Do Not Listen To The Enemy And Lose. Listen To God And Win.

What will you allow to FORM you and become the convincing belief in your life?

Will it be your sickness or your problems? Is the convincing belief in your life going to be the marriage trouble, the issue with your job, or the difficulty with another person?

Something will form who you are and what you believe. What you believe about the promises of the Lord and his ability to work in your life will be formed either through his word and the promises of God themselves, or you will allow destructive situations and transient problems to be the force that forms your faith.

Faith comes from what we choose to listen to in our hearts.

In the Book of Romans, Paul explains a principle of faith to us. The principle is really simple yet so powerful. However, we often forget about its ability to take root in our hearts and become active. What Paul says about the origins of faith in our hearts is something we often take for granted. Yes, the Lord has given us a measure of faith, but for faith to grow, we must choose what we listen to!

Voices that carry a message of doubt and defeat will be produced in our lives just as easily as those that carry faith in God’s promises.

Romans 10:17 NKJV
[17] So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Paul instructs us on the principle that faith comes from hearing, but genuine hearing comes from listening to the word of God.

We have the choice to listen to or hear whatever voice is speaking the loudest. Yet, the fact that we hear or choose to listen does not mean that our inner man is being formed in the correct way. True hearing only comes from intentionally choosing to listen to the word of God! Every other voice we choose to listen to in our situations, other than the Lord, will result in a negative hearing beginning to form.

In other words, there is such a thing as Godly faith, but there is also such a thing as negative faith, destructive faith, or ungodly faith. A destructive faith is belief in words that do not come from the Lord. Destructive faith can be as simple as listening to your heart when it is afraid and telling you all the possible adverse outcomes that might happen in your life or circumstance. Destructive faith can also be as sinister as listening to the devil’s words that he tries to speak into your life. For instance, Job, the man who lost everything, had a choice to listen to all the bad that kept coming, or he could listen to his faith in God and God’s character.

Allow me to express Paul’s faith principle in my own words: We are formed by the ideas and circumstances that we allow to inform us. 

Whatever voice you give permission to speak into your life and inform you will FORM you. 

If the voice that informs your faith is God’s word, promises, or character and grace, your faith will grow strong in God’s kind of faith. However, if you choose to let your pain and problem become the informer, your God-kind of faith will shrivel because you are feeding the flesh or, worse, the devil.

So what will you allow to do the forming in your life?

Abraham was the father of faith. He believed God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness. Something happened in his heart that would change the course of history. His decision of faith still affects us TODAY. We have the same possibilities that come with choosing God's faith over fear.

Scripture says that Abraham did not waver at God’s PROMISE. The word waver is the Greek word diakrino. One of the possible uses of this word is to remain undivided. In other words, Abraham never allowed the magnitude of God’s promise to him to divide his heart in two. Sometimes, the Lord makes such impossible-sounding promises to us that it divides our hearts into two camps. The one camp says, “I know God can and will.” The other camp says, “I do not see HOW God can even if He wants to.”

The devil probably will not try to undermine your idea of the Lord’s desire to do good to you. Instead, he will most likely try to tell you a lesser version in the hope you will believe him. Your enemy will say things like, “God would do it if there was a way, but you have destroyed all the possible ways God could fix it.” Or the devil will say, “God loves you enough to save you, but He will not change your circumstances because you have just been too sinful or bad in your past.”

Hear me. DO NOT LISTEN to the enemy!

If you study the meaning of the word waver, it could be said that to waver is to walk on a balance beam. When you waver, you struggle to not fall off the beam. The devil does not have to get you to deny what the Lord says to you; he just needs to get you into a place where you are struggling to balance. When you are trying to balance it means that you FEEL LIKE you might fall. Doubt comes in and says, “You will fall; you will not be able to walk this out.” The struggle of the balance beam forms unbelief in your heart, not ABOUT the promise of God, but about YOUR ABILITY to walk in it.

Remember, Abraham did not waver at God, nor did he waver at the PROMISE of God. This trick of the devil to get us onto the balance beam is the same trick the devil used with Jesus when he tempted him. The tempter came to Jesus and said, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” The devil wanted Jesus to get on the balance beam. He wanted Jesus to waver about whether he was the son of God. The devil was not interested in whether or not Jesus could create bread. What the devil was doing was seeking to create indecision and imbalance in Jesus’ faith.

Again, which voice will you allow to form your life? The devil’s voice? Your own voice? Doubt’s voice? Or God’s voice? 
We have to choose!

Pray this with me:

“Father, I pray that as I read your word consistently, it will produce in me the power to choose YOUR WORD and YOUR PROMISE no matter what I see with my eyes. Give me the faith to listen to your voice and let your voice form faith in my heart that will make me stand even when the battle is hard. I choose this day to trust what YOU SAY no matter how things look. When the problems look bigger than my faith, I will turn to your word and declare what you say instead of what I feel. In Jesus name, amen.”

- Blessings, Larry & Amanda Shankle

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