bible, God makes it clear that our obedience and faithfulness will be rewarded. We are called to exercise faith in future rewards, choosing to believe that our actions or inaction will be compensated.
We are not told what these rewards will be, but simply given the assurance that it will be worth our while. Teaching our disciples to maintain an eternal perspective, or to live for eternity can cultivate their faith toward this truth, provided that our definition of what is eternal encompasses far more than evangelism, for Jesus states that even a cup of water given in his name will not fail to be rewarded.
Adam and Eve became convinced that God was holding out on them. Eating from the tree was in their best interests.
When things are going wrong, we justify our sin with self-pity. More innocuously, many of us fall prey to pessimism and distrust that what lies in wait over the time horizon is anything but good, often brought on by a nagging suspi- cion that God never did forget our sin, and payday is right around the bend.
Everything God does in our lives is motivated by love, and any minor deconstruction of that truth is a lie that can have serious ramifications. In helping your disciples with this struggle, you might ask some questions to discover if their mind has a proclivity to move down this path. You might also share in what ways you tend to doubt the goodness of God. Intimacy with Christ is the best answer to any and all doubts of His goodness.
When we feel close to Christ, we sense that He is on our side, and when we feel distant, we come to suspect that He is not. Memorizing scripture is great, but passages of scripture are animated by our intimacy with Christ.
In some way we are all victims of identity theft. Having trusted Christ, we are heirs with Christ of all that is in Him.
In the movie Cheaper by the Dozen, the youngest child is treated as the family outcast. Over the course of time he begins to believe it, rumors become a lie, and the lie grows in power until he runs away from the family believing he has no place within it. Our faith in our identity in Christ is absolutely foundational to our lives. Faith is fed by reading the Bible.
Commend it to your disciples for daily reading particularly during times of deep trials and temptation when they are most prone to forget who they truly are, and believe things about themselves and God which are not true. Today I deliberately choose to submit myself fully to God as He has made Himself known to me through the Holy Scripture which I honestly accept as the only inspired, infallible, authoritative standard for all life and practice. In this day I will not judge God, His work, myself, or others on the basis of feelings or circumstances.
I recognize by faith that the triune God is worthy of all honor, praise, and worship as the Creator, Sustainer, and End of all things. I confess that God, as my Creator, made me for Himself.
In this day, I therefore choose to live for Him. Revelation ; Isaiah ,7,21; Revelation I recognize by faith that God loved me and chose me in Jesus Christ before time began Ephesians I recognize by faith that God has proven His love to me in sending His Son to die in my place, in whom every provision has already been made for my past, present, and future needs through His representative work, and that I have been quickened, raised, seated with Jesus Christ in the heavenlies, and anointed with the Holy Spirit Romans ; ; Philippians ; ,7,13,19; Ephesians ; ,6; Acts , I recognize by faith that God has accepted me, since I have received Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord John ; Ephesians ; that He has forgiven me Ephesians ; adopted me into His family, assuming every responsibility for me John ,17; Ephesians ; Philippians ; given me eternal life John ; 1 John ; applied the per- fect righteousness of Christ to me so that I am now justified Romans ; ; ; made me complete in Christ Colossians ; and offers Himself to me as my daily sufficiency through prayer and the decisions of faith 1 Corinthians ; Colossians ; Galatians ; John ; Matthew ; Romans ; Hebrews , I recognize by faith that the Holy Spirit has baptized me into the body of Christ 1 Corinthians ; sealed me Ephesians ; anointed me for life and service Acts ; John ; seeks to lead me into a deeper walk with Jesus Christ John ; ; ; Romans ; and to fill my life with Himself Ephesians I recognize by faith that only God can deal with sin and only God can produce holiness of life.
I confess that in my salvation my part was only to receive Him and that He dealt with my sin and saved me. Now I confess that in order to live a holy life, I can only surrender to His will and receive Him as my sanctification; trusting Him to do whatever may be necessary in my life, without and within, so I may be enabled to live today in purity, freedom, rest and power for His glory.
All things build upon this. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God John I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life 1 John In describing our spiritual armor, Paul uses a helmet to illustrate the truth of our salvation: that which protects the mind, and protects us from a fatal blow. We make it a critical part of basic follow-up, because scripture affirms that it is.
Let your disciples doubt that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Let them doubt that the Cubs will ever win a World Series. But, rehearse this with them until that helmet cannot be pried off their head. Faith is like a muscle; it grows by lifting weights.
Weights are the resistance—the doubts, mental whispers, and circumstances that tell us the opposite of what faith must believe. He is for me. He has a plan. And so all disciples are periodically tossed into a boat and sent out into a raging storm, where God is conspicuous by his absence. We are not trying to rescue our disciples from the situations and circumstances that will cause faith to grow.
Our role is to come alongside them, strengthen their feeble arms and help them to curl the heavy weights that will cause their faith to bulk-up. I think I just described a steroid.
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