Hey, welcome back for week six of our discipleship program. I'm so excited you chose to join us again. And I really hope that what you're experiencing in Christ is everything being restored to you. You know, I was thinking about it the other day. When we say God's restoring everything to us, sometimes we don't even know what was stolen in the first place because we never got to experience it. And I like to look at it like this. Imagine that you were created to live in paradise. You were born to live in the Garden of Eden and have nothing but perfection, no death, no disease, nothing to cry about ever.
And that was what we were made for. And so unless you've lived someplace where all those things are, you don't even know what you're missing. And so when we say we're getting all things restored in Christ, they're going to be things that come into our lives that we didn't even know were possible. And today we want to look at how to access some of those things that we didn't even know were possible. And we access everything in this new walk by faith. So week six is learning to trust God, learning how to walk by faith and not by sight. So we've talked a little bit about repentance, which the word means to turn away, to turn around, to change our mind and change the direction in which we're walking.
And if we look at it like walking on a road, before we really came to know Christ and were born again, we were walking on a road away from God. Repentance means we turned around. Now we're walking toward God. And this is an encouraging word because it means for the rest of our lives, it's not so much about whether we are making quick progress in terms of becoming more like Jesus, becoming more righteous, fewer issues in our life. That's not how we're measured. That's certainly not what's important to the Father. What's important to the Father in heaven is that we're turned toward Him.
So it might feel sometimes like I've taken three steps forward, two steps back, or maybe even one step forward, three steps back. But the point is always, I'm facing in a certain direction now. So today we're talking about, we've repented and turned away from our dead works. Now we're turned toward God. And that means a lifestyle of faith. It means a lifestyle of learning to get comfortable with living by an unseen realm, by a God who, yeah, He shows up in certain ways that are tangible. And we can testify to, I have encountered the living God in this.
But for the most part, faith means being able to go into something without seeing what's going to happen next. You don't need faith for something that's obvious, that's right in front of your eyes. But we do need to learn how to walk by faith. So we've trusted God with our eternal life, right? You're here doing this series together with me because you said at one point, weeks or months ago, hey, I am ready now to put my life in the hands of God. And I trust that even if tomorrow I die, I have eternal life through Jesus Christ. And it can only get better from here.
I mean, what can really go wrong from this point onward, right? So in one way though, that's almost easier to trust God. I am now trusting God with my eternity. I'm born again. I'm going to live forever. Great. Now we're going to talk about though, how to trust God in everyday life. Because to trust that if I die, I'll live again is one thing. But to say today, I have hard decisions to make. Or tomorrow, I have trials in front of me. I have some tribulation and now I'm going to have to go through.
Do I have enough faith to walk with God through those things? That's where rubber meets the road. In 2 Corinthians chapter 5, Paul talks about living after death and being in heavenly places and living forever in that. And it takes faith to believe that that's what's going to happen. And then Paul goes on and he says, for we walk by faith, not by sight. And our whole walk with God begins with this belief, right? We trusted in a certain thing that we heard preached or however the word came to us, that yeah, if I die and I put my trust in Jesus, I put my faith in what he did on the cross for me, and then I opened the way wide so I could have eternal life.
That now I'm able to lean in on that and trust that no matter what, even if I die, I'll live again. And we don't see that yet though, obviously because you're still alive. We don't see what happens after death. So we are living our entire life by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us, right? That was our first memory verse, but one of them anyway, that we did in this class. So we're going to need to learn in this walk with Jesus, how to get comfortable with doing things that may not make sense to this mind. Now I don't know about you, but I was arrogant in my mind, and I thought I knew a lot more than I actually knew.
And our mind can actually interfere with the simplicity of walking by faith and trust in God like nothing else. In fact, I would propose that for most of us, our mind is the biggest obstacle to walking by faith, because we tend to like comfort. We tend to like things to be predictable. We like to know what's going to happen next. And yeah, there's some personalities that are a little bit more risk tolerant, and some that need answers before you do anything at all. But all of us like to know what's about to happen next. And that's because our mind would like answers for questions before we're willing to trust something.
So let's first talk about the difference between faith and trust. And the first thing I want to say is that there's no such thing as blind faith, right? We use that expression, and I've had, you know, atheists, friends of mine accuse me of, well, you just, you have blind faith. And what they really typically mean by that is you trust in something that you can't observe with your own eyes. But I would propose that actually, the life of faith that we live is built on testimonies of times that we know we encountered something. We encountered a real living God. So you and I were born again because we had some kind of an encounter where we just knew beyond our minds, something in here just knew, I just encountered truth.
I encountered a Jesus who somehow, I know that I know that this is real. This isn't just some emotional thing. This is not just some, you know, rush judgment that I'm making in the heat of a moment. But I encountered God, and nobody can take that away from me. That was how we started this walk of faith. How we walk without calling it a blind faith is that we build on that first encounter that we had. And every single time that we, God comes through or he makes himself known to us in some kind of way, we're building a track record of faith.
So I'm sitting on a chair right now. Before I sat down on the chair, I looked at it, and it has four legs and a seat, and it looks to be pretty stable. So I sat on it, and I put my trust in it, that it wasn't going to become some clown show prank where I'd end up on the floor. We trust in a lot of things that we maybe or maybe shouldn't be trusting in. I trusted, like you probably did, in my own judgment, my own ability to make something in my life. And what a train wreck I was making out of my life because I trusted in myself. Many of us have had our trust broken, and we've been betrayed in times past.
We'll talk about that down the road because we can be healed of those things. But trust is based on something that we've observed or experienced. When I grew up, I went to a school, and I had to ride the train to get there. Three New York subway trains, and if the first one was late, then I missed the second one, and I was late for school. And I grew to know the schedule for that particular subway. The train came every four minutes, and I knew to the minute when it was going to be there. And so I put my trust in the fact that if I got to the train station by this time, I'd make it on time for school because the train was going to be there every day.
So that happened over and over again, and then I'm sure, I don't remember when it happened first, but one day the train didn't show up on time, and it was 10 or 15 minutes late. Now, did I think, oh, man, I should have never put my trust in that train? No, because it had a track record already. It had been on time so many times before. So my first thought wasn't, this train stinks. I never should have trusted it. My thought was, wow, man, something might have happened. I wonder if they had an accident or something like that, or there's a delay for a reason, mechanical failure.
The point is, we tend to not trust God because maybe He didn't come through the way we thought He should. And the longer of a track record we have of putting our faith into practice, trusting Him and taking a step of obedience or a step of faith, the more of a track record we have, the more we learn how to trust God. So faith and trust are really interchangeable. We learn to trust God by walking by faith. There's no other way to do it. And here's just some basics on how to begin this walk of faith. The first thing is, the Scripture is a reliable record of everything that God's ever done.
So, how do we know what God's asking us to step into? Begin to read the Scriptures. Begin to live according to the Scriptures. Put something to the test. Try something that the Scripture's telling you to do. Like, you know that the Word says you should do X, Y, or Z. So do it. Put God to the test. Put His Word to the test. See what the results are. For me, initially, my biggest problem with the Lord was that it seemed like the Bible was just always telling me what not to do.
Or so I thought that's what it said. And I didn't want to stop doing certain things. I didn't want to stop drinking at first when I came to know the Lord. So I kept seeing in here about drunkenness. Don't be drunk with wine. Drunkenness is sin. So I thought, all right, I'm going to give that a shot. Maybe life can be fun without drinking alcohol all the time. So I repented of it. I obeyed the Word. And I found life's a whole lot more fun when you're not intoxicated. There are so many other ways of having a good time when you have all your wits about you and you can actually enjoy what you're doing instead of just being six sheets to the wind and not having a clue how you ended up where you woke up that day.
I put the Word of God into practice. I trusted the Lord in that. And I found that I wasn't sacrificing anything. I got more in return for giving up alcohol. So there are many things like that in the Word of God. How do we begin to build our faith? Every time we say yes to the Lord, there's now an opportunity for Him to come through, show us that His Word is true, that He's faithful, and that He's trustworthy, that His Word begins as being trustworthy. So first, we live according to what the Scripture says.
Romans 10 verse 17 says it like this. So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ. It's an amazing thing, isn't it? You think about Jesus' life. He preached the same message to crowds and crowds of people. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people heard Jesus preach during His years of ministry. But only some of them took that Word and said, I'm going to change how I live my life, because I would have just heard that man say. They all heard the same Word, but some of them mixed it with faith.
And because of that faith, their lives were changed. Some of them became apostles who went on and preached Christ and changed the world as a result of what Jesus poured into them. The point is, this Word is powerless unless it's mixed with faith. So begin by putting this Word into practice. And little by little, you'll see, boy, when Jesus says to be generous and to give, man, I think I'm sacrificing so much of my money to give generously. But boy, it seems like every time I give, God replaces it. And I'm beginning to live this life of faith in my finances or in my relationships.
He says, forgive, even if that person may not even repent for what they did. Forgive and release them. And we begin to experience the joy of what it's like to be freed from the sins of others. And we live this new life because we put the Word of God into practice. And little by little, He begins to change us. And He gives us our own testimony. So when we hear the Word of Christ, here's how we build faith. Have a predetermined yes in our heart. We'll talk about hearing the voice of God a little bit more, but I'm going to tell you now, this is the first key to learning to hear the voice of God.
Have a predetermined yes to whatever it is He says. Because we can read what He has to say. We can eventually learn to hear specifically what He has to say. But if our heart says no, we're not growing in our ability to hear from Him. And we actually close off our heart to it because we're not mixing His Word with faith, which means taking action on it. Number two, read the testimonies of those who have gone before. Hebrews chapter 11, which I'll read the opening of that in just a moment, shares kind of a summary of some of the big ones, like the people who, well, they made it into the Bible because of their faith.
The thing that impresses me about so many of them is that they walked by faith before there was even a Bible to read. Like Abraham existed hundreds of years before there were any books of the Bible. So he just followed his heart. He believed he was following God and all of it. And he became like the father of all the faithful. So these guys, you'll see they tested God by stepping out in faith. And God came through for them, sometimes the way they expected Him to, many times not the way they expected Him to, but they walked by faith.
They put their trust in God even if they couldn't see. So read these testimonies and be encouraged by them that you're not some nut job out there trusting in something with blind faith. You're following in the footsteps of people who have changed the world and who have brought Christ into all humanity. And we've joined a great company. The book of Hebrews describes them as this great cloud of witnesses. You think of a witness in a trial. What are they there for? Or they're there to tell everybody, here's what I saw or here's what I experienced.
And you are a witness now. You, because you're born again, you can give testimony. I know what I was like before I met Jesus. And I know what my life is different like now after I've met Jesus because of what He's done. That's the beginning of your life's testimony. So you begin to build on that and begin to walk according to that. And then you have a track record so that it becomes easier actually to say yes to the Lord when He speaks. If you have the scriptures, you also have people around you.
Probably, you know, for many of you, you heard somebody preach and they shared their testimony. How did they come to Christ? Or they shared some miracle that happened in their life because they put their trust in the Lord. And then the Lord came through with an answer that was amazing or supernatural in their life. So talk to people who have testimonies. Be encouraged by the testimonies of other people that you're not alone in this. You're not just kind of stepping out into absolute nothingness. You're following and you have joined together with billions of people through the centuries who have put their trust in God and seen Him come through because they chose to walk by faith and not by sight.
Next, you can learn to hear God's voice more clearly. I gave you the first tip today. Have a predetermined yes in your heart and learn to argue with God less. Learn to argue with His written word less. Learn to argue less with what you know now in your heart is right and begin to obey. And it becomes easier to hear the voice of God once we do that. And as you begin to respond to that internal voice, you're going to discover now because you have the Holy Spirit that there are going to be times that you just feel like, I just don't really believe I should do that.
And it may not make sense. I'll share one amazing. I've got a million testimonies, but this is one of my favorites. I'm going to share it very quickly here. A friend of mine was a manager for a big security company that was out of Logan Airport. This is in the 90s. And in 1999, he was offered a vice presidential position to oversee all of the security for this company at Logan Airport. So they had big airlines like American United, you know, some of the really big ones. And it was what he was working for for years and years.
And his boss finally came to him and said, we feel like you're ready. Do you want the position? So he was a godly man. He said, you know how I roll. I'm going to go back and pray with my wife and I'll have an answer for you. He went back and he and his wife prayed. And these were mature Christians. And they prayed and prayed and they had absolutely no peace. And they looked at each other and they said, this just doesn't make any sense. This is what I've been working for all these years.
I'm finally being offered the position. And God's saying, no, don't take it. How could this possibly make sense? So they went back and they continued to pray. And after three days of asking the Lord, they just had absolutely no rest about taking the position. So he went back to the owner of the company and he said, I'm so sorry. I know that I've been working toward this, but I just can't take the position. And the guy said, that makes no sense. You know, I don't know what you're doing here. You're ruining your career.
But so be it. I have to take no for an answer. My friend within that year left that company and he and his family moved down to Miami. And he began to work down there again, which is where he was from. Well, Logan Airport in Boston is where two of the planes took off on 9-11. His security company was the company responsible for allowing those hijackers to get on the plane. The person who took his position was on the front page of the Boston Globe the next day and became the local like, you know, scapegoat for everything that happened.
Now, there was nothing anybody could have done with what they were doing back then to prevent that. But because my friend was willing to walk by faith and trust God, that even though it made no sense to his mind up here, his heart knew this is what God's saying. And I have to walk with God. I'm going to choose to walk by faith and not by sight. His career was spared and his life was, I mean, I can't imagine what would have happened. That's a big extreme case. I'm putting that before you right now because that's a goal for us all, that we learn how to hear God that way.
But how did my friend come to a place where he could be that confident about what God was saying? Because he always said, yes, Lord. When all the little things along the way, when God said, repent of this, because the scripture says don't do it, he repented of it and he stopped doing it. We build our testimony in a track record of faith and it becomes easier to say yes every time we say yes. So I encourage you to write down the testimonies from your life. All the times that you saw God come through, write it down. Don't forget it because in those moments of testing, when the stakes get higher, when, you know, life or death or a career is on the line with some things, you're going to want to be able to look back and remember, oh, well, God came through before.
God came through here again. And so I can trust that he's going to come through for me now. And you'll find it easier to make those big decisions and live by faith in that moment. Hebrews 11 and verse 1. And this is a chapter you'll see in your devotional this week that we're going to ask you to kind of read through and marinate in. It's the chapter, we call it the Hall of Faith. Like, you know, we have the Hall of Fame, the Hall of Faith. And here's what people did before.
And because of this, you can do it too. And it opens up like this. It says, now faith is the substance or the assurance of things hoped for. It's the evidence of things not seen. So, in other words, until you actually have the answer to the thing that you're trusting for or that you're having faith for, faith, real faith feels to your heart as if you already have that answer. So, my wife and I, for years, were believing that we were supposed to have more children. And then we had a couple of miscarriages along the way.
And it was getting very discouraging. And as the years went on with that, we were starting to get really discouraged. And then we prayed and God really met us in that place. And real faith came alive in our hearts. It was still three more years before we had our fifth child. We have six kids. Our fifth child, such a dream. What a beautiful baby. But it was another three years. But during that three-year period of time, we had real faith. And our hearts were not growing weary. We weren't getting anxious.
We weren't frustrated with God. We didn't lose our hope. And we certainly didn't disconnect ourselves from the living God because He wasn't answering our prayers on time. Why? Because we had genuine faith. Authentic faith is not clinging, holding on for dear life. You know, you may answer the question sometimes. You know, I ask everybody, so how are you doing? And I always mean it, by the way. When I ask somebody, how are you doing? I'm ready for a half-hour conversation, if that's what we're going to have. But many people answer that like, well, you know, I'm hanging on, hanging in, hanging on, or something like that.
That's not a life of faith. A life of faith is when we have such a confidence, the same confidence I had sitting down in this chair. The trust that we have in God is so strong that even if the answers are delayed, or things don't happen right away, we're not discouraged, we're not losing heart. We're saying, I already know that I can trust God. He is for me, not against me. He loves me with an everlasting love. He is a Father who wants to give good gifts to His children. He's not going to let me down.
And if you can stand your ground in the place of faith like that, there's a peace that goes beyond comprehension. There's a joy unspeakable and full of glory. And there's a hope that stays alive in the heart during that period of time so that we don't get worn out and weary. Because God wants to be able to trust us with bigger and bigger weights of responsibility. But they're all going to come with a bigger and bigger demand for faith along the way. So begin to step out. Put God to the test.
I don't mean test God like go and do something stupid and see if He rescues you. That's not what I mean by that. By testing God, I mean put His Word into practice and watch and see how life begins to take on a whole thing. So when you can have peace with no answers or not an immediate supernatural response from God, welcome to the life of faith. Welcome to the life of many who have gone before who can testify before all the courts of heaven and for all eternity. He's good. He's faithful.
He'll come through for you. Then you'll be the encourager for one who's in your shoes right now. So I pray for you right now. May the God of all hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that you might abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. I pray that'll be your way of walking by faith. Not hanging on for dear life, but this wild, joyful ride of trusting God all the way. Amen. Enjoy your devotions this week. I look forward to being back with you again shortly.