We live in a fight of faith because God is making us a people of faith. He will make you a spiritual son who believes until your faith cannot be moved. “For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13).1 He will work in you to believe; then He will test your faith and continue to work in you to believe. We are entering into a time when the only thing that is really happening is a fight of faith. Nothing we are doing has any real significance other than that. We will have the victory when we believe the Word more than we believe what we see and feel. We are not in a fight with an enemy; we are in a fight of faith. How do you win the fight of faith? By believing. Faith comes when you hear the Word of God and contend earnestly for it (Romans 10:17).
You may wonder, “What are all these circumstances that I am thrown into?” They are the proving of your faith. Before the engineers pour concrete at a construction site, they take a sample of the concrete and put it under a stress test. They want to see if it can really hold the necessary weight. If it fails, they have to deal with it somehow before they can move forward. They have to reinforce it or even tear out a section and start over to make sure that the concrete will not fail. Do you get the picture? Of course, you have faith. But will it hold? Our faith is being proven. It is being tested because it needs to bear the weight of the Kingdom. It has to be load-bearing so that God can put His weight down upon it. God is simply being a good engineer. When we come running up to Him and say, “We’re ready now; we believe this time,” He makes sure we are ready by putting a little weight down on our faith to see whether it will hold up or collapse.
After you set your heart to believe a Word, just give it five minutes and things will start happening to you. You can say, “This is the same old battle.” No, it is not. This time you are the issue, and you must walk in the Word about you. This time you are not going to collapse because you will understand what is taking place. It is so simple. We are going to love the persecution; we are going to love our enemies; we are going to love the impasses. Think about it. How can an impasse possibly stand against the Word of the Lord? God’s Word is the greatest force in the universe; the Word is God Himself (John 1:1).
In the spirit realm, it is never what you see; it is only what you accept. The entirety of the spirit realm works on the principle of believing. The odds never matter; only what you accept matters. When you accept that whatever is raging against you is your reality rather than the Word—whether it is a circumstance, something in your physical body, or another person—then your faith collapses. You did not lose the victory. You simply let go of the Word. The only purpose of your impasses is to give you a way to measure how you are doing in your fight of faith. When your impasse disappears, you know you have taken a new level of faith.
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1All Scripture references are from the New American Standard Bible 1995 (NASB1995).