He
said, “Thus says the Lord,
‘Make this valley full of
trenches.’ For thus says the Lord,
‘You shall not see wind nor shall you see
rain; yet that valley shall be filled
with water, so that you shall drink, both
you and your cattle and your beasts. II
Kings 3:16-17
We
are always looking to better understand the
relationship of faith to results. In the
natural mind, this relationship is measured
in terms of “cause / effect.” This is where
we see faith as “causing” whatever it is
believed for to come to pass. But it is
precisely here that our understanding of
faith is in error.
In
the original article on entering
the work of faith, we drilled
down to clarify that faith is not about our
work, but rather our entering into what God
has said He will do or wants to do. We
strove to clarify that entering the work of
faith is not about entering into a
“contract” with God such that “if we
believe such and such, God will do so and
so.” It is not in any sense where
faith “purchases” God’s action as under a
reciprocal “contract” for performance. Faith
is not a “commodity” of “quantity” such that
you can “use” it to “make a purchase” of
God’s performance as long as “you have
enough of it.” (This is what Simon the
Sorcerer thought faith was about.)
Again,
faith is not a “cause,” a “contract” or a
“commodity”—thoughts which are inseparable,
belong to the natural mind and which
actually convert faith to a form of sorcery
through superstitious incantation and
action.
Instead
we talked about how the work of faith is
entering into God’s own work on
terms of unilateral covenantal promise.
Here, God says and shows what He wants
to do by way of promise for our lives,
and then drafts us into His promise by
faith, beyond our capacity to willingly
enter it or even know what we are getting
into. (This is called “election.”) God
beneficently chose us for this life of
promise; we did not choose Him and therefore
certainly cannot “work” to earn His promise.
This is what Paul was all about in Romans 4,
and we saw this through the illustration of
the “Lord and the babe” in Ezekiel 16.
The
Preparatory Nature of Faithful Response
So
far so good, by way of brief review. What I
want to do today is further harness our
understanding of faith to the concept of “preparation.”
Understanding the preparatory nature of
faith relative to the results we are hoping
for can help further dispel the false notion
of faith in terms of “cause,” “contract” and
“commodity.”
Faith
is our part in the divine promissory
covenant. As our part, faith does
require responses and actions. This is
where the genuine aspect of our work comes
in: “Faith without works is dead.”
It’s just we have to understand that
whatever it is we are “supposed to do” in
“responsive work” to what God has said He
will do, does not “cause” God to do what He
has said He will do. Faith does not “make
things happen.”
The
concept of preparation goes the mile to show
us what our “work” is and is not inside the
faith covenant. When God says what He wants
to do by promise, we enter a response that
proves our faith by taking preparatory
action. Such action shows we are
serious about our faith, while acknowledging
that our response is not what causes God to
do anything and makes nothing happen.
-
Illustrating
Preparatory Response
The
verses quoted today come from the story of
the Three Kings versus Moab. Three kings are
going to war against Moab but get stuck in
the desert where they run out of water. They
are now “sitting ducks” for the Moabite
army. They come to Elisha for help. Elisha’s
prophecy tells them what God will do to save
them by bringing water. But for this water
to be usable, they have to prepare
for it by digging trenches that will hold
the water when it comes.
The
key command here is “Make this valley
full of trenches.” See how this
command satisfies the two qualifications
that must characterize faith. One, there
must be a responsive work, but two, that
work cannot be seen as the cause for
effect, a contract for performance, or a
commodity for purchase. Do we clearly
get this?
So
they dig the trenches. The water comes to
the surface. They are saved. And not only
because they got water to drink, but God
used the reflections of the sun off the
water as blood to then fool and entice the
Moabite army into their own unprepared
destruction at the hands of the three kings!
That part of the result was not revealed
in the prophecy and was totally beyond
expectation! It falls into the
category of “beyond what we can ask or
think.” The kings just thought they would
get the water needed to sustain them for
proceeding forward according to their
strategy. But God did them one better.
See
then what the digging of trenches did and
did not do. The trenches did not cause the
water to come. But the trenches did make the
water usable when it did come. If they had
not dug the trenches in responsive
preparation, the water would have come, but
it would have done them little or no good.
It would not have been in a containable form
for drinking.
The
preparatory nature of the work of faith
within the covenant is seen in other
stories. Take Noah for example. God said
what he was going to do. He would send a
flood and save Noah. But Noah had to respond
by preparatory work in building the ark.
Noah’s work in building the ark had nothing
to do with causing the flood. That should be
obvious. Yet as a required responsive work,
if Noah had not built the ark, the rain
would have come just the same, and neither
he nor anyone would have been spared.
Throughout
scripture are stories of promise by God
connected to commands for preparatory action
ahead of whatever has been promised.
Remembering
the Word of Faith Movement
The
Word of Faith Movement of the 1970s-1980s is
fast fading in the rearview mirror of church
history. We are now a full generation out
from that movement at its peak. But for
those who remember this movement and its
teaching (especially if one was damaged by
it), it’s important to put that movement
into proper perspective through the lens of
what we are teaching here.
As
noble as was the idea of building up people
in faith and in evicting a dead fatalistic
concept of faith, the Word of Faith Movement
foundationally erred by its failure to
understand faith in terms of unilateral
covenantal promise and preparatory
responsive work to the revealed promise and
will of God.
Faith
instead was taught in terms of the
three-fold carnal concept we have exposed in
this article. It was taught as a cause for
effect, a contract for performance, and a
commodity for purchase—all unhinged from any
discovery of God’s promise within the
context of sovereign unilateral covenant.
Promise itself was taught as a commodity to
be claimed apart from any concept of
revealed divine will (hence the term “name
it and claim it.”). People were taught
instead to “write your own ticket with
God.” But you don’t write your
own ticket with God! He writes His ticket
with you, and you find out what it is and
act in preparatory accord with it!
It
is because of this error that the faith
movement became an enterprise of sorcery
under contract, bringing condemnation down
on those whose faith could not “produce the
results.” One was at fault because he did
not “work hard enough” by way of
“confession” or because he did not have
“enough” faith as a commodity by which to
“purchase” the divine result. And it was
these errors combined with the self-centered
focus on the purpose of faith that brought
this movement into such great disrepute and
final ignominy.
Practical
Applications
Understanding
faith only as a preparatory response to
God’s revealed promise remains a challenge
for all who still take active faith
seriously and who reject dead que sera
sera “faith.” It is a challenge
because we are so desirous to see God’s
personal promises fulfilled, and we so much
want to be at the vanguard of whatever is
necessary to facilitate God’s movement in
bringing about those fulfilments. We
are neither fatalists nor quitters when it
comes to unfulfilled faith. We will do
whatever it takes to be in the place we need
to be to receive God’s blessing. We have the
rightful attitude, “I will not let you go
til You bless me.”
Being
of that mind, it is critical we get
engrained into us the preparatory nature of
everything we do by faith so that we don't
succumb to the spirit of cause, contract and
commodity. All obedience is preparatory only
to receiving God’s promises.
We
don’t know God’s ultimate plan for how He
wants to accomplish what He has said He
wants to make of us and do with us. We don’t
know how long it will take or how many
processes we will have to pass through
before His fulfilment comes. What we can say
for sure is that a great objective of those
processes is to get us to the point of
understanding the preparatory-only nature of
our obedience. A lot of these processes are
just to get it through our thick souls that
obedience is not what causes, earns or
purchases the fulfilment of God’s revealed
promises of life blessing.
The
responses we offer in obedience to God’s
promises do not turn God’s hand, but are preparing
us to become equal to the magnitude of
what God has promised He will do. The fact
is we are never equal to what God has
promised at first hearing. And maybe not
even at second or third or fourth hearing.
As we hear, we act and obey, and we expect.
But our expectation has to be crucified
because it is tied to the erroneous concepts
of cause, contract and commodity we have
already identified.
Everything
God will do to fulfil His promises must be beyond
expectation. We must be brought to the
place in faith where we can only expect
the unexpectable. And this is why.
Human expectation is always tied to the
false sorceric idea of faith, and must be
put to death. Undergoing that death is what
eventually makes us equal to responsibly and
safely receive what God has promised. (For
more on this, please see the in-depth series
“God’s
Promises to the Hidden Man.”)
Knowledge
Is Power?
Part
of going through the process of being made
equal to receiving God’s promises is the
need for education. There is a lot we have
to learn about a lot of things. When we
first receive God’s promises, we are
ignorant in comparison to what we will need
to know and understand to rightly steward
God’s promise when He is ready to fulfil it
in our lives.
Joseph
was totally ignorant of what he would have
to someday know of Egypt’s court system in
order to receive the promise that his family
would one day bow down to him. He had to go
to the “University of Egyptian
Incarceration” where he would gain all the
training needed to make him equal to
stewarding the Egyptian economy under
famine. (Today, some of God’s people are
being trained similarly under God’s promise
to deliver us from this wicked commercial
beast system.)
While
Joseph was incarcerated, he would have been
seeking whatever understanding and learning
was necessary to get him out of that prison!
He would have studied, studied, studied. But
not until he learned everything God knew he
needed to know would God actually
precipitate the situation to free him.
Knowledge alone would never have been enough
to spring Joseph from his prison. Knowledge
could never substitute for what only God
could do.
Today
a mantra throughout the entrepreneurial
world says that “knowledge is power.” Gurus
promising wealth and freedom in business
continually parrot this mantra. Some go
further to a little more correctly state
that only “knowledge rightly applied is
power.” To ascribe power to knowledge
is however the root concept underlying
witchcraft.
Nevertheless,
hoards of believers in the entrepreneurial
dream do all they can to soak up knowledge
from such wizards to the tune of thousands
and thousands of dollars in quest of the
elusive dream that never comes to pass. All
their knowledge brings them no more power
than they had before they started the quest,
no matter how wisely and faithfully studied
and applied the formulas for success.
Believers
in Christ who feel they have an edge in
faith and who have heard God’s promise of
freedom and deliverance similarly pursue
this knowledge. And God may indeed lead them
to do so as Joseph had to. Some of them
mistakenly buy into the mantra that
knowledge is power. Others know better, yet
for all their faithfulness to the Lord in
what they are pursuing, still never find
their education produces that elusive
deliverance and promise, whether for a home
business, or some successful vein of
ministry, or the knowledge to get well from
some disease, or some other enterprise
altogether.
Why
is this? It is because being a believer in
God’s promises plus improving your education
is not what gives you the power to realize
fulfilment of God’s promise! Knowledge,
while necessary, is not
power. And knowledge mixed with faith in
God’s promises is also not
power!
No.
Rather, the faithful acquiring of knowledge
in response to God’s promises is only preparation.
But the power is only in God’s
readiness to do what God has
said and promised that God alone will
do with your life to bring you
to that place of deliverance, freedom and
fulfilment of promised purpose.
No
matter how much we study and learn about
whatever in our quest to realize the
fulfilment of God’s promise, whether
spiritual or natural, we must realize that
knowledge is not power to
realize the fulfilment of what God alone has
promised and alone can do in your life.
Knowledge is preparation only
for what God alone will do to fulfil His
promise to you.
Spirit-led
Preparation
Grasping
the concept of faith as preparation opens up
another question. Once we receive a promise
from God for our lives, and he gives no
guiding word or command for preparatory
action, then what kind of preparation is
required? How much? Just what exactly do I
need to do to prove my faith in the promise?
Offering
a responsive work of preparation to what God
has promised often is not easy. Sometimes a)
God may not have told us how we need to
respond to what is otherwise an impossible
promise, or b) we may know what needs to be
done, but are not sure exactly how to carry
it out to what degree and in what
timing. So let’s talk about this.
-
A
Look at Mary
First,
we may not know what to do in faith because
what God has told our hearts is just so far
beyond possible that there is nothing we
could think of to do to respond in
preparation.
Mary
is a good example of this. She received the
impossible promise of having a baby without
knowing a man, and at that the Son of God!
And there is nothing God told her to do as a
preparatory act of faith.
In
response, all Mary could say was “be it
to me according to Your Word.” She
believed in heart, there was no preparatory
action to take, and all she could do was to
wait, and then adapt to life as her body
began to change.
It’s
important to note that faith says here, “be
it to me according to Your Word,” not
the fatalistic “if it be Thy will”
oft spoken in prayers. There is a huge
difference. Mary’s response actively
embraces a revealed impossible purpose of
the Lord. The fatalistic response does not
really believe anything. (And that fatalism
is what the Word of Faith Movement, to its
credit, was raised up to combat.) It is a
dead response.
-
Called
to Peru?
Second,
we may know what needs to be done in
response to what God has said He will do,
but there are too many questions about
exactly how, when, and what our part is in
that.
Let’s
say the Lord tells a young anglo North
American believer who is a third year
business major in secular university, “I
will make you a teacher of many disciples
in nearing days to come, and you will feed
my sheep in the jungles of Peru.” And
there is no other command of preparation
given.
Well,
depending on what this believer already
knows about the teaching ministry, the
Spanish language or the land of Peru, he
will have questions about what he is
supposed to do in faithful preparation for
this call. Does he quit university to go to
Bible school? Does he change majors to learn
Spanish? Is he supposed to study up on Peru,
and even maybe make a trip there? Just what
is He supposed to do, when, and how?
In
this case, whatever faithful responsive
action the believer is to undertake must be
informed by the Holy Spirit Himself. It is
not for the young man to just suddenly up
and make any one of these life changing
decisions.
The
preparatory response to God’s promise must
itself always be a cooperative partnering
work of faith through ongoing revelation.
All faithful action to any word of promise
must be imparted by the leading, guiding and
further directing of the Holy Spirit. And
this is to be worked out like anything else.
It is what our lives in Christ are all
about.
God’s
life promises are always about an ongoing
unfolding revelation of purpose requiring
preparatory faithful responsive action until
He is ready to do whatever He is finally
going to do beyond our expectation in
life—no matter how many years, decades or
generations it may take before He is ready.
We just have to walk the process out over
whatever lifetime period that takes. At
points He will whisper to us new things that
have to be undertaken. Other times He will
just say “keep doing what you are doing.”
The faith is ultimately always demonstrated
in our responsiveness directly to Him at
every turn.
&&&&&&&&&&
In
all then, may this look at the preparatory
nature of the work of faith help seal us in
faith’s true nature, and deliver us from the
counterfeit “faith” of cause, contract and
commodity based in human knowledge and
effort that so easily besets and cripples
our relationship to what God alone by
promise can do in us, through us and for us.
Love
to all the Worshipping Priesthood,
