BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

In addition to God’s promise of a son, one of the things that made the lightbulb of faith come on for Abraham was the blood covenant God made with him. Before that happened, his faith kept wavering. But after God appeared in all His fiery glory, walked up and down in the blood of sacrificial animals, and made a covenant with him, saying, “Unto thy seed have I given this land” (Genesis 15:18), Abraham’s faith rose to a whole new level! If a covenant ratified in the blood of bulls and goats could do that for Abraham, imagine what the New Covenant can do for our faith! Our covenant isn’t ratified in the blood of bulls or goats. Our covenant with God has been ratified in the precious blood of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Every mark the whip left on His body was a covenant mark. Every drop of blood He shed was covenant blood shed for us. Think about that! Spend time meditating on the fact that you have a blood covenant with Almighty God and, like Abraham, you can have strong, unstaggering faith! Out of the Ashes Exactly how strong was Abraham’s faith? It was so strong that, years after Isaac was born, when God told Abraham to offer him up as a sacrifice, Abraham was willing to do it. He was so confident God would fulfill His promise, “In Isaac shall thy seed be called,” that he bound Isaac and put him on the altar, “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from whence also he received him in a figure” (Hebrews 11:18-19). There’s no scriptural evidence God had ever raised anyone from the dead at that point in time! Yet Abraham was certain God would raise up Isaac. He’d already seen it happen, “in a figure,” on the inside of him. Why was he able to see it? Because he was still walking by faith and not by natural sight. He was still doing the same thing he did when he became fully persuaded he and Sarah were going to have this boy in the first place. He was meditating on God’s promise and His covenant BLESSING. He was talking about it. He was raising his son to believe it. (Isaac must have had faith for resurrection, too, because he was almost full grown when Abraham agreed to sacrifice him, and he apparently went along with the plan.) Abraham had spent some time with this! With the eye of faith, he’d already seen how this situation had to turn out. He’d already seen Isaac come up out of the ashes. He’d already seen him raised from the dead. If you read over in Mark 5 about the woman with the issue of blood, you’ll find she did much the same thing to receive her healing. She spent time meditating on what she’d heard about Jesus—about what He preached and the miracles He’d done. She spent time thinking, If He healed those other people He can heal me. Then she started saying, over and over, “If I but touch His clothes, I know I’ll be healed…If I but touch His clothes, I know I’ll be healed.” The more she said it, the more she saw it. Until, finally, she couldn’t stand to sit there in her house anymore. Despite the fact that for years she’d gone to one doctor after another and only gotten worse, despite the fact that it was against the law for her to go out in public in her condition, she got out in the street and went to find Jesus. She intended to just slip up to Him unnoticed—to crawl through the crowd and quietly get her healing. But that’s not what happened. When she touched the hem of His garment, He stopped and said, “Who touched Me?” “And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing. But the woman fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth. And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague” (verses 32-34). Come Up and Think God’s Thoughts This is how you live in the abundance of God’s grace! This is how you walk in such victory and dominion in this world that it’s like sin never even happened! You fix the eyes of your heart on what The WORD of God says. You keep thinking it, talking it and seeing it “in a figure” on the inside, until God’s WORD comes to pass in your life just like it did for Abraham and the woman with the issue of blood. Recently, I was preaching along these lines, and the word of The LORD came to me saying: 8 : BVOV

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