When you are a child of God, when you are walking in the Will and knowledge of God, many things which happen in your life – some of which may be painful now – are like an instruction, a teaching, to prepare you for the future! In Isaiah 30v20, ‘Although the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction…’ I’m sensing, that although your life’s experience will be of adversity and affliction, yet they will become the very thing which God will use for His glory. When I look back on my life and my 70 years of ministry, it is very clear to me that in order to come to where I am today, the Lord had to take me through adversity. I would not be where I am, seeing the power of the evangelism and the phenomenal miracles unless I had had cancer twice and been in prison.
Our confidence is in Christ
Our confidence is in Christ! When we have faith in God, He takes away our fear. In Christ we have no fear of the past, the future, no fear of the virus, no fear of the devil – we have confidence in God! Scripture says, don’t throw away your confidence! Keep that confidence in the reconciliation we have with God – nothing can break our relationship with God, no evil can destroy what we have, we are one with God, reconciled in Christ – and that’s why Jesus Christ is so important in our lives!
Raised from death to life
In October 2003 David was evangelising in Almaty, the commercial capital of Kazakhstan. Someone told David that a missionary friend of his was dying in a hospital there, would he please go and pray? This man, Doug Boyle, an Australian missionary, was dying alone in an intensive care unit. David went to pray with him. 16 years later, who greeted David on arrival in Georgia, but this same man! Watch his dramatic testimony!
Pray from your heart with faith
To me, the most powerful prayers that I’ve read in the Bible are in the Old Testament. As Solomon kneels on that altar in 2 Chronicles 6, he’s crying out to God to FULFIL every Promise, to VERIFY all the Promises He has made! There should come a time in our own praying when we are calling on God to fulfil His Promises!!! This is why we need to pray over the Word of God! We need to SEEK the Word of God! Whatever my crisis, I SEEK God through His Word! God never, ever fails! God has never once – in all my 70 years of ministry – failed to keep the Promises He has made to me!
God will never fail you
Faith is EVIDENCE. Not just the miracle. It’s faith itself which become the EVIDENCE, the SUBSTANCE of things which we don’t have but which we are hoping for. Why so often do we Christians look first for the material answers and don’t look to the spiritual? To God! We would rather go to something we can see and which we think we can depend on. Just as Isaiah said, “Why do you look to the number of chariots, to the men in the army?” They are not God! They are only flesh, and flesh can fail. But God CANNOT EVER, EVER FAIL YOU!
Standing on the Promises of God
If you can believe just one of God’s Promises, if you can believe even just part of God’s Word – then I challenge you to believe the whole! I believe the Bible from cover to cover, I believe it is the inspired Word of God. I’m challenging you to have that confidence that God CANNOT and WILL NOT and DOES NOT FAIL! There’s an old song, ‘Standing on the Promises of God’! That’s what we have to do! Don’t go back to ‘Egypt’, don’t go back to the strength of the horses and the chariots – let’s stand absolutely firm on the Authority and Power of God’s Promises! And if you are going to believe just one, why not believe them all?
Put your faith in God!
Our strength, our hope is in God, not in men! The world is facing so many crises at the moment; Isaiah says, why do you trust in material things and human power? Sooner or later they will fail. But God is so different! That’s why Scripture teaches us to put our trust in Him, believe what He says. If only we would take God at His Word, literally!!! We have to learn to have the confidence to believe God will do what He says!
Driven to make a decision
When we trust God, our bread and water, the basic necessities, everything we need for life, will always be there. The Power and the Anointing of the Holy Spirit will never run dry. It doesn’t matter how much I use the Holy Spirit, how much I pray, how many miracles I see, that precious cruse of oil of the Holy Spirit will never, ever run out. God’s supply is inexhaustible. I KNOW that! I have no fear of the future. I have no fear that the miracles of the past will diminish and go away. God has promised that He will never leave or forsake us, so we may boldly say: "The Lord is my helper; I will not fear."
Through faith we obey and receive
Do you understand how powerful faith is? God will never ever, ever fail to keep His Promise!! Even if everything around us seems to conspire against it, God won’t fail!!! Somebody once said, there are three levels of faith. The first level of faith is that you believe in something because all the evidence is there that it is going to happen. The second level is when you are believing for something and there is nothing at all to support or convince you that it could happen. But the third level of faith is when everything is against you – it can’t happen! Faith when it’s impossible, absolutely impossible.
Your confidence has great reward
We can understand faith in so many ways. Yes, the faith to receive miracles of healing, faith to receive answers to prayer, but also the CONFIDENCE we have in our Christian walk. Faith should be, that when we get out of bed in the morning, we are confident God is with us. When we open the front door and step out into the day’s life, whatever is in store, we have confidence. It is confidence in God that has always boosted my life, bolstered my life, supported and strengthened my life.