BVOV Magazine 2013 - present

Otherwise, you won’t last long at all. You’ll get the wind knocked out of you and end up running for the locker room while the rest of the team is still out there on the field punching and pounding one another and calling it “fun.” In my years as a believer, I’ve discovered something similar is true about living by faith in God. It’s the most thrilling, powerful adventure there is, but it doesn’t work for those who take a wait-and-see attitude. It doesn’t produce results for people who just hear a few messages about it and say, “I think I’ll give that faith stuff a try.” If you want to win at the life of faith, you have to really want it. You have to take the same attitude Abraham did in the Bible. Talk about someone who wanted to walk by faith! Abraham set the standard! He wanted to walk in the manifestation of God’s power more than anything else on earth. He wanted it more than he wanted his family. He wanted it more than he wanted his own life. He wanted God so much, that he’d believe and act on His WORD no matter what anyone else thought or said about it. You can see that by how he responded when God told him at 100 years old that he and his 90-year-old wife were going to have a baby. He not only had audacity enough to believe it, he made a public announcement: “I’m the father of many nations,” he said. “From now on, don’t call me Abram anymore. Call me Abraham, the Father of a Multitude!” Can you imagine how people reacted to that? They must have treated Abraham like a laughingstock. They might not have mocked him to his face because he was the richest man around; but behind his back, I’m sure they pointed at him and snickered, “That old man has taken leave of his senses! There’s no way he and his old, barren wife are going to have children at their age. It’s impossible.” While they were scoffing, however, Abraham was believing. He was refusing to be moved by impossibilities. As Romans 4:19-21 says: “Being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; and being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.” When it came to living by faith in God’s WORD Abraham was as rugged and determined as they come. Like those guys I used to play football with, he was all-in. One hundred percent committed to believing God. The Same Kind of Faith God Uses You and I, as born-again believers, can have the same kind of attitude! When we see in God’s WORD that by the stripes of Jesus we were healed, we can choose to consider not the symptoms of sickness in our body. We can jump up in faith and say, “Yes, Sir! I am the healed of The LORD!” When we see that our covenant with God declares that His BLESSING makes us rich and adds no sorrow to it, we can say, “Yes, amen! I am BLESSED and I am rich!” We can believe God 100 percent, regardless of what our bank account or other people might say about it. “Yeah, but Brother Copeland, I just don’t have that kind of faith.” The Bible says you do. It refers to all of us who believe in Jesus as those who “walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham” (Romans 4:12). BVOV : 7

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