Faith and Hope How to use hope and faith together and the grace of God

Welcome to episode 127, In the Beginning Was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Spending time in the Word of God is the best way to spend time with God. Welcome to No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast, where we will encourage, inspire, and empower you to live your best life in Christ. Here's Greg.

Welcome to episode 127. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I am going to turn the page on all this childlike faith. We've been talking about faith, and I want to turn it because we kind of got an idea— I hope we got an idea what faith is. And, and the reason I'm trying to turn it is I think we could go on talking about faith for probably a month and still not get a hold of it. So I— and to keep this into 10-minute increments and to finish by the end of the week on faith and hope, I need to start talking about hope and kind of the picture that I have of hope. And to do that, I've got to use an analogy, and I'm not sure that's the right word, but what I want to do is I want to use a thermostat to picture hope. And you know, we've talked about hope before as being your imagination, and, and I want to keep that picture in our mind the eyes of our heart and the ears of our heart, and to be able to picture, use our imagination. We're going to come back to that picture, but right now, just to kind of solidify what hope is, I want to kind of give a working example of how hope and faith work together. And again, I use the salt as sodium chloride. The two elements by themselves are poisonous to us, but put them together and it's an essential nutrient. That we need, or an element that we need in our daily lives. So, you know, faith and hope is something that have to— they got to work together. And so too, so do grace and faith. The whole word of God, you know, humility and love, all of these things have to work together. So to say that, oh, I got this faith and hope thing figured out, but you have no love, you're sounding brass and clanging cymbals. You're just making noise. Let's get back into hope. And as in the thermostat analogy, I want you to picture your thermostat. And if you're here in America, you probably have central heat and air, and you, you regulate that. The, the system, the heat and air system, it's called an HVAC down here where I'm from. But that system is regulated by a thermostat. The thermostat calls for the heat or the air, and it's got to be switched. If you're in the summer and you've got that thing switched to heat, that's probably the wrong setting in the summer here in Louisiana. You probably need to make sure that your setting is correct and that's dialed in, and we'll— we can kind of get into that. But I just— I don't want to start getting in the weeds of this. I want you to see the picture of this thermostat controlling the AC, and without the thermostat, the AC is just going to sit there because it has nothing telling it to come on or to turn off. So the AC unit or the heating unit needs the thermostat to regulate, to tell it to turn on or turn off. And the thermostat, if it's just stuck on the wall and it's not wired to anything, you can have a— you can go buy a thermostat right now at Home Depot or Lowe's or any hardware store, and you can stick it on your wall. And you can even get one of those smart thermostats, you know, one that you can hook up to your smartphone, your iPhone, your Android, You can have one of those thermostats hooked on your wall, you can attach it to your wall, and you can get the app and download the app, and you can get your phone talking and the thermostat talking. But if that thermostat is not hooked to a central heat and air unit, it's not going to do you any good. All you're going to do is your phone and that thermostat's going to say, hey, I think I wanted 70 degrees in here, and the thermostat will say, well, here we go, we're going to get it to 70. But if it's not, if that thermostat isn't hooked to an air conditioning unit, if it's the summer and it's 90 outside, nothing's going to happen. So, okay, so now we got the thermostat and we got the AC. So now I want— hope is the thermostat and faith is your heating and air unit. So I, you got to get that idea. I want you to get that picture in your mind. And again, I want you to picture faith as being the promises of God. So we have to have the promises of God. We have to have faith in something, and it's the grace. So I mean, I guess we need to pull grace in here too. And grace is promises of God. All of God's grace is in the spirit realm waiting for you to access it. And if you really want— and you know, and I talked about having grace follow you around And in all honesty, it's probably inside of you right now because faith has been, you know, when you accepted Jesus Christ, you are saved by grace through faith. And maybe that bridge, you know, the faith bridge that we built way back in episode 104, 103, somewhere back in there, but that grace bridge or that faith bridge that walks into grace, what if grace is just inside your heart? What if grace is in your spirit? What if your spirit man is just full of all of these promises, and your faith is what you use to walk into your heart and go grab them things. You already have it. And a, a wonderful teaching by Andrew Wommack is You Already Have It. So his teaching on this is your spirit man is just like Christ, and I totally agree with that. When you were saved— and I've talked about that— when you were saved, your spirit man became just like Christ. It became 100% redeemed. It is a new creature, a new creation, and you are completely— your spirit man is completely saved, and it was sealed by the Holy Spirit. So what if your spirit man that was completely saved and is just like Christ, what if your spirit man has all of those promises inside? So it's just sitting there, a power-packed, Spirit-filled treasure chest of pro— the promises of God inside your body right now. One-third of you is packed with all of these promises and all of these things that God has given you at salvation. At the New Testament, when Christ died and when he rose from the dead on the third day, he took captivity captive. He got the keys of hell. He got all the keys from Satan He now has all power, all authority, and he has given that to you and I. That is the grace of God. So every promise in the word of God is yours to just dig into and to get. So we got to figure out how to get it, and that's where the faith— so we're gonna— we're not gonna talk about grace in this episode. And again, like I told you before, this is a huge topic, and to try to figure it out in 10 minutes is just laughable. But I want to try to keep on the idea of the— that hope is a thermometer and that faith is what we're telling hope to kick on and kick off. But you also need grace because the grace of God, that's the promises of God. You can't— I don't, I don't see anywhere in the Bible where grace gives you a lottery ticket, a winning lottery ticket. And so for you to pray— and I hate to burst your bubble— but for you to pray to win the lottery and think God is going to somehow hit you with his magic wand to win the lottery That's not the kingdom of God. That is not seed time and harvest. That's kind of instantaneous bow magic wand moment, and I don't read that in the Bible. So I hate to burst your bubble now, you've got just as many chances maybe as anyone else is winning a lottery, which are slim to none, but it is not in the Bible that you can pray, use your faith and hope, and get a winning lottery ticket. If you were wondering if I was going to chase a rabbit this episode, there you go. Well, I want to dig back in. We got faith and hope. We've got a thermostat and we've got the heat and air condition unit. And so hope is dialing in, it's finding one of those promises. Remember, we are looking at the promises of God. And so then we start getting our— we start focusing. And again, that's why I want to talk about that reading the Bible in 365 days. I'm not against reading the Bible. In fact, my whole podcast, everything I do is based on the word of God and you getting into it. But I don't want to teach you to read the Bible. My job, I think, here is to help you believe what you read. And to— in order to believe it, you have to start putting it in, and you have to start attacking one issue at a time. You can't be scattered. You can't have 15 things you're trying to get God to answer, or you're not going to get— you start chasing— let me tell you from personal experience, you start chasing 10 rabbits, you don't catch any. You You start going after one rabbit and you keep getting after that rabbit, sooner or later it's going to get tired and you're going to catch it. But I'm telling you, you've got, you got to take your eyes off of those 10 and focus on the one. And that's what we're going to do. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. So that is, you're hoping for something. And what are you hoping for? You're hoping for the promise of God. And faith is a substance. Faith is something— we're going to talk about the bridge again, but we're going to get into a promise of God. And when you start digging in, like, if you need finances, if your body is healthy and if you're walking through life and everything's going good physically, but you need to pay off debt— and that's kind of where I'm at, so that's why I'm talking. I'm talking to myself. Why would I be concentrating on getting my body healed, if my body is well, and I've been walking in healing for a long time, why would I concentrate on healing scriptures when what I need to do is get the debt paid off? I need to focus on what God's word says about prospering people. Everything your hand— you lay your hand to. And I need to get out some of the garbage thinking that I've got in my head. And I'm just telling you, you know, I wasn't raised in a wealthy environment, and most of what I've learned, I learned from my mom. She was a single parent for the first 5 years, and then after the 10th year, my stepdad came in and he helped, but you know, they both just went to work, and they just were both workers, and they paid the bills, and they lived paycheck to paycheck and had 4 boys. And if you've ever had 4 boys, you're going paycheck to paycheck, and 2 of these boys came from a previous marriage, and they were 10 or 12, when they got married, and then the other two came. And so now you've got kids. I think my mom raised kids for 40 years. So I mean, that, that will drain a pocketbook. So I'm not saying— but they, you know, and some of the thinking, because my mom grew up poor. I'm not sure about my dad and stepdad, you know, because I didn't really talk to them a whole lot about it. But I know my mom grew up picking cotton, or her sisters picked cotton, and she sat on the cotton bag. So I mean, they were kind of sharecroppers. I mean, we didn't come from a lot of money, so some of our thinking and some of my thinking comes from that. And so I've got to clear all that out, and I got to see what the Bible says about that thinking, and I've got to get into that word and say, hey, this isn't right, I need to get this out of me. And but it's just taking a minute because I haven't been concentrating on it. And I've told you this, I, you know, I am now starting to concentrate on my business and chasing one rabbit. And speaking of which, I just looked at the clock, and so let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you for hope and faith and grace and love and all of these things that you're trying to pull together in this lesson. God, I pray, Holy Spirit, please pull— help us to pull all this together. Help us to grow in grace and truth. And Lord, help us to be more like your Son. Holy Spirit, we thank you for helping us and leading us and guiding us and directing us. Continue to do so as we go through our day. We thank you, we love you, we ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thank you for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you on the next episode.

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