In episode 320 of the "No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe" podcast, the host opens a new series on Christian faith by defining what faith is and what it means to walk by faith rather than by sight. He emphasizes that believers must be grounded in Scripture, noting that the word of God is truth and that Satan opposes believers. The host explains justification—being made righteous through Christ’s work, not personal merit—and stresses that faith does not require full intellectual understanding. He defines faith using Hebrews 11:1 as the "substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," describing it both as a noun (a concrete thing) and a verb (an action). He contrasts walking by faith (spiritual realm) with walking by sight (physical realm) citing 2 Corinthians 5:7, and highlights the necessity of the Holy Spirit and God’s love in the believer’s journey. A personal anecdote about a poison‑oak rash illustrates his own imperfect walk of faith, showing how he relied on prayer and Scripture during the ordeal. The episode concludes with an invitation to engage with the Bible, a brief prayer, and a preview of future episodes that will explore faith more deeply.
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Welcome to episode 320. I want to get right into this podcast and define what is faith and what does it mean to walk by faith and not by sight. This is going to be a video series. I know this is a pretty big topic and there's no way we're going to get all this done in one episode, but I want to set the stage. This series is going to be all about faith. But before we get all that started, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. If this is your first time to my podcast, I want to welcome you, and I want to remind you of a few things before we start talking about faith. We have to understand, we got to get grounded in the word of God, because the word of God is Jesus. The word of God is truth. The world is going to fight us every, every inch, every step of the way. The punk— the Bible calls him Satan, I call him the punk— he is going to come against us, the church. He's going to come against even the people that don't believe in Jesus, because his only job is to steal and to kill and to destroy. But Jesus said, I have come that they may have life and have it more abundantly. So Jesus is abundant life. God is abundant life. Satan is stealing, killing, and destroying. And the Bible is pretty clear about faith. It says that the just shall live by faith. And that is important because if we know who we are in Christ, we are the justified. And an easy Definition of justified is just as if I had never sinned. And so when you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you become justified not by anything that you do. It is everything that Jesus has already done. People get all wrapped around the axle and they don't understand. And you know, the cool thing about God is you don't have to understand it to believe it. And that is important. That's a key. And that's one of those things about faith. We're going to dive deep in it. We're not going to talk about it in this episode. I think a lot of us get too tied up in, "I've got to understand every little bit of this before I do any of it." And perfection is a curse. There's no way that you're going to be perfect at anything. That was Jesus' job. He's already been here and done that. You and I are to walk the best way we can. And I'm going to tell you a little faith story. Before I define faith, I want to tell you that I don't have all this figured out. And you know that if you've been here for a while, you know this podcast is about an imperfect man, which is me, who's following after a perfect example, which is Jesus. And I do my best. And as a child tries to walk in their dad's footsteps, or an adult's footsteps, you do the best that you can, but you're not going to do it perfect. You are not God. You are not going to do it perfect. And this is the good news, the great news, is that we don't have to. Sin is no longer the issue. Jesus died for all sin— past, present, and future sin. Next Thursday's sin is just as taken care of as last Thursday's sin, and it better be because Jesus died over 2,000 years ago. He's not going to keep dying over and over and over again. Jesus died once for all sin. We have to by faith reach out and accept what Jesus Christ did for us when he was here on earth. And I want to introduce you— it is Romans 8:1: There is now therefore no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. And that is a wonderful definition, I think, of grace— is we don't have to understand it, we don't have to get it right. All we got to do is try to walk in the Spirit. We're learning how to walk by faith, walk in the Spirit, And every step we take, we have a chance of falling, but we have a chance of not falling too. We can't be scared of falling. We just got to keep walking. And Father God is the perfect Father. And we have fathers. In fact, I just went to see my dad up in Michigan, and I saw some relatives up there, and it was great times. We have a father here on earth, and we have a Father in heaven. No matter how good your dad is, he He is not perfect, and no one is perfect. And so what we have to understand is we have got a Father in heaven who is perfect, and it says that it is impossible to please him without faith. That's Hebrews 11:6. We got to see God as love, and God is not— does not have his arms folded and he's up there in heaven just waiting to smack us. No, he's got his arms wide open trying to get us to take another step by faith, because it's impossible to please him without faith, and that is just him trying to coax you to take another step. I've got to have you see Father God as this loving, kind, gentle, good— you see, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. All of those things are God, but God is love, and it's not something he does, it's who he is. God is love. So when God does something, he does it in love, and you and I just have to accept that, that Father Father God is not mad at us. Father God is not even a little bit upset. He put all his anger on Jesus at the cross. He put all the sin, all the judgment, all the condemnation went on Jesus at the cross. It was nailed to the cross. It went into the grave with Jesus, and it did not come out. It stayed there. Jesus rose again, and he is forever at the right hand of the Father, and we have just got to accept that And again, here's my definition of faith. We've got to go to the scripture, and it's in Hebrews 11:1. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. And when you take a look at what faith is, faith is a substance. So faith is something concrete. I say faith is a noun. And if you know anything about English, and you know, if you've listened to this podcast, you know English is not my first language. I don't do a great job with the English language, but I'm trying. And when I talk about a noun, it is a person, place, or thing. So faith is a thing. But the other thing faith is, I believe faith is also a verb. When you look at somebody that walks in faith, that's an action. Verbs are action words. And so when you take a step of faith, that is an action that you're taking. You're actually walking in faith. So we need to understand what faith is, and we need to go to 2 Corinthians 5:7. We're going to talk about this a lot in this series. 2 Corinthians 5:7 says, for we walk by faith and not by sight. Now, this is in the spirit realm, and so we got to have a lot of definition. We got to have a lot of talk. We're going to go pretty deep into faith in these next episodes, but I just want to set the stage, and I want to tell you a story before we go. I'm just like you. I walk around in my life and I do stupid stuff all the time. And one of those things happened a couple weekends ago. I was helping my father-in-law in Louisiana, Rayville, Louisiana, and he's got 3 acres and he's getting a little bit older and he can't keep up with it like he wants to. And so I was out there clearing some land and I really wasn't prepared to do that, but I was cutting down some limbs off of some trees and I was raking up some brush and some leaves is because it's fall. And so I was trying to clean it up a little bit and there were some vines. And so I'm raking and it's— these vines are catching the rake every time. And so then I got my gloves on and I reached down there and I grabbed these vines and I'm ripping and tugging and tearing. And so what I've done is I've got all these vines out of the ground and it was a pain in the backside, but I got it done and I put it in this— the golf cart or a mule or whatever it was, little 4-wheel drive. It's got a little dump on the back, and I put all these vines in there, and we take it to a, like, a burn pile, and I dump that. We got done working, you know, I didn't get it all finished, but there's still, there's plenty more to do if you want to come help. I tell you all of that to say, the next weekend I was traveling to go up to Michigan to see my dad. About Tuesday, these bumps on my arms start showing up. I looked down, and where those vines had hit me, I guess it was poison oak. I don't think it was poison ivy because I've seen poison ivy before and I didn't see any of that leaf-looking stuff. But anyway, something tore me up. And you know me, if you've listened to this— and if you haven't— I started cursing all that poison and all that poison oak in the name of Jesus. And so I'm walking, I'm talking to it because you've got to say unto this mountain, be thou removed and cast into the sea, and do not doubt in your heart but believe what you say, you shall have whatever it is you say. I was saying to this poison oak to be gone, and I was cursing it in Jesus' name. And the more I cursed it, the more it itched. And I just want to tell you, you don't have to be perfect to get this thing done. I started cursing it and kicking and screaming, and it just kept getting more bumps and more itching, more rash, and from my elbows to my wrist. And I'm going to show you, if you're watching this on YouTube, I'm going to try to show you what's, what's going on right now. If you can see that, it's kind of nasty, but it looks so much better than it did. It's about a week and a couple days off of where it was. But what I did and what I found in this, in this faith walk— we're going to get involved with this and you're going to kind of see how, how I look at things. But everything the Bible is true, and I believe that by Jesus' stripes we were healed. I know that it's a done deal. I know that the grace of God has been poured out for all of us. It is just sitting there waiting for us to reach out and take it. And I— that's what we're going to talk about in this series is how we walk by faith and not by sight. I'm telling you, I was seeing and I was feeling the poison oak, and it was incredible. And it just— my flesh was constantly telling me, hey, this stuff Whatever you're doing is not working. Whatever you're doing is not working. And so I'm going to tell you in the next episode how I got it to go away, but it had to do with humbling myself, and it had to do with a lot of things that we're not prepared to talk about in this episode. I just want to open the door. I want to tell you that you can walk by faith. It is not a bad thing. It's impossible to please God without walking by faith. So we need to understand what that is. We need to understand what faith is. I think we all understand what walking by sight is, unless someone's listening to me that's blind. Everybody understands the walking by sight. I call that the physical realm. When we walk by faith, we're walking in the spirit realm, and we need to learn about the two. There's two different realms, I believe, where God and the Holy Spirit and Jesus are. That's where faith has all its power. And that's what we're going to learn. We're going to, we're going to find the grace of God there. We're going to go by hope there. We're going to learn about faith there. But we are going to get after this thing. I love the Bible and I love the word of God, and I want you to get into the word of God and allow the word of God to get inside of you because it is the truth and it really works. I want to encourage you one more time, if you're not in the Bible, if you're not opening it up, I want to encourage you just to get into your Bible. Open that thing up It's not going to hurt you. In fact, it's really going to help you. It has changed my life. God is no respecter of persons. It will change your life too. Let's pray real quick. God, I thank you so much for this listener. God, I thank you for your word. I thank you for faith. I thank you that you allow us to dig into your word and to find out what it says and how we can apply it to our life. God, I pray for this listener. I pray for this person watching on YouTube. If they need anything from you, Lord, you are right there. You are a prayer away. And Lord, we thank you. We love you. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, thanks for being a part of this, and I look forward to visiting with you in the next episode. Thanks for listening to the No Doubt, No Fear, Only Believe podcast at www.nodoubtonlybelieve.com.
