There is a necessity for us to have a great deal of faith in our relationships. What is jealousy except an uncertainty about your relationship, a lack of trust, and so forth. What do you call it when you are thinking two different emotions at one time, when your heart is filled with one thing and yet another? It is called ambivalence. Paul talked about that in Romans 7 when he said that while he was feeling one thing, something else was warring in him too. So he found himself hindered from the pure thing that he wanted to do with all of his heart because there were other things that entered in.
We are finding that there is a purity coming to the way that we love each other, the way that we believe for each other, the way that we really trust. Even if there appears to be neglect of one another, it does not affect us, because we trust our love for one another. There is an old story about a man who said, “Well, you know I love you. You know that I did all of these things for you all through these years”, and he named a lot of wonderful things that he had done. But his wife said, “Yes, but what have you done for me lately?” She was upset because she felt there had to be something being done in order for her to trust the relationship. That shouldn’t be with us.
The reason I said all of that is because I want to go into a chapter in the Bible that has become so real to me. The Lord laid a certain chapter on my heart and said, “This is going to be for you, and it is going to be for the people.” I set it aside for awhile. Afterwards I went into a very discouraging day and there didn’t seem to be any reason for it. I was assaulted in my mind with all kinds of fears, almost like a psychic assault, and yet when I got ahold of this chapter finally, it all disappeared. When I recalled that chapter and went back and read it, I wished I had read it before! It would have been the solution to a lot of things that I went through that I didn’t have to go through.
Have you ever gone through things and afterwards said, “I don’t think that was necessary. I don’t believe it was really necessary for me to go through that.” There is a way, as this chapter reveals, for us to look at the positive promises of God and claim them; and the failure to claim them lets us walk in a lot more trouble than we need.
Faith has two parts to it Faith has something that reaches out and accepts the Word of God, but faith also has something where, because you believe the Word, you rise up and refuse everything negative that comes to you. The power to reject is as great as the power to accept.
The Scripture says, “You submit yourselves to the Lord, then you resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). So there is a submission to God. But then there is that which reaches out and says, “I am absolutely going to reject everything that is negative or satanic that comes into my life.” I think that Christians are sometimes brought into an attitude of, “Well, you’ve got to tolerate things. You’ve got to just accept things as they come.” And I think that a lot of believers all over the world—this is true everywhere, in every denomination—try to accept things that they should fight and they should reject.
For instance, suppose a young couple find themselves arguing over little things. They could accept the relationship that God has brought and the blessing He has brought and reject the little momentary, insignificant things—just totally reject them—and they would be of no significance. A lot of problems would never have any place in our thinking if we refused them. The next time the Lord lays a Scripture on your heart, read it, because the Lord reveals something to you that you are going to need; and you will have to prove it.
Isaiah 61 is probably one of the most significant chapters in the book of Isaiah. That chapter and Isaiah 53, I think, are uppermost. Isaiah 53 talks about Christ being the Lamb led to the slaughter and carrying all of our iniquities. But Isaiah 61 is the first prophecy by the Lord Jesus Christ when He stood up to preach in the synagogue at Nazareth. In Luke 4:18–19, the Lord quoted this very chapter. Then He closed the scroll and gave it back to the head of the synagogue, and He said, “This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears” (verse 21). But He had read only a small portion of it. Here is what He read.
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives, and freedom to prisoners; to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord … But He stopped before reading, … and the day of vengeance of our God. Isaiah 61:1–2a.
He stopped with that one prophecy: “To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.” And of course, what that meant was that the ministry of Christ started in the Year of Jubilee. And that favorable year of the Lord was the time in which the captives would go free. According to Old Testament Law, every fifty years all debts were canceled. Those who had been taken into bondage because of debts suddenly found that they were liberated. If they had had to sell the family property that had first been theirs in the division of Canaan, it came back to the family at that time. Real estate had a value according to how close you were to the Year of Jubilee. If it was only two years away, you would not pay a big price for property that you were going to give back in two years. So the favorable year of the Lord was the year in which they would blow the trumpets, and in that fiftieth year every debt was canceled (Leviticus 25:9–55).
Now the Lord said, “This is the time. This is the time that this Scripture is being fulfilled.” He said, “This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears. You are going to go free. If you’re indebted, afflicted, oppressed, or in prison, everything is going to be canceled.” That was good news.
This prophecy was written between seven and eight hundred years before Christ. Like a lot of things in prophecy, a prophet in the Old Testament did not seem to see in three dimensions. When a man sees something, he normally sees it in three dimensions. That is what has made the movies of our time so tricky; they can put up a backdrop that is only a few feet away, but when you see it, in your imagination you feel, “That’s a very distant mountain that I’m looking at.” And all it is is a screen set very close to the camera.
But you see, the prophets had the opposite picture. They saw everything as though it were all there at one time; and they were not able to distinguish that there might be a thousand year valley between the first mountain that they saw and the second mountain that they saw. That is why within a verse or two, several thousand years may be in that prophecy; and yet the fulfillment of part of it will come at one time, and the fulfillment of another part of it may be reserved for a distant time.
This is exactly what this prophecy was doing. Christ was saying, “This day this Scripture is fulfilled in your ears,” and He cut it off right there. He did not say, “The day of vengeance of our God,” and He did not go on to talk about the great things that we have found to become more real. We are talking now about a 2,000 year distance between the first things that Isaiah saw and the things that he saw for now.
The thing that made this chapter so real to me is that the Lord spoke to my heart, “These verses that you read are for you now. There has been a fulfillment of the other verses, but now these verses are for you and for the people.” The others are still true—we still find that He binds up the brokenhearted and He proclaims liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners—but now we are coming into the day of the vengeance of our God.
Isaiah 61 goes on to talk about what God was going to do for His people. I want to take just certain phrases from this chapter that became so real to me, and I would like for you to get ahold of them too. If you are into intercession and you are into praying for things to come to pass and you want to see action, you are going to have to have these positive things that God is going to do for you. Don’t say, “Oh, the battle is so bad, and I’m depressed—how long is this going to last?” You’ve got to believe that we are in a day when there are some very positive promises which God says are going to work for you; and that is going to have to really be in your thinking.
These following phrases, taken from Isaiah 61:3–9, are the ones the Lord made so real as being what we are going to experience ourselves, now.
Giving them a garland instead of ashes. Have you ever felt like you were burned out, like you were just a bunch of ashes? You are going to have a crown instead of ashes.
The oil of gladness instead of mourning. Do you like that? How do you like this next one?
The mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting. That spirit of fainting comes; depression hits you. All right, let’s go on down the line.
They will raise up the former devastations. Is that word “devastation” familiar to you? God is going to heal the people who have gone through these devastations in their lives. I believe it. I just see something positive. Instead of talking about the negative, let’s take the promise that there is going to be some action that we can have from the Lord.
You will be called the priests of the Lord. You know, we miss a great deal if we try to get into intercession instead of entering into it as a priest of God. Some of the most effective priests in the world were men like Samuel, who could hew Agag to pieces, the conquered king who was such a vicious enemy of Israel (I Samuel 15:32–33). Yet Samuel was a priest before the face of the Lord. To be a priest means that, first of all, you stand in His presence. We don’t fight flesh and blood (Ephesians 6:12), but in the day of vengeance of our God we stand as the priests of the Lord. It is the day of vengeance of our God. It is His vengeance; it is not ours.
You will be spoken of as ministers of our God. I have known decades of the ministry in which I was fairly well thought of. Then I have had times in which, for no reason at all, people would twist and pervert almost everything that I would say or do. I have had the persecutions. And this next promise became real to me.
Instead of your shame you will have a double portion. God takes away the time of persecution from you, and He takes away the time in which you feel that you are downcast, downtrodden. That is going to end. We are going to stand up. We don’t have to be shamed, and humiliated, and considered offscouring. There is going to be a time in which God will vindicate us by giving us a double portion of blessing, a double portion of His Spirit.
Instead of humiliation they will shout for joy over their portion. I don’t think that there are too many people in this world right now who are shouting for joy over what they are getting. Are you shouting for joy over your portion? Well, I haven’t heard the shouts for joy yet.
Therefore they will possess a double portion in their land. Now, this became real: I am not going to be robbed of the blessing and the anointing of the Lord, because really the opposite is taking place. The anointing on the Word is greater than ever before—the way the people are led into the creativity of God. Things are being imparted to them.
I want this to be real to you. Don’t put yourself down just because the enemy puts you down. Satan is called “the accuser of the brethren” (Revelation 12:10). But where he makes his biggest progress would not be if he could accuse me to you so that you believe his accusations against me. That is not the deadly thing. The deadly thing is when he accuses you and you believe it and go into self-condemnation, and you find that you have no faith anymore to lift up your head and say, “I’m a child of God.”
Maybe there was a humiliation that you went through. Maybe you lost your job; or maybe they persecute you at your place of work. Or you find that there is something that is of a wrong, satanic, negative spirit constantly coming against you. There has to be that time in which you say, “I am going to have a double portion. God is going to bring me through.”
David said, I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Psalm 27:13, KJV. “If I didn’t believe that this was going to come out all right and I was going to see the goodness of God in it,” he said, “I would have fainted. I wouldn’t have been able to go through it if I just thought I had to endure from day to day. But I believed by faith that there was going to be an outcome down here where I was going to have a double portion.”
I think some people miss the great blessings of their life because they give them up. They don’t insist upon them. They don’t take them as promises of God and claim that they are going to have them.
Isaiah 61:9 goes on to say: Then their offspring will be known among the nations. We have been talking about this third generation—watching the fathers and the sons and the grandchildren all begin to move in wonderful blessings of the Lord. That is a fairly recent development within just the last few years where we have watched that blessing begin to come. Always before we watched the enemy try to tear up families, and he did a pretty good job of it many times. But we are going to see something else happen. We are going to find blessings that are tremendous. A man will be blessed to a thousand generations because he trusts God. We are going to see something else happen. I believe that, because I believe that in this great family of the Lord where the Lord has made me a spiritual father, I am really seeing the blessings of the Lord come upon them as never before. I am seeing blessings that are just unbelievable.
All who see them will recognize them because they are the offspring whom the Lord has blessed. Your children do not have to be victims of this age. It doesn’t have to be that you send them off to school and know that pretty soon they are going to be sucked in to the life and the spiritual level of the people round about them. No, you can control that; you can bring a real blessing.
I know that this is not a promise that many people have claimed, because parents have almost accepted the fact that there is going to be contention and division in their home, and that their children are not going to walk with God or be blessed by God too much. But there are a lot of us who are believing that these promises of God are so valid that God will deal with our children, and the things that have been ministered to them will still bear fruit and will still come forth in the name of the Lord.
There is so much in this chapter that the Lord is teaching us. Don’t be negative; look for a double portion. Don’t draw back. Determine that you will read this chapter through every time you feel that there is a spiritual assault coming against you, or whenever problems begin to weigh in your mind and your heart. Just commit them to the Lord and read this.
Our faith will determine what the facts of the future will be. The outcome is going to be according to your faith. That is what the Lord said to a number of people. Someone would come and ask Him for something, and He would say, “According to your faith be it unto you.” In other words, if you believe it, that is what you are going to get. If you have faith for it, it is going to come out right (Matthew 9:27–29, 22; 8:5–10, 13). Have a little more faith.
Troubles can be as big as a mountain, but faith can remove that mountain (Matthew 17:20). It first removes it because it anticipates the blessing. And mountains have a way of shrinking when they are confronted with the earthquakes of faith. Let your faith rumble and praise before God. Let your faith just stand in the promises of God.
I know that this is a heavy chapter, and some of the phrases that you read in it seem to be a little ambiguous; and you say, “Can we really apply them?” But I think we can. I think that God is going to enable us to do a lot of things. I don’t think that He intends for our life to end in decay. You see, Romans 8 talks about futility. All creation is subject to futility, or corruption, or some translations read “decay” (Romans 8:20–21). That is the history of everything.
The Hawaiian Islands were once a lot bigger than they are now. According to geologists, adjacent islands were at one time a single volcanic land mass, but eventually they sank back into the sea to become separate islands. Of course, we won’t see them sink much in our time, maybe a quarter of an inch at most, but everything tends to shrink and decay. Many of the great mountain ranges have changed; upheavals have come. You can go into some of the highest mountains and find petrified seashells in the rocks, and you know that they were once under the ocean. At other places you can observe that mountains have sunk into the sea.
Everything changes. And in our thinking we begin to accept the fact that everything in our life is going to gradually deteriorate. I am going to reverse my thinking. I’m determined that I am going to have the life and strength of the Lord, and walk in that. The aging process comes against us, but we have got to believe that God is going to change that. There were men in the Bible who believed to do that. Look at Caleb and Joshua. Caleb was eighty-five years old when he went in and conquered the Anakim and the giants, the nephilim of the time that had resisted the children of God for years. Those were the giants who had bluffed them out in the first place (Numbers 13:21–33). So when he went back after forty years of wandering, he said, “Give me that mountain, because I am as strong today as I was forty years ago and I am able to go in” (Joshua 14:6–13). He had refused the process of deterioration. He refused to accept that day by day we deteriorate a little bit more. He said, “I’m as strong now as I was then.” His eye was not dim nor his natural force abated, and he said, “I’m going to go in and do it.”
There has to be a faith for this, though. If you submit to the course of life, it is one of futility. You just automatically begin to think about death and destruction and disease, and everybody tells you that these things are going to kill you. They say, “Well, life itself is terminal.” The experts say that everybody has a certain life expectancy; they make charts of it. You can expect to live just so long and then you are going to die. And so, there is a futility on people’s thinking. We have to reverse that, because if we believe that the Lord is life, “he that believeth on Me shall never die” (John 11:25–26). There has to be some kind of life expectancy in us instead of death expectancy. There has to be the positive victory that we anticipate, instead of coexisting with a state of semidefeat, limping along, hindered, prevented from doing the will of the Lord.
This chapter becomes real to us because we have been in this kind of battle for some time. We are going to believe God for the positive thing. We don’t want to be given over to the negative; we want to live in the positive and break through. You will have just as much faith as you decide to have. If you make the decision that you are going to have faith, that is what you will have. If you decide to believe the Word of God, that is what you will believe. It is so easy in a moment of spiritual attack to listen to the fears of the enemy instead of going back over hundreds and hundreds of prophecies and proclamations and prayers and intercession which have come proclaiming release, proclaiming healing. Which are you going to believe? You have to believe something. Either you will believe the faith in God or you will believe the negative and give yourself over to it.
Open your heart to be more positive. Don’t be filled with unbelief. Don’t be fearful. Believe for the best to happen. Even when it seems like things are going wrong, believe, “These things are going to be turned around for my glory, for my blessing. And I’m going to have a double portion.” Finally we are getting ahold of it: “Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads” (Isaiah 51:11, 61:7). There is so much to believe for that it far overwhelms anything we have to be fearful over.
It’s the thing of hitting the Lord under the eye—you just change the facts. With the woman who came to the unjust judge there wasn’t a fear or an intimidation, but there was a faith that stepped out and said, “I’m going to change the facts” (Luke 18:1–8). And this is what is happening; we are changing the facts that have to be changed within our thinking. This is the thing of faith that we keep touching on that we have to see happen. Our thinking just has to change on it.
It is the authority of the Lord that rests upon us, because it is a provision. Things can go along as they are, and until there is a faith that changes the course of how things go, they continue to go that way. It’s like God keeps saying, “Well, here is the provision. Are you going to believe it? It is already there, it has already been spoken; but you have to go in, and you take it, you lay hold of it.” Joshua and Caleb refused to let go—there was a decision. We keep going back to this thing of a decision that happens in our heart.
Faith changes the facts; and that is the truth, that is the facts. When the Lord asked the disciples, “Where could we get bread for all these to eat?” they said, “Well, there’s a young boy here with some loaves and fishes. What are they among so many?” That was the fact. That’s what it was; but faith with the blessing changed it. And the fact became twelve basketfuls of untouched fish and bread (John 6:3–13). That’s what became the fact.
You can take a little and say, “This is the fact.” No, the fact is changed by the promises of God. Doesn’t that make sense? How many things were like that? David said, “My cup runneth over” (Psalm 23:5). You give and you believe God and it is given back, heaped up, shaken down, running over (Luke 6:38). You get into your faith, and your obedience to God opens the door to the facts actually changing. They become something different. You change the facts by your faith. Faith determines the facts, what will be.
We ought to do more studying on this in the Scriptures, because there are so many miracles where it starts one way and it ends another. A widow, whose husband had been a prophet and died, was going to see her sons sold into slavery for debts. So she went to Elisha the prophet, and he said, “This is what you do. What do you have?” She said, “Just one little cruse,” just a little bottle of oil that they would use for cooking. So he said, “Well, go borrow all the vessels that you can, shut the door, and start pouring into those vessels.” So she borrowed all the vessels; the Scripture says, “vessels not a few.” She brought them in, and that little cruse of oil never stopped pouring until every one of those vessels was filled. Then she came back to the prophet and said, “Now what do I do?” He said, “Well, go sell it on the market, get the money, pay off the debts, and live on the rest of it” (II Kings 4:1–7). So that was one wealthy widow.
What were the facts? One cruse of oil—or all the debts paid, the sons saved from slavery, a wealthy widow to live on the rest? What were the facts and how were they determined? They were determined by faith. You can go to miracle after miracle in the Scriptures. A miracle, very simply expressed, is nothing more than that you believe a promise of God, and what looks like a fact becomes what your faith declares it to be.
We are learning how to break through that impasse of satanic heaviness that comes to convince us that there is no way we can change the facts. But when we see that, we are getting faster and faster at recognizing that it is an illusion. The enemy says, “Oh, but this is unchangeable.” And our faith is sparking into that action where we are identifying it and saying, “Of course we can change that,” because our faith can change anything.
We just changed future things. We determine the future that we are going to walk in. And we are going to see it. These are not going to be facts that are a fantasy. They will be facts that are real. Our faith brings them to be reality. I don’t want promises that are a fantasy; I want a faith that makes the promises a fact. That is where we are tight now. That is what we are doing. We are declaring it into being. I tell you, we had better be alert that what we say is what is going to be.
There are so many things that we are going to do. But one thing we are not going to do: in spirit we are never going to be separated. We are determined in this. I tell you, what a battle we have been in! But we initiated it; we determined that the war would be over the Word. We knew it, and we are doing it. Oh, we just take this day of liberty, of captives set free.