BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

Faith isn’t just crying and begging God for a miracle. Faith is believing His Word. It’s finding out what He said in the Bible, believing it in our hearts and confessing it with our mouths until it comes to pass. Faith is the victory that overcomes the world (1 John 5:4)! If you maintain a spirit of faith, you’ll still face trials and difficulties, but you’ll always come out victorious. You’ll march in triumph even through seemingly impossible situations because in the eyes of heaven they’re no big deal. Nothing is impossible for God! He can turn any situation around for us if we’ll just give Him some faith to work with. He can BLESS us beyond what we can ask or think if, as 2 Corinthians 4:13 says, “We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak.” One Place Is Not Enough Notice that verse tells us exactly what real faith does: It believes AND speaks. The speaking part is where most Christians miss it. They get in a hard spot, pray and believe God for help, then go right back to talking the problem. Instead of speaking the Word, they go around saying things like, “I don’t have enough money. I’m unemployed. I’m sick. My children are on dope.” After a while, when nothing changes, they quit even trying to believe the Word. “I tried that faith stuff,” they say, “and it didn’t work.” What really happened is faith tried them, and they didn’t work. They didn’t fulfill what the spirit of faith requires, which is to keep faith in two places. Keeping it in one place is not enough. FOR FAITH TO WORK AS GOD DESIGNED, WE MUST KEEP IT BOTH IN OUR HEARTS AND IN OUR MOUTHS. This isn’t always a popular message to preach. A lot of people don’t like to hear that for God’s promises to manifest in their lives, they must speak His Word in faith. But like it or not, it’s what God tells us in the Bible. He’s not in this for popularity. He didn’t put in the Scriptures only what we want to hear. He put in them the principles of His kingdom so that we’d know what works. I’m glad He did, too! Otherwise, Ken and I would still be in the same shape we were in during the first five years after we were born again. Those were tough years because even though we loved the Lord and had been baptized in the Holy Spirit, we hadn’t heard any teaching about faith. We’d heard some unbelief preached. We’d heard things like, “You just never know what God is going to do.” So that’s all we knew. Then we began listening to Oral Roberts and Kenneth E. Hagin and finding out how to lay hold of what belongs to us in Christ. We learned the written Word is God speaking directly to us, and whatever it says, we can take and apply to our lives. We learned we can receive by faith whatever the Word promises, and that faith comes by hearing the Word of God. Talk about good news! That was the best news we’d ever heard, so we made the most of it. We absolutely dedicated ourselves to the Word and took a crash course in it. Although Brother Hagin hadn’t yet started Rhema Bible Training Center, he had some tapes on faith and we listened to them over and over. We also went to the 14-day meetings he held every quarter. Rain, shine, sleet or snow, we didn’t miss a service. At the same time, Ken was a student at Oral Roberts University, traveling with Brother Roberts to his healing crusades. He was getting to watch Brother Roberts minister by faith the healing, delivering power of God to people who needed it desperately. Brother Roberts used faith like a mechanic uses a tool, and Ken learned a lot about that from working alongside him. Of course, Ken and I were also studying the Bible on our own. We were learning directly from the Scriptures that healing, for example, is part of our spiritual inheritance. It’s included in THE BLESSING of Redemption and we walk in it by faith. 28 : BVOV

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