The only way to express faith is by a continual awareness of the Lord and of His provision and promise, together with a persistence in the way you go about believing and appropriating that provision. The voicing of it must be continual. The love that God produces in us is a more sustained emotion than is faith. Faith is not a sustained emotion. There are moments when you really sense faith and you believe; there are other moments when you look around for it and it seems to be gone. The only way you can break through in faith is to keep repeating and persisting in your request, no matter what happens or how you feel. Feelings get in the way and seem to wipe out your faith and the deep conviction you sense over a promise of the Lord.
Young people go through certain cycles and periods in which they become discouraged. Things may be going badly for them financially, they may be harassed at home or at work. Sometimes a demon-possessed professor at school can be a real harassment. Girls can face the same factors because of their monthly period, which is sometimes a source of producing so many emotions within them that at that time they lose what they were contending for. There are so many things that come continually to work away at faith. Love seems more deeply rooted, though the real acceptance of love is very tricky.
Because faith is not sustained as love is, God tells us to be persistent in the expression of faith. He doesn’t tell us that about love because love seems to abide. But we constantly need to work at faith and hope, in order for them to be vivid and real in our hearts. In their basic essence, faith and hope are kindred emotions. Love is different. Love just walks right in with an overwhelming strength. But faith must constantly be reiterated and expressed. You would do well, every day that you live, to go over the things you are believing for, persistently claiming them and believing God for them.
Ask (and keep asking), and it shall be given you; seek (and keep seeking), and you shall find; knock (and keep knocking), and it shall be opened to you. Matthew 7:7. The literal Greek emphasizes this persistence in the use of the aorist tense, in which an action of the present is extended into the future. That is why the Lord gave the parable in Luke 18 of the widow who had been cheated out of her inheritance. She received an answer because of her persistence. He brought the obvious conclusion, “How much more will your Heavenly Father avenge His elect who cry day and night unto Him, though He bear long with them?” There may be a lot of things in you that God has to put up with. You may not really be worthy of an answer. But faith does not go on a basis of worthiness; it is based on His commitment. Faith says, “You’ve promised it, Lord,” as it persistently hangs in there.
Sometimes God seems to ask, “What is your request based on—your faith in Me or your worthiness to receive?” So He tells the woman who is begging for her daughter to be delivered from a demon, “It is not meet to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs.” She takes another position: she doesn’t have to be worthy. Call her a dog if you want to; she will take the crumbs that fall from the table. Faith can never be based upon the worthiness of the individual who is seeking the blessing. It is based upon a persistence that claims the promise and the provision of the Lord without wavering, without stopping.
Faith is like the tide of the sea: it comes up and then it disappears, in and out, up and down. Many things seem to pull at faith until we decide that we’ll stabilize and equalize it by constantly voicing the petition, constantly asking and seeking, continually prevailing in intercession. Often you say, “We keep praying and praying. What good does it do?” Just hold fast your faith. Keep believing. There will be an answer. As long as you keep on praying and keep on hoping and keep on presenting before the Lord the apostolic company, you may be sure that every satanic hindrance, every devil-possessed opponent will be removed. It will take place. God will open the door for you.
Faith must be persistently obnoxious in the spirit realm. It must have a continually disturbing quality to it. It’s by faith that mountains are removed and cast into the sea. It’s by faith that obstacles are removed. It’s by faith that you change inwardly. It’s by faith that the will of God is accomplished through most unworthy vessels. It’s by faith that men walk on water and through furnaces of fire.
Faith could be compared to a little raindrop. One little raindrop by itself is very insignificant. No one pays much attention to it. But a mass of little raindrops, working together for a few thousand years, will produce a Grand Canyon. If you persistently bombard the problems with your little mustard-seed faith, you will see things happen. You don’t need much faith, but you must keep working at it. Keep praying. Keep believing God, “It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen.”
It’s easy to become discouraged when we stop and reason in the natural. We look at the huge mountain and say, “It can’t be removed.” It can too be removed! It can be removed, even if your faith is only like a little drop of water. It will finally erode the mountain and push it into the sea. A mass of raindrops, pelting away at the mountain, will finally destroy it. It may not look like a mountain when it gets into the sea; it may take form as the sands of the sea. Whether it happens as an instantaneous miracle or not, faith is never denied. Keep working at it. Keep believing God. That raindrop may be very small and insignificant, but the Word says, “Much dripping of the water weareth away the stone” (Job 14:19).
Keep expressing. Keep believing. You cannot know what the eternal issues are at stake through your prayers and intercession. Pray for me. Believe for me. Persistently call upon the name of the Lord to see that the deliverance comes. I Believe it’s going to come. I don’t doubt it or waver on it in my heart, but I must not let a day go by that I don’t storm the gates of heaven, that I don’t believe that this rock of revelation is so great that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. This must be in my heart. It must be in my spirit to persist in expressing this faith, to voice it again and again. I know we’re not heard for vain repetition or for much speaking, but this isn’t vain repetition, and the fact remains that faith has to have an expression. If it is not given an expression, it seems to go into a state of limbo.
Your faith seems to go in cycles, and Satan tries to put your faith in some kind of down cycle of depression so that he can delay, delay, delay. All of Satan’s efforts are aimed at delay, but God sees the danger of Satan’s tactics and therefore He gives the promise, “Unless these days are shortened, there will be no flesh saved alive” (Matthew 24:22). It’s our persistence that will shorten these days. If Satan can succeed in dragging them out, he will destroy the human race. But if we persist and persist and persist, if we cry day and night unto God, He will avenge us speedily and we’ll become the instruments by which God releases His authority. He has bound Himself by His Word to operate through the faith and the prayers of His people. That means if you want to see the apostolic company come forth, then get with the prayer and intercession, and stay with it. Don’t waver. Don’t pull back. So much is dependent upon this persistence. I can’t convey to you or adequately express how intensely I believe in the significance of your faith and your continual prayers.
You don’t have to understand a great deal about it, but believe me—the apostolic ministry has been in continual jeopardy. I have learned to live every day as though it were my last. When I go to bed at night, I kneel down and thank God with all my heart that I have lived through another day. When I get up in the morning, I thank Him and praise Him. We are aware of the frailty of life, of the continual assault in Satan’s effort to destroy what God is bringing forth.
If you look in the Word, you see that time and time again Satan has hindered. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “We purposed to come to visit you time and again, but Satan hindered us” (I Thessalonians 2:18). It was Satan’s hindrance that prevented it. This is the only strategy Satan can use. Even now the rage of Satan is great because he knows his time is short (Revelation 12:12). If he could just delay a little longer, he might frustrate the plan of God. We are wrestling against principalities and powers, against spiritual hosts, against this force of wickedness which is set to hinder us.
You battle on and on. You might say, “I’ve been in a battle for a couple of years, but thank God, I won.” Did you really win? or did you lose two years? That’s the issue. Were you hindered? Let’s stomp on this hindering tactic of Satan. Let’s curse it! Do you want to grow old and spend your last days, shaking and senile, in some convalescent hospital, without seeing the reality of what you’ve believed for in this generation? or do you want to get with it and persistently press through.
Even as I watch the advance of the Word, I know that with every day that passes, Satan has a purpose and a motive. It’s your prayers and your faith that will keep this Walk alive, and the apostolic company going, until we see God’s will accomplished. It has to be. A violence must possess your soul. It has to!
If we could just recognize the deadliness of unbelief and depression and discouragement! I wish there were some way we could quarantine it and wall if off. It is such an insidious, filthy, destructive hindrance to the faith of God’s people. I wish there could be some way that you could rise up with an intensity, a persistence, a perseverance, a constant expression of faith that does not waver or go into an eclipse, but is crying day and night unto the Lord until He hears us and avenges us speedily. We have the promise, “He will avenge them speedily.” But then follows a heart-searching question: “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man cometh, will He find faith on the earth?”
If you let your personal problems beat you down, you’ll be fighting them the rest of your life. The children of Israel who perished in the wilderness perished because they were constantly looking at their circumstances. They weren’t thinking about Canaan or the promise of Canaan; they were continually murmuring over this, that, or the other thing, and finally they died. The circumstances overwhelmed them. If you are continually focused on circumstances, you’re defeated right now. Get your eyes off of yourself and off your circumstances.
How can you actually be crucified to the world and the world crucified to you when the egocentric nature of man makes him so extremely selfish that his interests and objectives, his feelings, his problems and circumstances are the only thing he is going to battle over. If that’s all you’re going to do, God will see to it that you always have a problem. I’ve noticed that if you don’t have any problems when you come into this Walk, God will soon give you a set. Why? Just to see if you’re going to be bogged down by the problems or if you are going to get your eye on the prophecies and on the vision.
You can be either a very earth-locked individual or you can be a Kingdom-oriented individual. We have the promise, “Seek first the Kingdom, then the other things will be added” (Matthew 6:33). When will we learn it? Seek and cry and pray. There isn’t anything as important right now as the coming forth of the apostolic company. “Oh yes,” you say, “but I have a big problem—a great big one.” It is still not as important. The steps of the Kingdom are more important than anyone of us individually.
The problems of despondency and depression are born of the fact that you’re too focused on yourself. If Paul had been focused on himself, he wouldn’t have expressed himself as he did in II Corinthians 11:16–30, where he is telling about all the hardships he had endured: the shipwrecks, the beatings, the imprisonments (all in all, there is a long list); but that was not the real issue. Notice how often he uses the words “foolish” and “foolishness.” He is saying, “I am speaking like a fool. In fact, I shouldn’t even be talking about these experiences.” He wasn’t constantly lamenting about the hardships and problems he was going through. He seemed to be rather embarrassed even to be speaking about them at all. That’s the way we should feel about it.
I think we still have a long ways to go. But we could make it with just one step. It doesn’t have to take a long time. It doesn’t mean we have to travel over a lot of ground. Just take one step. Just get out of yourselves and into this business of interceding and praying for the Kingdom of God to come forth.
When the Lord taught us to pray, He emphasized, “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Very little of the Lord’s Prayer is focused on the self-life—only two petitions: “Give us our daily bread” and “Deliver us from the evil one.” The important thing is the prayer for the Kingdom. “Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” Bring it forth, Lord. If we would take this to heart in our intercession, in continually crying unto the Lord, I just wonder what could happen. And how fast it could happen!
Don’t you often have the feeling, “Lord, I know there’s something wrong. And I know it isn’t with You. I’ve been looking around, and I’m practically persuaded that there isn’t anyone else responsible, Lord.”
The intercession will be continuing every day, every hour. It’s not going to waver for one moment. By the grace of God, we’ll be praying and believing and prophesying morning, noon, and night. This is very necessary. No matter what you’re going through personally, don’t despair or be discouraged. Don’t allow any evaluation by your own reasoning of your personal circumstances in life to interfere with what God has revealed about His Kingdom and about your place in it.
You may say, “The Kingdom is rather vague, but my problems are very real.” You would be surprised if you realized how illusionary and deceptive your problems are. The only real thing that is standing now is what God had brought forth in the Word. Look back to the time you’ve been in this Walk, and you will see how your own affairs have always been illusionary, without the reality and substance they should have had. The only real thing was what God said, what God established. The minute you forsook that, you forsook your own welfare. Then you floundered. So let’s come back to the reality of what God has said. This could become the world-wide tide that sweeps over the whole earth with this marvelous Living Word. We could be right on the threshold of the Parousia. I wonder if we realize our importance in it. We could bring back the King.