Faith is the Substance

Recently I had a profoundly powerful time of prayer. Using the terminology of the late 19th century revivalist Charles Finney, I prevailed in prayer. It was that sense that I broke through the darkness the devil had cast on my circumstances. As I rounded a turn in the highway immediately at the end of my prayer, I came upon a huge yellow billboard containing a quote from Hebrews 11: Faith is the substance of things hoped for. I had never before equated faith as being the substance of anything. Yet it was immediately clear to me that the very physical essence of that which I hoped for was made from faith alone. As hopeless as things seemed to me as I began to pray that morning, I now knew that the fruition of my dream and my vision would only be realized if I was determined to walk by faith. No doubt, no extenuating circumstances, and certainly no devil would defeat honest faith. As I contemplated this revelation, the following came to me:

Faith happens when we walk right through the fire. Satan is always casting fear and doubt upon us, making us want to crawl up in a spiritual fetal position and give up--right before we are about to prevail! But faith happens when we ignore his attacks and press onward despite all outward indicators. The devil only possesses the power to make us believe a lie. His power is diminished when the lie is exposed. We can have faith yet still miss God's favor because we fear the devil more than we trust God. This is the very thing that causes dead institutionalism. We begin to rationalize defeat rather than believing God. We settle for something far less than God desired for us, and we buy into worldly means to achieve our dismal mediocrity. The end result is either religion or apostasy. But faith can be found in neither, nor can the Holy Spirit.

Therein lies the significant difference between faith and religion. It is why Ichabod was written on the door posts of the temple, because the glory of God, the presence of the Holy Spirit, had departed. For him who has ears to hear...