Hebrews 11:1 (kjv) "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
Intro
Understanding faith and hope will change your life. If we don't believe then how can we receive? God's word promises us a lot of things, healing, miracles, deliverance, and much more. So why do we sometimes see our faith in these things go unanswered? I'm going to be examining what faith is, what hope is, and how to operate in more faith to see the promises of God come to pass in our lives.
Understanding Is Key 🔑
Diving deeper into Hebrews 11:1, lets break down the following words:
Faith = Complete trust, confidence, and belief in someone or something.
Substance = Ultimate reality that underlies all outward manifestations and change.
Hope= Expected/ look forward to.
Now lets plugin these definitions as well as context and relook at Hebrews 11:1:
Hebrews 11:1 (Paraphrased) Complete trust and belief in God and all his promises is the driving force behind things expected to come.
Let's look at faith from another angle to receive more understanding. Another way to look at faith is, complete trust and belief in someone or something. We put our complete trust and belief in God's authority, word and that he truly is God.
Now looking at hope in the same light, hope is what is expected to come. You have faith that God's word and his promises are the truth, so you put your hope in things like his promise of salvation, healing, and mercy.
Now what ties it all together is substance, it is the driving force behind the things expected to come. Substance is what we in Christ struggle the most with, but it's the part that brings the change. So how do we fix this?
You're asking for too much yarn?🧶
We understand faith is what makes up our hope, and the problem is we get too fixated on faith. Our prayers are full of asking for more faith yet we don't see our hope rewarded, it's because you don't need more faith for the prayer to be answered, you need to put in more work. Let me give you a very real testimony of a miracle healing in my life, and I'll lay an analogy over it so it's easier to apply to your own walk.
Look at faith like yarn, and you want to make a scarf. Simply having yarn doesn't make the scarf, you have to put in the time, work and energy knitting the scarf with the yarn in your mind. In my own testimony I discovered almost a year ago my aunt had cancer. I spent weekends praying and fasting, asking God to heal my aunt. I remember asking God, is it even your will for everyone to be healed, and he answered, "Read my word and find out". I believed God COULD heal, but I didn't know if he WOULD heal my aunt. So after hours of studying God's word I realized he does want everyone so that meant he MUST want my aunt to be healed. I read God's word and received the faith that God does want my aunt to be healed. Jumping back to the analogy, I acquired my yarn by reading God's word and believing it was the truth.
The next step I took was going standing on the foundation of the word of God believing and praying God would heal my aunt. I during this prayer I asked God to heal her again, and he responded with, "You know it's my will to heal her, so why would you ASK me to do it?" I paused and thought about what I should do next, and God said, "Tell me to heal her" so that's exactly what I did. Shortly after this God filled me with his presence and said, "Give me praise because she has been healed." and you can imagine the waterfall of joy and peace that overtook me in that moment. But this is where the "work" kicks in. God gave me more yarn at this point.
It's been almost 9 months and my aunt's cancer has receded over 90%! Glory to God! You could say, ahh but she wasn't healed 100% and that's where you have no faith. Abraham could have said the same thing when God told him he'd be a father of many nations, with children as numerous as the sand on the shores. Just like Abraham, God has given me a prophetic word to stand on and believe. But this is where we all are in our walk, God's word is filled with promises that we don't have yet. Promises like healing, financial provision, and miracles. I believed God's word and received the yarn, I had my mind focused on the hope of God healing my aunt and started knitting the scarf in alignment to God's written and spoken promises. But God leading me in our conversation shined a light on the most important part of all of this, knitting!
Knit Knit Knit!!!🧵
Knitting is needed to take your lump of yarn and turn it into a scarf. Let me rephrase this, working out your faith is needed for your hope to get rewarded. How do we practically knit our yarn of faith into the scarf of our hope, so that it may become tangible? By working, walking, and talking.
It depends on the promise of God, verse or scripture you're putting your hope in, as well as God's calendar but no matter the time period you must be ready to work out your faith. In the time my aunt has been getting progressively healed by God, the Devil has used doctors to speak death over her life span, saying she would only be X amount of time, but I have rebuked the lies and not wavered in faith. The result is these same doctors speaking death over her keep finding the cancer receding each time they check. The devil is a liar and I will rebuke him and stand firmly on what God has promised me. But you see how this is a daily effort, I'm working out my faith daily as I believe in my heart of hearts she is already healed according to God's word, it's not contingent on what I see.
Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac in faith that God would provide a sacrifice, and Hebrews 11:19 says that Abraham went even a step further into this faith and believed God would be able to raise up Isaac from the dead. And both cases were true. It takes radical faith in God's power to have your hope brought into the natural, and it is completely obtainable.
I believe if you're reading this post, you already have enough yarn to build the scarf you're seeking God for. All you need to do is reorient your prayers to be focused on knitting. Ask God to give you wisdom on how to begin walking to his promises. Ask him to give you the strength to keep walking into his promises, and ask him to help purify and reorient the direction you're walking in already to be sure your faith isn't misguided. The best way to walk out your faith is to use your physical body and start moving to it, talking about it and preaching it.
Tips on Increasing Faith✔🌱
Here are a few tips I have used over the past couple years to increase my faith!
Read the word: Romans 10:17 Faith comes by hearing the word, so try reading your bible out loud. Fill your atmosphere with the word of God and doubt will flee!
Preach the word: You believe in God's promises don't you? So then preach it! tell others about the promises God's made to you personally, as well as in his word and stand on it!
Declare the word: Declaring the word in your prayers or throughout the day helps with your own spirit. As you speak it in faith you turn your body into a vessel of hope.
Pray the word: Talk to God about it like you know it's his will, and already tell him thank you for it!
The point of these tips is to have a lifestyle of faith, not just a flash of it. When you live a lifestyle of faith you carry a presence of God's power to bring change!
Conclusion
If I could summarize this whole message into just a few points, focus more on the labor of faith. Adjust your prayers to be more oriented on strength to overcome, and not so much on having more faith. I personally believe you have enough faith, you just need to get to work and stay working until your hope is rewarded. My wife prayed for 4 years, asking God to change me. It was a long 4 years and she had no evidence in the flesh that God was working, but God was working. Don't stop walking in faith to God's promises, no matter what the flesh says, no matter what your family says, as long as it's from God and grounded in his truth your faith WILL be rewarded.