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We are back for another session. We’re doing our series on walking in radical faith. And this particular session is one of my favorite. Just a real quick update for our podcast listeners. Be sure to subscribe. You can either subscribe to the channel that you’re listening on or if you’re also a YouTuber, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel at Get Sellers calling you. If you do like this, please share it on social media and let others watch it. And as I always share, the second time around is always the most effective. So I’d like to encourage you as you listen to this, go back and listen to it again. If you have a chance, go to our podcast website, which is either depending on which channel you’re on, the get sellers calling you.com or get radical face.com and watch the video because you’ll see me drawing up diagrams and stuff and it just really makes everything else gel and come together. So with that, I want to talk about what we I want to do a quick review from last week or at least the last session as we get into this one. So we talked earlier about this thing that we call we commonly call it radical faith. From God’s perspective, it’s just faith. It’s like you’re pregnant or you’re not pregnant. It’s not like you’re radically pregnant. You’re just you either are or you aren’t. And faith is the same way. You either have faith or you don’t have faith.

And we see this in Scripture. Jesus says, If you have faith, you can say to this mountain, Be taken up and cast in the sea and it will obey you. And so if you say to this mountain, be taken up and cast it into the sea and it doesn’t obey you, what does that mean? You didn’t have faith. I mean, it’s just either you have it or not. In the our perspective with faith is that it’s either we do faith in gradients. Okay, someone’s taking a trip. Hey, pray for traveling mercies and traveling safeties. And I have faith that the Lord’s going to get me from here to there safely. So that’s one level of faith. But then do I have the faith to give above and beyond what I think I can afford? Now that takes bigger faith. Or maybe sell everything and give it all to the poor and go become a missionary over in Mongolia and be with Eric or someplace like that. Right. And that’s really big faith. So we always think of faith in gradients, but it’s either it’s either you have it or you don’t. I call it radical faith only because it it’s a snazzy title, right? That’s really the main thing. It’s a snazzy title, but with faith that it is just faith. So let me ask you a question. I’m holding up my marker. How many of you have faith that this marker exists? Raise your hands.

We know that. You know that. Yeah. No one’s falling for it. You can’t. Caroline’s. Caroline’s not sure if she should raise her hand or not. Not raising my hand. Yeah. I caught everyone last week. You’re. You’re fast learners. When I did this at the Lovelady Center last.

Week and then again yesterday, I held up my marker and everyone raised their hands.

So for those.

Who are just joining in, if you can see it, you cannot have faith in it. So yes, my podcast listeners can have faith. I’m holding up a marker because they can’t see it. But those here in the living room, you cannot have faith. So faith is the conviction of things not seen. And this is what Hebrews 11 one says. It says Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And notice that it’s the assurance and it is the conviction. Okay. We’re going to talk about this a little bit later. But just to draw it real quickly. Paul says in First Corinthians, I think it’s first Corinthians 13, that faith, hope and love abide. Right? Faith, Hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. And we’re going to do a whole session that faith is rooted in love. And what you have is you have love is the foundation and on top of love, you have hope. That’s built on top of that and then on top of hope you have faith. That’s why faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the things hoped for is those things that are absolutely certain to occur. And they’re rooted in God’s love. Okay. And so you have faith, Hope and love and faith is that assurance of things hoped for. The other thing we find about faith, this comes from second Corinthians five seven. Paul says that we walk by faith and not by sight. Okay? And the reason we walk by faith and not by sight, because faith is essentially.

Do you believe me? Do you believe my word to be true? This is where we see in Galatians where Paul is saying and Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. So it’s all about this belief and it’s about what we cannot see. And what we also find is that you have faith in what God’s Word says is always a heavenly truth. And then what happens is we live in the natural and the earthly realm and what we see with our eyes is the earthly reality. And what happens is it’s faith that transfers the heavenly truth into our earthly reality, and it becomes what we receive on Earth. This is where you have gradients. So if you go back to one of my sessions on our Identity series, I was talking about the three churches, right? You have the servant church and then you have the Saint Church and then you have the Son Church. And really the difference between these is the servant Church believes that there is a veil between Earth and heaven. And because there is that veil, the pure servants, they do not believe in the impact of faith making any change in your earthly reality. You have faith for salvation, but you have a beyond. Their faith doesn’t change anything. And then you have the Saints and the Saints say you were going to pray down our blessings from heaven. Pray down those blessings that are spiritual blessings in the heavenly places into the earthly reality.

And as you continue to grow through faith and revelation as you move into Sonship, then this becomes not so much a praying down, but a speaking down. Okay. We were talking about. Romans 1017 Faith comes from hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ, and that word is the Greek word called Rhema. In simple terms, Rhema is either a direction or a promise or a statement of truth. Sort of like a prophecy. Okay, Mary, you will have a child and you will call his name Jesus. Right? Okay, so that’s a Rhema. It is a prophecy, a statement of something to come. Or when Jesus tells Peter to step out of the boat and come, he says, Come. And that’s arema. And that’s a command to start moving. What we find is that this word of Christ is always a heavenly truth word. It originates in the heavenly realm because Christ is the word. In the beginning was the word. The word was with God, the word was God. And so the word has power in it. When we act on it by faith, when we believe it by faith, because it’s that faith that transfers what this word is claiming back into our earthly reality. And this is the type of faith, the only faith that Jesus talks about. The other thing that’s interesting that we talked about last time is one of the reasons why do we walk by faith? Well, it says in Romans that the righteous man lives by faith.

The other thing is, Jesus says in Luke, When the son of man returns, will he find faith on Earth? It’s the only thing he claims that he’s going to be looking for. And not only that, he then says, I think it’s Luke 18 when he’s talking to the disciples, he says, I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. So we see all of these things that we talked about last time that what is this thing called faith? And the last thing we talked about is that faith is acting on God’s word. It’s taking the action of God’s word. And this is where we covered and we’ll talk about in just a moment a little bit. But man acts on God’s word before he can see. Right? But he acts because God said to do it. And there’s that faith, that belief and faith is not simply expecting. Okay, we talked about I could go to the light switch and turn it off and I expect the lights to go off. That’s not faith. Faith is rooted in believing the author of the word the Lord and then acting on that and acting on it in such a way that there’s great personal risk. So that’s kind of the catch up from where we were last time. And I want to ask a question. The Lord asked this to me and I shared it in a story last time, but some of you may be going through some challenges or something in your life right now.

And you’re really not sure what to do. And there’s some fear, there’s concern and some anxiety, and you’ve read God’s word and he seems to have certain promises or assurances or he has spoken to you in your heart and in a certain way. And he says one thing, you know, trust me, this will work out or whatever it is that he’s telling you. And here’s the question I have. If you really believed God’s promises to you that he’s been making, if you’re going through that situation, how would you be acting differently right now than you are acting right now? Because that’s really kind of the test of faith, is if you believe what God was saying in that situation that you’re walking in, how would you act differently than you’re acting right now? Because I remember I was someplace and this person, a friend of mine who’s been a Christian and a strong believer for a number of years, she’s going through some situations and looking out into the future and God providing for them and going through some challenging times right now. And there was just a comment that she made that you could tell she was really fearful and you could actually when this comic came out, you could just kind of see this fear in her eyes. And the question is, is she really trusting the Lord and all of his promises to take care of them, or is she does she take her eyes off of the Lord, off of the word of God, and place them onto the natural earthly circumstances and loses her faith? Okay.

And that’s where I want to really kind of go into a little bit today. I want to talk about getting out of the boat. John Ortberg wrote a book a number of years back. I have to be honest, I don’t remember much about the book, but I love the title because it says it all. If you want to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat. It’s not going to be easy and it’s not going to be fearless. It’s going to be fraught with a lot of risk. And all of that risk is you’re going to place your entire. Livelihood or whatever it is in God’s Word and trust him. Now, here’s what’s interesting. I remember. One of the things I was wrestling with in trying to understand is think about this. We have faith for salvation. And then we have faith for things that we find very difficult to believe, like miraculous healing. Or raising some from the dead. Or imagine you have someone with a mangled arm and is broken into and you want to pray for that arm and say, in Jesus name, be healed. How do you all think that would be pretty tough to have faith in that arm, right? We see our finances and they’re really rock bottom and we go, oh my gosh, we don’t have enough money. And you tighten your belt every way you can and you start to live in fear because you just don’t have enough money.

But what’s the difference between faith for salvation? And faith for the miraculous in our lives. Have you ever thought about that? Here’s what I’d like to suggest, because I was asking the Lord this and just kind of working this out. Think about faith for salvation is probably the greatest miracle of all because we are changing our genetic line, right? We’re changing it from the line of Adam going to hell to the line of God. Going to heaven. I mean, it is a change from one if we call it in like a one genus to another genus, you know, going from a brier to an olive tree. It just doesn’t happen. But yet we have no problem believing it. But we have problem believing something much simpler of God working supernaturally in our lives and whatever capacity it is. And the reason is we have no grid about going to hell or heaven. It’s so out there that we really don’t think about. We can easily believe in Jesus for salvation, but to believe in him to meet our financial needs at the end of the month. When we got this really big bill coming up and we don’t have any money for it or to meet our health needs because we’re really sick or a loved one is is dying of cancer with stage four cancer. And it’s hard to believe and especially when all of the data you get is the doctor saying you’re going to die, you’re going to die.

This is proven. This is science. And now we have to wrestle with who do we believe. That’s where the hardest part of faith comes in. So I want to talk about a God showing up moment as we move into this section. So God acts in supernatural ways in our lives, and most of the time we never even see it. Most of us we think of. I remember one person. He is a friend of mine that I went to high school with and he is critical about the whole concept of faith. And at the time, you know, maybe healing or things like that, he said, you know, you don’t need to go out and heal someone to prove that you have faith or for God to love you. And I go, Well, that’s true. But you don’t have faith just for healing or faith just for the miraculous or faith just for finances. What happens is this If you go back to this whole concept of our heavenly truths and part of the heavenly truths, one of the biggest truths that Jesus said is I came, that you might have life and have it abundantly. And down here in our life, in our earthly reality, that life doesn’t seem all that abundant right now. In fact, for my friend, it’s not abundant at all. He’s been going through some really tough times, a very difficult divorce, financial challenges, possibly some health challenges. And he’s saying, who needs that faith? You don’t need to do miracles.

What happens is you’ve got the we get our picture, our mind in the wrong focus. Walking by radical faith is not so much walking in the miraculous. It’s walking in the abundant life that Jesus promised us to have, but that life can only be received through faith. Either you have your abundant life now on earth as your earthly reality, or you have to die and go to heaven before it’s abundant. And that’s no good because when you die and go to heaven, it’s already abundant. Jesus didn’t have to promise it, right? So where do we want to go with this is understanding. That this abundant life, this God acting in supernatural ways is not just the miraculous that we think about so much of the way God acts in our lives for all these abundant blessings in our life. They appear to be providential circumstances. Think about the Israelites going through the wilderness. They’re hungry. They want meat. So it says a wind started blowing all of these quail from the sea and they landed and the children of Israel could eat. Well, that’s providential. You would say. Well, quails are just out there. Well, quails don’t live out over the sea. Not so many quails to feed 2 million people. So as that wind was blowing, it looked like providential circumstances, but it was creation, miracle happening every single moment. Those quail kept showing up. And so much of our lives, when we walk by faith, it just looks like providential circumstances.

That.

Just somehow God just blessed us here and blessed us there. Or we worked hard and we got something over here. But really what it is, is God working in our lives for one reason, because we’re walking by faith and He’s giving us this abundant life that he promised. We started to see some of the God showing up. And so where God shows up, sometimes we don’t recognize it, but God is still showing up. The times that we do recognize what we talked about last time we had Elijah and the widow, if you remember this is during the reign of King Ahab. During Israel’s time there is a drought. There was a widow in Zarephath that God said, I’m commanding this widow to provide for you. So Elijah goes over there and he says, If you’ll make me a bread cake first, then the Lord promises that your jar of oil and your bit of flour will not run out until the rains come. And so we start to see a pattern. And this is the thing that we talked about last time is the pattern of.

She acts before she can. Sees. Before she can see. But she acts because of God’s promise. God’s Word and direction. And then God performs. We saw the same pattern with Moses parting the Red Sea. All the children of Israel are in fear. The Israel the Egyptian army is coming behind them and they start to complain. And God says, Moses, just go out and divide the sea. Raise your staff and divide the sea. So Moses acts before he can see, but he acts because God told him to. And then God performed. We see the same thing with Mueller. Okay. They have no food in the pantry. All the kids are sitting around the tables at the orphanage ready for breakfast. And he says, Children, we must be in time for class. So let’s pray for the food that the Lord is about to give us. Dear Lord, we thank you for the food that we’re about to eat. In Jesus name, Amen. And there’s no food anywhere. And yet. Providentially. Right. The baker shows up with food. He said, the Lord woke me up at 2:00 this morning, and I just felt that y’all were probably going to be hungry. And here are some bread. And then no sooner than he left, the milkman knocks on the door. He said, My cart just broke down right outside and I need to fix it. Can y’all take all my milk? And God provides.

It sounds providentially, but it is because of faith. And faith moves the mountains. It brings the heavenly truths into our earthly reality. So I remember Beatty Junior was sharing a testimony, and here’s a picture of the testimony and I don’t remember if it was Beatty himself or just seeing a man, but he said, the Lord gave me a vision of faith. And he said, Faith is so powerful it wells up from in the in the gut region of a man, and it goes straight to the heart of God. And it’s so powerful. He said even mighty angels would jump out of the way before it runs right through them. And when it hits the heart of God, God has bound himself by an oath to always fulfill that for which faith has. And when he first told that to me, I wasn’t quite sure I believed it, but I couldn’t really doubt it. I mean, this is Beatty. And for those who know Beatty, you can’t doubt much that he says because he operates at a different realm. But then as I started to learn more about faith, it’s really true because faith comes from the Lord. And any time there is faith, it’s almost like an umbilical cord between you and God and all the nutrients and all the benefits from God comes right down through that umbilical cord. And.

You know, there you are. You’re full of.

Faith. And you can walk in faith and you can do things because God does them for you. So one of the things about applying this is there are two points I want to share as we get into this main teaching. Is that God shows up when he asks you to do something great. And typically it’s out of the norm and typically at great personal risk. If you think about every time we see faith in action, there’s always risk. There’s always something out of the norm. There are two ways out. You either walk by faith on his promises or you walk by faith on his direction. So in these cases, this is when God directs you to do something, it’s always out of the norm. You’re not going to do it. It’s always great personal risk because there’s some reason why you weren’t going to do it to begin with, and God calls you to do it. The second thing about applying this faith is God will never call you to do something that you can do on your own. This is probably one of the big things that has impressed me over the years. If you think about every story in the Bible, when God has called someone, he’s called usually the least. Of the people. Gideon. He was of the smallest tribe, of the smallest family of that tribe, and he was the youngest. So in their culture, he was the least of the least of the least. And God called him to deliver Israel from the Midianites.

And then you have David. He was the youngest of all the sons of Jesse, and he was the one keeping the sheep. You even have Saul. King Saul. And he was a very timid man. You have Moses to be the spokesperson, but yet he stuttered. In every single case, God calls people who don’t have the innate ability. And I think this is on purpose because he doesn’t want us getting the glory. He calls us to do what we cannot do, so we have to rely on him. And then it’s only through his power and his spirit that does it and causes it to happen. And so in one sense, you can use for this radical faith term, a little definition. It’s my definition is radical Faith is acting on God’s word in such a way that failure is certain unless God intervenes, defies the natural course of events and produces the outcome that you need. And this is when you really that’s a long way of just saying it. It’s stepping out. In a radical way where failure is certain, your risk is high and your you’re going to be lost unless God intervenes. God’s taking me through a little test right now, and it’s always our next session is test of faith to understand how he does it. But it’s always through a test. So one of the things that you can understand about walking in radical faith is, is what does it really mean if the Lord is calling you to do something that makes no sense? Then at that point, that’s probably a good thing.

He’s probably saying, I’m testing you. Do you have a little box faith or do you have a big box? Faith. I remember this goes a few years back. We were in our business and at this time we were two and a half years into a slump and we lost 73% of our income during that time. At the point that this story takes place, I was without a paycheck. I had three months left in my savings account. We had drawn all of the money out of all of our lines of credit, so I had no nowhere to go. And it was a Wednesday night. And I was preparing to give my stewardship testimony at church on how you can give faithfully and God provides. And I was kind of role playing and in the role play. Sometimes people would come up to me and say, Hey, Beatty, you know, I just lost my job. My car broke down, my water heater’s busted. What do I do? My standard response was always, We’ll increase your giving. Because God promises that if you give faithfully, you cannot outgive his ability to produce and to provide for you. This comes from Malachi three, ten and 11 in 2 Corinthians nine. And that’s the way I kind of always had stated it. So as I was role playing this, the Lord said. Well, do you really believe that? Beatty? I said, Yeah. He said, Then why don’t you increase your giving?

Now, keep in.

Mind, I have no paycheck. I have three months of savings left. Out of that savings were still giving some giving commitments that we had which were about $2,000 a month. So they were not insubstantial. And in three months it all goes kaput.

So I said, Lord.

I’m giving a lot already. We have three months left, no income. What more do you want? He said, Do you really believe what you’re about to tell those people? I said, Yeah. He said, Then why don’t you do what you say, increase your giving? So I say, okay, here’s the deal. Now, normally I don’t make deals with the Lord, but this was a pretty substantial risk. I wanted to make sure it’s him. I said, okay, to make sure this is you and it’s not me. Here’s the deal. You have someone call me tomorrow or some groups of people call me tomorrow from a ministry and I will fill fulfill their everything that they ask for financially up to and including everything I have in my savings account. But it’s up to you to prove it. You need to have them call me. Okay. And normally people have been calling me all the time, but for the last several months no one called me. I guess I knew how bad we were doing. So I woke up that morning all excited. About writing a check for everything I had in our savings account and giving it away and putting ourselves entirely at the mercy of the Lord to provide for us.

Now, how many of y’all would be excited about going into work and writing a check for everything you’ve got and putting all of your trust entirely on the Lord and doing it on purpose? Yeah, kind of gutsy, but this is this is what I’m calling this is radical faith, right? So I went into the office and there was a voicemail on my phone. So I checked it and it was a guy at our church who manages ministries. His name is Chuck. And he said, Beatty, we’ve got this ministry that’s needing some money. He kind of he’s being very delicate, delicate. But he finally said, you know, and they’re needing $375. I kind of laughed and I picked up the phone and said, okay, Chuck, you got the money? Where do you want me to send it? I said, okay, Lord, send me the next one. And I was excited. I was I was looking forward to the next phone call that said, We need $8,000 or we need 10,000 or whatever it was. I don’t even remember how much we had.

And it didn’t come.

And I remember. Okay, so maybe the phone call is going to come later tonight. So I come home and we eat dinner and I’m waiting for this phone call and no phone call comes out. And then it’s about 10 or 1030. And I remember it because I was feeling dejected. I was feeling like. Like God turned his back on me. Like I wanted to do this. And he said no. And so I actually went to the Lord in prayer and said, Lord, I was willing to give it all. Why did you make it so easy on me? And then the first vision he’d ever given me, I saw a picture in my mind’s eye of Abraham with Isaac about to come down with a knife. And there’s a ram in the thicket. And the message with the vision said, I made it easy on Abraham to see. A lot of times the Lord wants to test you to see if you really believe his promises to be true. And the question is, do you really believe it? And if you say you do at what level? Because a lot of times we go through tests and trials in our lives and we don’t see them as clearly as a test as what I just had.

Sometimes there are things that look like natural circumstances that we’re dealing with in our lives. And God’s Word says one thing and your eyes say you ought to do something else. Which way do you go? How do you respond to that? The interesting thing is, you know, you’ll never see God show up. And do something mighty in your life unless you act by that radical faith. So the rest of the story was, this is really cool. So at that time we were giving a really large amount. I think it’s like 60% of our income. Whatever the company made in profit, whatever we took out in payroll, we would give 60% of that first and then live on the rest. So within three months of me giving that testimony and doing this little test, the Lord brought on an account that came in so fast that within those three months we were able to give $110,000 away. It was the biggest giving month we ever had in our history and within five months.

Every bit of.

All of our lines of credit were totally paid off.

And this was.

We had no idea of even expecting anything of that magnitude. But yet God will bring his abundant blessings down into our lives if we’re willing to walk by faith and believe him. So I want to show you some examples in scriptures on this and try to put some meat around it and teach through these. So let’s turn to Matthew 14 and we’ll start with verse 28. Matthew 1428 This is Peter walking on the water. This is one of my favorite passages of faith because it is so clear now. I’m not a scientist, but I like to do scientific experiments, always testing, always looking. You know, anytime you do like in marketing, you do what’s called a split AB test. Okay. And a split AB test. Real simple is. You take your marketing list and you randomize it and you test one variable, we’ll call this variable number one, and then you’ll test variable number two, you’re only testing one thing is the same variable, but you’re either testing it on or off. You know, we’re going to say this or we’re not going to say that, whatever it is.

And then you send it out and you see which ones of these produces the most results. When you have a split AB test in marketing, it allows you to eliminate all other variables and look at just the one thing that you’re testing. Does that make sense? What we have here with Peter on the walk, walking on the water is that perfect laboratory experiment or the AB marketing test concept because we see the identical situation, no other variables except one. And we see two different outcomes. Watch this. Matthew 14, verse 28 through 31. Peter said to him, By the way, this is just to give you the backstory. The disciples rowing in the boat all by themselves. Jesus had gone up to the mountain to pray. This was right after feeding the 5000 people. Now Jesus comes walking on the water, everyone scared. And Jesus says, It’s just me. And that’s where we pick up. Peter said to him, Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water. And he said, Come, by the way, that is a Ramo.

Come. That’s a.

Command. And watch this. This is interesting. Intrinsic within God’s commands for us is built into it. The promise of him performing what He’s commanded us to do. Okay, so that’s what we see. Jesus says, Come. And Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came toward Jesus. This is a miracle.

He acts on God’s.

Word and a miracle happens. But then we see the next. But seeing the wind, he became frightened and beginning to sink. He cried out, Lord, save me. Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and took hold of him and said to him, You of little faith, why did you doubt? When we talked about this last time? But one of the only rebukes that Jesus ever gives to his disciples is that one rebuke of you, of little faith. Why did you doubt? Now I want to make I want to park here for just a moment and talk about a couple of things. So what we see is really interesting if you actually analyze this. What we see is Peter doing the same activity. He gets out of the boat and as he keeps his eyes on Jesus, now Jesus is called the Word of God. Right? In the beginning, John, one says, in the beginning was the word. The word was with God. The word was God. The word became flesh. So he’s the word of God. So as Peter is keeping his eyes on God’s word. And following the command. Every step he took was a miraculous step because the water held him up. But then when he took his eyes off of God’s word and onto his earthly circumstances, he continued the same activity one step after another.

But he got a totally different response. He got the consequences of the natural rather than the miraculous of the supernatural. Paul tells us in Romans eight. The mind set on the flesh is sin and death. But the mind set on the spirit is life and peace. We start to see this contrast when we focus our mind on God’s Word. We get supernatural promises fulfilled in our lives when we focus our mind on the earthly reality. We get the natural consequences. My friend that I went to high school with will just call his name David. He keeps looking at earthly reality. He totally discounts that faith has any impact in your life. The only thing he thinks about faith, miraculous healing. Who needs that? But what he’s missing out is understanding. It’s not miraculous healing. It’s God’s miraculous work in our lives in all ways. They come out in different ways, and that’s what we see with Peter. The other thing that we see with Peter is not only I mean, how many times have we gone through our own personal challenges and we go into God’s Word and he starts to highlight certain things in there and we get great strength and confidence and peace in our heart.

And we can make it through.

That tough times. And then we forget about God’s word and we look at the report or we look at whatever that person just said to me, and instantly we start to get depressed and anxious. You know what I’m talking about. That’s the supernatural versus the natural consequence. And all it is, is where do you focus? And notice what Jesus said to Peter. You have little faith, why did you doubt? Let me ask you a question. If I said, Caroline, why did you flip the light switch? Does that mean that Caroline had an option to not flip it?

Yeah. It was her choice.

To flip it. That’s why I’m asking her. Why did you do it? Why did you choose to flip the light switch? It was her choice. Notice what Jesus says to Peter. Why did you doubt? It was his choice to doubt.

Faith.

Once you have faith, you don’t always maintain faith. Faith comes and goes based on your choosing. And when the son of man returns, will he find faith on Earth? Will he find those who choose to believe the Word of God and keep their eyes focused on the word? When the natural when your natural eyes tell you everything is different, that it can’t be real. And yet God’s word says something different. It’s where you choose to focus. This will be, I think, our last session that faith is a choice, but this is where we start to see it. The other thing we find here, too real interesting. When you look at Peter walking on the water or Peter sinking. You have the same situation. Two completely different outcomes based on one thing. Where do you focus your eyes? Do you focus your spiritual eyes on God’s word? Or do you focus your natural eyes on your earthly circumstance and where you focus? Determines the outcome that you get. It’s not a predetermined outcome. You remember a while back we did a series called Faith Like Jesus, and I was sharing that with faith. Everything is different without faith. Everything is dark with faith. Everything is light in peace. And here’s the example I gave. You’re off in the jungle and there’s this long trail, maybe 100 or 200 yards long going, let’s say from your hut to some other place that you need to go. So it’s the dead of night, it’s dark, and you start walking through the trail, you can’t see anything, and you start to. Your mind starts to play tricks with you.

You hear a little and you look over there and you hear.

A something crack over here, and then a.

Twig snaps and your mind has gotten.

Control of you and you freak out and you go, Oh my gosh, it’s a lion coming after.

Me, right? Or a panther. And my wife is grinning. That’s a private joke on that one. And so you start tearing down that trail and you run.

Into something and it.

Almost breaks your shin. You fall face forward. You put your hands out to break your fall. You break your wrist, your adrenaline is running. You get up, you limp, you keep running, you tear through Briers and hit things.

And by the time you get to the end of the trail.

You are worn out, you’re bloodied.

You got a broken wrist, cracked shin.

You’re scraped up all over the place.

How peaceful is your life at that point? Not pretty good, right?

It is horrible. One of the worst experiences.

In your life.

But then let’s go.

Back.

Crank back the.

Clock of time, and we’re going to go right back down that same trail. But now something different. We’re going to wait till morning. Now the sun’s out. You walk down that trail, see butterflies and birds chirping. You look through the trees and it’s beautiful Everywhere you see that same twig breaks. But what you see out of the corner of your.

Eye, there’s a limb that falls.

Breaks a twig. Oh, that’s cool. And then you see this tree that’s fallen down. That’s the one that you kicked your shin against. You just step over it. And by the time you get down to the end of the trail. It’s one of the most beautiful experiences you’ve ever had.

That’s the difference.

Between walking by sight and consequences of the natural or walking with your eyes on God’s word. With what his promises are. And that’s what we see from Peter. The same situation, two completely different outcomes based only where you choose to believe your truth. You can either believe God’s word, the assurance of things that you cannot see. Or you can believe your eyes. The lie of the reality. And either one becomes your reality. Let’s look at another story. This is Elijah and the widow, Second Kings, four verses one through six. We’re going to learn something else on this one. This is really cool. Now, certain women are the wives of the sons of the prophets. Cried out to Elijah, your servant. My husband is dead. And you know that your servant feared the Lord. And the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves. Elisha said to her, What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house? Notice the first question is what do you have? We also see this with Jesus.

He says that he asked.

Peter what the 5000 he said. Peter, we got 5000 people. How are we going to feed all these people? What should we do? And it says in one of the passages and Jesus said this to test him.

But it was always.

What do we have? That’s what we have here. Elisha says, Tell me, what do you have in the house? And she said, Your maid servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil. Then he said, Go borrow vessels at large for yourself from all your neighbors. Even empty vessels. Do not get a few and you shall go in and shut the door behind you and your sons and pour out into all of these vessels. And you shall set aside what is full. So she went from him and shut the door behind her and her sons. They were bringing the vessels to her and she poured. When the vessels were full, she said to her son, Bring me another vessel. He said to her, There is not one vessel more. And the oil stopped. So a couple of things we can take out of this.

God uses the.

Little that we have to produce the abundance that we need. He always provides not only enough, but he provides a great abundance beyond what you need. That’s what we see here. And we see this in every case. We even see it in our own lives that he always takes the little that we have, and then he multiplies it to provide the abundance that we need. Okay. The other thing is we see with this is the same thing we saw in our last session if we were to ask the little questions. Who acted in this story.

The widow.

Why did she act?

Because God’s Word said right.

Could she see the outcome before she acted? No. But who performed it? God did. So man acts before he can seize upon God’s word and God performs. We see that same pattern here. And we also see what we the same thing that we saw with Peter just a moment ago. When we act by faith, miracles happen. When we stop acting by faith, miracles Stop. For Peter, he stopped acting because he doubted for the widow. She stopped acting because there were no more vessels. And at the moment, there are no more vessels. The oil stopped flowing. Let’s look at another one. We’ll actually do the one Jesus with the 5000. This comes from Mark 635 through 44. Mark six.

35 through 44. And I’ll begin. I’m going to skip.

Around, but I’ll let you know where I’m skipping.

When it was already quite.

Late, his disciples came to him and said, This place is desolate and it is already quite late. Send them away so that they may go Dot, dot, dot. Buy themselves something to eat. But he answered them. You give them something to eat. Dot, dot, dot. How many loaves do you have? Go look. So Jesus asked the same question that Elisha did. What do you have in the house? Let’s see what we have. And when they found out, they said five and two fish and he commanded them all to sit down by groups on the green grass. Dot, dot, dot. They all laid and were satisfied and they picked up 12 full baskets of the broken pieces and also of the fish. There were 5000 men who ate the loaves. So we see the same pattern. Okay. God takes the little that they had to produce the abundance that they need over and above all that they needed. The other thing we see, we see the same pattern. So in this case, the disciples went out, Jesus broke the bread, gave it to the disciples, and they went and passed it out. What we know is it multiplied as they were passing it out. So we see the same thing that man acts before he can see. I only got a few pieces of broken bread, but they act because of the direction. The raima, the command of the Lord and intrinsic in that command is the promise of the provision. And then God performs as.

They are going out.

And acting.

This bread is just.

Constantly multiplying, feeding everyone. If we looked at the story of Gideon, we’re not going to go there. I’ll just kind of walk you through real quickly. This is in Judges seven. Some of you all probably know the story, but the Midianites come against Israel. This is during the time of the judges. Gideon is all afraid. Okay. This is where you have the fleece. You know the test of the fleece. We’re going to pass over that. But what happens now is there are 135,000 Midianites. And so Gideon goes and musters up Israel. All the peasants and farmers, they’re not soldiers. They don’t even have, you know, they don’t even have weapons. Right.

And he brings.

Them and now you’ve got 32,000 Israelis against 135,000 Midianites. How many you all know that the odds are not very good.

They’re horrible.

So God changes it. He says, Gideon, the odds are too bad. This isn’t good. Tell those who are scared to go home. So 22,000 people leave, and now Gideon is left with 10,000 people from Gideon standpoint. He’s going. This is worse from God’s standpoint. He’s going. It’s not enough yet. So he calls him again. He tells him, Go tell him to drink out of this brook. And based on how they drink, you send the groups that that drink one way home. And so now Gideon is left with 300 people against 135,000 Midianites. And God finally says, okay, that’s enough. This is all I need because he doesn’t want man to get the glory. Remember, he never asked you to do something that you could do on your own. He always going to ask you to do something that you have to believe him to provide for before you do it so that he gets the glory and he can train you up as a test of faith. So they have these 300 men and they go out against 135,000 Midianites. They go out at night time and God told them to carry a torch in one hand with a basket over it, a jar over it, so it won’t let out the light and carry a trumpet in the other hand.

And they’re going to line.

Up in this big valley and then they’re.

Going to all.

Break the jars.

So the lights.

Flash open, blow the trumpets.

And yell for the.

Lord and for Gideon. Okay, so.

Now I want you to.

Put yourselves in not only the shoes of Gideon, but the shoes of all the 300 men that are with him against 135,000 Midianites and they’re going down into same. I know.

Their heart was beating.

Scared to death, but they’re obeying the Lord. Here’s the other thing about faith. You can be.

Scared. And God still honors your faith of obedience. There’s two. There are several ways that.

Faith comes out. One is by obeying what God says and the other by living by what God says. They’re both focused on God, what God says. They’re both focused on the Word of God.

But one is.

By command and one is by simply.

The.

Command of living that way. So they’re going out there and I know what they’re thinking. Oh, gosh.

I hope you’re there. I pray you’re there. I don’t know how this is going to work out. But we’re obeying you.

And we know the rest.

Of the story. They broke the jars.

The torches flamed up, they blew the trumpets, they yelled, and all of the Midianites attacked each other and killed each other. And then the rest of Israel comes and chases the rest of them. And it was a great defeat.

So you see the same pattern.

You see that Gideon acted before he could see. But because God told him to and God performed.

And had he not.

Acted, there would not have been that miraculous deliverance of Israel.

Last story we’re going to go through.

This is David and Goliath, because this also shares something really interesting as well. So David and Goliath, you find in first Samuel 17. First Samuel 17 and this is.

Verses 40 through.

47 and I’m going to read this out of the NLT version. It’s just kind of smooths it out. This is really interesting, too. So obviously the backstory, David, is still.

Just a.

Probably a young teenager at this time.

They’re battling.

The Philistines and Goliath comes out.

And all of Israeli soldiers get scared.

David says, Well, who is this Philistine that’s come to criticize the Lord.

And his army?

So here’s where we pick up.

Verse 40.

David picked up five smooth stones from a stream and put them into a shepherd’s bag. Then, armed only with the Shepherd’s staff and Sling, he started across the valley to fight the Philistine. Goliath walked out toward David with a shield bearer ahead of him, sneering in contempt at this ruddy faced boy. Am I a dog? He roared at David, that you come at me with a stick. And he cursed David by the names of his gods.

Come over here and I’ll.

Give your flesh to the birds and wild animals. Goliath yelled. Now watch this.

David had a choice.

He could either look in the natural and see this giant that the odds are so far against David that there’s no way David could could win. Or he could keep his eyes focused on God’s promise. And all the past experiences that God had given. David.

Where he would go and attack the lion and the bear and grab him by the jaw and club him to death.

Without any fear of his life because God continued to deliver him. So what this tells us is when.

We’re going through a.

Trial, we can always look backwards at other times that God has delivered us from different things and gain strength. But watch what David says. This is. This shows you where he chooses to look. David replied to the Philistine. You come to me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of the armies of Israel whom you have defied. Today, listen to this. Cockiness, this confidence. Today the Lord will conquer you and I will kill you and cut off your head.

Does he have any doubt?

Does it sound like David has any doubt? He didn’t even have a sword.

He didn’t even have a sword.

And Jesus said so.

Hebrews 11 one Faith.

Is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. The amplified version says that faith is the title deed of things you have hoped for. Does it sound like he’s going into battle with that title deed in his hand? I got the title deed right here, Goliath, and it says, I’m going to kill you today. Cut off your head. And then we continue.

And then I will give the.

Dead bodies.

Of your men to the birds and.

Wild animals.

And the whole world. Watch this. The whole world will.

Know that there is a God in Israel.

Why is David doing this? Not for him, though.

There is benefit for him.

He gets the king’s daughter in marriage.

And his whole family goes without taxes now. So there’s something. By the way, don’t underestimate the value of incentive. If you go back to the backstory on this. Once he hears what the king is offering for whoever kills Goliath, he asks the same question.

Three.

Times.

And what does the king going to do for the one who kills Goliath? Who is this Philistine to find God? Right? And so that’s the backstory.

So this is where we are now.

And then we finished.

And everyone assembled here will know that the Lord rescues his people.

But not with.

Sword and spear.

God rarely performs the miracle that we’re looking for.

In the way that we think he will. He doesn’t use man’s. Man’s means to accomplish his purposes. And then the final statement from David. This is the Lord’s battle and he will give you to us. Great confidence, great faith, great belief on what the Lord is going to do. And so with that, what we see is several things. We see this great faith of David, but the great faith of David is not a supernatural faith, but it is faith in the supernatural.

It is the faith that.

Says, I believe my God. I believe the Lord.

He has called me to go out and I will do it.

He has done it in the past and this is nothing different.

I have complete.

Confidence in what my Lord will do. And then we also see the same thing we saw in these other passages. God took the little that he had and produced the abundance that he needed. He didn’t even have a sword. He was.

Saying, I’m going to kill you and cut.

Off your head. And he didn’t even have a sword.

But God took one stone. The little that he had. And from that one stone, he produced.

The abundance that he needed. And David ended up killing Goliath with his own sword. The stone took him down. It says he then took out the sword and he killed Goliath with it. And then he chopped off Goliath’s head with his own sword. So God always provides the abundance that you need. And then we see the same thing here. Who acted? David did. Did he act before he could see? Yes.

Why did he act?

Because he knew God’s will.

And he was directed by the Lord to act. And he performed.

God did. Yet the performance looked like everything was providential done it. He gets a stone, he slings it. It goes right to the mark.

The guy goes down, then he pulls out his knife.

His.

Sword and kills him.

Everything looks like natural circumstances. But God is acting through those natural circumstances. We call them providential. I just call it. It’s still a miracle, because whether it defies the natural or seems to operate within the natural bounds, the Lord is still the one that’s doing it, and he’s doing it because of faith. The other thing that we see with this is one other thing. When you know God’s will. You can have bold faith. Okay. One of the things that happens in healing is.

You’re looking for.

Those little signs of what is God doing in this situation.

And I remember a story. There was a guy over in one of the churches. They do a lot of healing. And this guy had a bad left.

Kidney and he needed a kidney transplant.

And he’d been to people and had them pray.

Over him and lay hands.

And God didn’t heal.

And he just kind of given up on it. And someone invited him to come to this meeting, said, No, no, that’s not for me.

God isn’t going to heal me.

Right? And he had a lot of doubt in what God’s will was to be. And he finally came and someone got up on stage and was just giving what’s called a word of knowledge. For those who don’t know, a word of knowledge is where God just puts something on your heart.

And you.

Say, I think God wants me just to share this. So here I am.

And so this person comes up, grabs the microphone and says, You know, I don’t know why I’m sharing this, but I just feel the Lord wants me to say.

That he loves someone’s left kidney.

That’s all it took.

And that man who was suffering with this left kidney believed.

That that message was for him. And all it took was.

That little bit of belief.

And then God healed his left kidney.

So watch the compassion, okay? God had this abundant life, this promise of healing for this man’s kidney.

But that man’s lack of faith, he doubted it, kept him from getting it.

And that faith was.

Being blocked and he was not.

Receiving the healing. And so God, with great compassion and love.

Supernaturally encouraged him providential.

Circumstances to show.

Up and then had someone.

Else to speak a.

Word. And that word resonated in his heart and took away the doubt just enough. That he could believe. That’s for me. And as soon as he had that belief, then the Lord passed that training.

That healing down through his faith. And now He received his heavenly blessing that the Lord had for him all along.

But his doubt.

Kept getting in the way.

As you grow in faith. What happens is you begin to doubt less because.

You begin to trust more. In the early stages, we always tend to doubt, and that’s the key to radical faith. You start to understand God’s will. The more.

You understand.

God’s will, then the more.

You will see your walk by faith. Just a real quick story on me with healing.

Most of y’all don’t know the story.

So I grew up in a church. I still go to this church that they don’t they don’t believe in.

Supernatural healing by any means, not through.

Faith. They don’t teach faith at all. And and so.

I started watching these videos. I think this was on Netflix of just the movement of the Holy Spirit today. And I started seeing people being healed. It was like a documentary series and people getting healed this all over the place as someone would pray for them. And it really caught me. I go, Oh my gosh. So I start to study it.

And I went to my church, went to my pastor. And what do you think about this?

And. No, no, that’s you know, that doesn’t.

Happen.

We don’t believe in that. That’s against the doctrine, right? The doctrine is supernatural gifts have ceased.

So I realized that.

They couldn’t help me. So I went outside of my church to that group of people, and I started to read.

The books.

And go to their seminars. And I was looking for one thing. I didn’t want them to tell me what they believed.

I wanted to see what scriptures they were reading that I wasn’t.

Reading the same way. What does God’s Word say? I was looking for their understanding of God’s word. And then I went to.

God’s Word and I.

Started to study those same scriptures.

And it took.

Me six months, but I came to the absolute conclusion it was God’s will to heal, because that’s the first thing I didn’t understand. Is it God’s will to heal?

Because in in not only in that church, but in a lot of churches, Lord, please heal this person if it be your will. And if it be your will. Well, and we were taught well, sometimes it’s not God’s will to heal because he wants.

To teach them something through the sickness. So he brings sickness or allows sickness.

So that they can grow.

That’s what I was taught. I went back to the scriptures.

And you know what I found?

I found conclusive evidence that it’s always God’s will to heal. That Jesus never turned away a single person who came to him for healing.

Anytime they asked, he healed.

So now there’s this disconnect. Why aren’t more people being healed here on Earth? But once I began to understand and came conclusively to what is God’s will. But what happened is, once I understood what God’s will was, then only at that point it took six months.

I decided to actually start.

Praying for people. And that first weekend, I prayed for people. I saw six people healed. One of extreme pain that the that the doctor said is incurable and one had degenerative discs in her.

Neck and her lower.

Back and couldn’t even move her head. And now she’s moving it all over. I mean, I saw amazing things, but it only happened once. I understood what God’s will was. So this guy with the left kidney, he kept doubting because he did not know God’s will. He felt it wasn’t God’s will to heal him.

So God gave him a word so that he could.

Believe it was his will. So he could believe what we see with David. David knew it was God’s will.

And that’s why he was so confident. And so I.

Want to end up.

Now with there are four.

Truths about radical faith.

And the first truth.

Number one.

As you must clearly know.

God’s will is.

You’re going to walk by faith. Because faith is. Do you.

Believe me?

Right. And if you don’t believe him, you don’t know his will. You definitely aren’t.

Going to believe him. And you can’t walk by faith.

So that’s the first step.

Number two, truth about radical faith. As you must act in faith without any doubting. As soon as Peter doubted.

He suck when this guy with the left kidney doubted.

He didn’t get healed.

Faith has to be without any doubting doubt, immediately squelch faith. Now you can have.

Faith in.

Fear.

You can be afraid.

Like Gideon. I’m sure he was afraid, but he was obedient.

But he didn’t doubt God. He knew God could. He knew God would. But that doesn’t mean you’re still not afraid. Okay.

Truth number three is you must be.

Willing to accept risk. I did a teaching a while back called Demands of Faith.

We had some young guys over here. And the first question I asked, How do you spell faith? And Tate blurted out perfectly. All risk. Right? Risk. That’s how you spell faith. Risk. I have to tell her story. So one of the guys that.

I attribute.

A lot of my understanding on just walking by faith and on the healing.

Side, okay. And I don’t want to focus on healing because faith is not.

Always healing.

But healing is a part of faith. Right?

And he teaches.

That.

Faith is risk. The greater the risk you step out, the greater the opportunity for faith. So his.

Son is.

Named Joshua. And Joshua was out at a McDonald’s.

Restaurant or some fast food.

And.

Sees this this high school.

Group comes in and he looks like after a game or after.

Something and a bunch of teenagers and one of the.

Guys is hobbling on a set of crutches with.

A busted up.

Leg. And so Joshua goes over and says, Hey, what happened to your leg? And he said, It’s broken. He said, Does it hurt? Yes.

Would you like God to heal it?

Sure.

So then watch this.

Joshua turns around and screams out to the entire restaurant. Hey, if you want to see a miracle, come over here. God’s about to heal this guy’s leg. And then one of the guys said, Well, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in that. He said, Well, you come up front. Okay, so this is risk. So it’s not just praying for it, but putting himself at great risk. What if God fails? So he then prays for the.

Leg and says.

Test it out. The guy gets oh my gosh, He starts.

Jumping up and down on it, throws.

The crutches away. God instantly.

Heals it.

But that’s what faith you have to be willing to accept risk.

So most of the things that the Lord.

Tests you with, there’s some risk.

Involved. There are some challenge involved.

And there’s always.

The tendency.

To want to look at.

The natural circumstances and begin to fear and doubt.

But you got to keep your eyes up on.

God’s word so that you don’t. And this is notice that every.

Time Jesus rebuked.

His disciples.

He he said, Why did you doubt? Rarely does he say, Why are you afraid? Okay. It’s why are you doubting? So that’s number three. You must be willing to accept risk.

Faith is acting on God’s word in such a way that failure is certain.

Unless God.

Intervenes.

And then truth number four about radical faith is God uses the little that.

You have to create the abundance that you need, and he always provides enough.

We see that with the guy with the left kidney. We see that with the story of the man who brings his.

Son to Jesus.

Jesus is up on the mountain transfiguration.

He comes down. There was a.

Commotion, this man with a boy with epilepsy. The disciples couldn’t cast the demon out. Okay. And Jesus gets upset with his disciples. Oh, you of little faith. How long do I have to put up with you? Right?

Complaining to his disciples. And then the man turns to Jesus and says, Help me if you can.

And Jesus says all things are.

Possible to him who believes? All things and then watch what the man says. I believe help my unbelief.

So God always takes the little that you have. And multiplies it to the abundance that you need. When you walk by faith. I remember.

One last story I’ll share is.

Many years back, I was we find ourselves at the beginning of this year. I was unemployed. And trying to figure out how to support a wife. Pa was a stay at home mom. James was just a little in diapers, almost. We had another baby that came that year. This was Beatty Junior and we had a house with a mortgage payment.

A car with.

A mortgage payment. If you all ever had one of those. Pa had to have a root canal that year, $1,200 in cash. And we had no savings left at the beginning of the year because we gave it all away to a missionary. Okay. So we went into this year with nothing. I tried 13 different things to make money that year to try to support the family. My adjusted gross income, I think I still have the tax returns now $11,821. And from that we faithfully gave.

20% off the.

Top to the church and to the to whatever.

Ministries. And then we.

Lived off the rest. Why? Because God’s Word said you cannot outgive his ability to take care of you. And what happened? Because that’s risky, right? So that year. We never missed a payment. We were never late on a payment. We never even got a late fee. Everything was paid. And there’s always, as you go through a test of faith and you find and you prove yourself faithful. God always blesses you with more. And what happened was one of those 13 different things that we tried to do. Was a little by this voicemail over here in resell it over there and just kind of be a middleman of voicemail services. And then within two years, 24.

Months, almost to the date.

Of when that little thing started, we moved into this neighborhood that we just moved out of.

We bought the home and paid it off in five and a half months.

Within two years, from having nothing to just shooting out of the rocket like a rocket ship. And that’s the business that we’ve now had for over 25 years, simply by walking.

By faith and trusting the Lord.

Believing his word, putting all at.

Risk and trusting him rather than circumstances. And that’s what radical faith is. So a couple of final thoughts. How do you know God’s will? This is the most important thing. How do you know it?

Yeah, you’ve got to know. You’ve got to know his word. But watch this.

It’s not simply studying his word. See, there’s two things.

You have God’s word as a book, and you have God’s word as the doorway to his heart. Okay. I was sharing with a friend of mine, I think, online that the when you’re studying God’s word. You have this this element of faith. Okay, So this is God’s word, right? This is the word. And on the far side, with limited faith, God’s word is a bunch of words on the page. Words on the page. Right. And you have verses and key verses with key truths. And you study this and you typically study it with what’s called man’s wisdom.

Trying to understand what it means.

Then you have on the other side of the spectrum, you have the words on the page, which are the doorway to God’s heart and God’s truth. And as you study those words, they don’t become verses. They become, I’ll call it dimensions of Truth.

I’ll explain that in just a moment. And you do not interpret it with man’s wisdom.

You interpret it through faith and revelation. One of the sessions we talked about back in the Identity.

Series.

Is that faith and revelation are intertwined. So we’re like a DNA type of strand that as you have more faith, you gain more revelation. And as you get more revelation, you have more faith. Because faith is believing God’s truth and revelation is the revealing of God’s truth. So you grow. So to know God’s will is not just the study of God’s word. But it’s knowing God’s word because the word became flesh. What you have over in this side is you have theologians that write about what God’s word says, but the study of God’s word is not appealing to the theologians to understand it.

Because all they understand generally is looking at this as a.

Book.

Applying man’s wisdom and saying this must be what it means. And so lots of people think it through and say this is what it means.

But as you move over here, through faith over here in man’s wisdom side. God’s Word is a book of printed words, and it’s our job to discern.

What they actually mean.

And how to apply them. And so they are words on an.

Opaque piece of paper.

They carry truths, but it’s our job to understand the truths. As you move through with faith and believe in childlike faith, then what happens is the Lord starts to reveal.

His truths.

That are embedded in.

His word. It’s a supernatural occurrence because.

The spirit takes the words and kind of implants them in your heart and then reveals them to you. And the picture is now they start to be printed on a sheet of glass. And as you’re reading the words, you can see down through the word, through the glass, into dimensions of what it actually is meaning. And it’s actually is saying, yeah.

You know what I was saying there, you know, because when we were talking about faith mixed with doubt. Okay. Doubt is really unbelief. Correct. And I said Beatty will only unbelief. Only revelation is the only thing that’s on that’s going to really destroy the doubt.

You know, and that’s the guy with the the left kidney issue. You see this a lot. The revelation.

Was God loves someone’s left kidney.

And that destroyed his doubt.

Just like what you.

Said. Exactly. So the revelation destroys.

Doubt and increases your faith.

So the first step is in. Knowing God’s will is you have to study his word, but you study it with childlike faith and study it as you understand the heart of God and God’s truths as He reveals it. How do you know God’s will? The first way to know God’s will is you must know His word. But it’s not the study of His word that’s the key. The study of his word is with man’s wisdom, Knowing his word is your saturating your heart and your mind with his word in childlike faith, and you start to actually know.

Who his word is.

The second step in knowing God’s will is you.

Have to be intimate with him.

You have to hunger to spend.

Time.

Like I know my wife’s will in a lot of areas, her desires. Why? Because I spend so much time with her that I know her. If you want to know God’s will, you’ve got to spend enough.

Time.

Intimately with him.

That you actually know Him.

And you know his heart. And I’ve shared this many times, but I’ll share it again. The most important thing I’ve ever found in knowing his heart.

Knowing him is what I call FaceTime. On your knees.

Face down, blank out your mind. You’re not there to praise, you’re not there to petition. You’re simply there to be actively inactive and try to vision.

Just looking into the heavenly realm and trying to focus on the Lord himself. And it’s not five minutes, it’s 15, 20, 30 minutes or more.

And what.

Happens is, as you are going down on your knees.

It’s like your spirit. The Lord was telling me that when you go down, you are actually the who you are, not your body, but who you are, your soul. Part of you moves.

Into the heavenly realm and starts to.

Commune with me and the fellowship with me. You don’t experience. You don’t feel it. But it’s growing. You okay?

It’s like eating nutritionally. You don’t experience. And when you eat nutritionally.

But over time you feel a lot better and you got a lot more energy.

And it changes you from the.

Inside out. That’s the same.

Thing with this face time.

The other final couple of thoughts. Faith is the.

Absolute trust that God will do what he said He will. That’s what we’ve been talking about, this whole thing.

One last thought.

This comes up a lot.

And is a question I remember being asked is that if.

Faith comes from hearing God speak to you.

How do you hear him so clearly?

I thought that was a good question.

Back on my podcast, I did a two episode.

Podcast.

On how to hear God speak.

To you.

Go back and listen to that. It’s really good. About a year, a year and a half ago.

But the simple answer, How do you hear God speak to you? You pay attention to the highlighted scriptures.

As you’re reading his word and it seems like something leaps out of the page to you. Write it down.

That’s God speaking to you. Write it down so you can focus on it.

Because when you focus on it, that’s when you gain that strength. And then the advanced answer, that’s the simple answer.

The advanced answer is God speaks.

A lot of times in that.

Still small, quiet voice in your spiritual heart.

And you have to train yourself to discern that voice specifically. So when Pia and I, when we got married, but before.

We had kids, we would be in a room full of babies as.

Our our friends have babies. And all of the.

Babies sounded the same way.

You know, And we would just kind of ignore them, right? Put them out as we would have a conversation. And then we start having our own children. We’d be back in that same type of room. All these young parents, all their kids. We’d be having a conversation, all the kids going well. And then all of a sudden our baby cries. What do you think.

Mama’s heart does? Oh, that’s my baby.

And she stops the conversation and she runs over and grabs the baby. How could she discern our baby’s cry out of all the other babies?

That sounded the same to me.

Because she spent so much time with that baby. She knew his voice over all the others. When you spend time with the Lord, that intimate time, study, worship and just face time, you start to recognize his voice in your heart above all those others. And when you start to recognize it, then when he.

Tells you things.

You can know very.

Specifically.

That’s the Lord. Yes, sir. I’ll go do that or whatever the command is, Right. So that’s how you do it.

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