BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

It’s actually very simple. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). So, you can get as much of God’s faith as you want just by availing yourself of His WORD. God’s WORD has His faith in it! That’s why it’s called “the word of faith” (Romans 10:8). When you read it, hear it, meditate on it and speak it, it empowers you to believe. It creates in you God’s very own faith because He filled it with that faith when He released it. Just as your physical body is designed by God to feed on certain natural substances, your spirit, which is created in God’s likeness and image, is designed by Him to feed on His WORD. His WORD is spirit food! It strengthens and nourishes your inner man with the very life of God. Matthew 4:4 says, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” So, if God said it, you can feed on it. You can receive it and it will produce in you the force of divine faith. Then you can release that force to go to work in your life. “Is the releasing part hard?” you might ask. No, I’m happy to say it’s quite simple. You just follow the example Jesus set in Mark 11 when He released His faith in the situation with the fig tree. You’ve probably read about that. Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem when He got hungry: “And seeing a fig tree...he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it” (verses 13-14). Notice, all Jesus did to put His faith into operation there was speak the desired end result. He didn’t say anything about how it was going to happen. He didn’t talk about the tree drying up from the roots or anything like that. He just released His faith by saying what He heard the Father say in His spirit. Then He walked away and left it up to the Father who dwelt within Him to do the work. (See John 14:10-12.) Operating as an Inside-Out Person What happened as a result? For a while it didn’t look like anything happened. That’s apparent because later that evening, when Jesus and His disciples passed that way again, the disciples didn’t say anything. You know they must have looked at the tree as they went by. Having heard what Jesus said to it, they probably expected it to be gone, or at least appear to be sickly. But even after 12 hours had gone by, it showed no visible signs of change. That’s often the way it is when the force of faith goes into operation. It usually takes some time for the visible effects to show up because faith goes to work first in the unseen realm of the spirit. It works from the inside out. This inside-out way of operating can seem strange when you’re first learning to walk by faith because in the natural you were raised to be an outside-in person. From the time you were born, everything you needed was outside you and someone else had it. At first, it was your mother and father who had it and you depended on them to get it. Then you grew up and it was your employer who had it, or the government or some other outside source. When you received Jesus as your LORD, however, you became an inside-out person. You were born into the kingdom of God, and Jesus said that kingdom is within you. So now you increase and deal with the situations you face in life in an entirely different way. Rather than depending on outside sources, you draw on the spiritual resources of God’s kingdom by speaking words of faith. 6 : BVOV

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