When you put patience into operation, you can take a victory stand on God’s WORD and refuse to back off, come what may. You can “withstand in the evil day, and having done all…stand” (Ephesians 6:13), and instead of whining you can keep the joy of The LORD in your mouth the whole time.
When the devil asks you what you’re laughing about, you can tell him, “I’m laughing at you trying to convince me God’s not going to heal me or supply all my needs according to His riches in glory. Those things are already a done deal, devil. God said it, I believe it and that settles it. So, ha-ha-ha on you!”
“But Brother Copeland, can I really be that certain? Can I truly be sure that even if in the natural it looks impossible, God will still bring His promises to pass in my life?”
Absolutely!
You can be as sure of it as Abraham was in his day. Referred to in the Bible as the father of our faith, Abraham stood confidently on God’s promise to him, even when it looked like the worst was about to happen. His faith stand was unwavering because he knew how serious God was about His WORD. As Hebrews 6 explains: “For when God made a promise to Abraham, because He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself, saying, ‘Surely blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply you.’ And so, after [Abraham] had patiently endured, he obtained the promise” (verses 13-15, "New King James Version").
Notice those verses connect Abraham’s patient endurance with God swearing by Himself to BLESS him. They indicate God’s sworn oath is what kept Abraham’s faith strong. Therefore, as believers we need to understand what that oath was all about. We need to study the events surrounding it, because the giving of that oath is one of the most important events recorded in the Bible: one that not only teaches us a lot about following in Abraham’s footsteps of faith, but that reveals what God’s oath to him means in our lives today.
The Movies Got It Wrong
Genesis 22 records the story. It says that some years after the son God promised Abraham had been born to him and his barren wife, it came to pass that God said to him: “‘Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.’ So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him” (verses 1-3, "NKJV").
6 : BVOV
