Rediscovering what faith is

In my dealing with the faulty paradigms that were blocking me from experiencing God's best for my life I will proceed from the general to the more specific ones, in the order as I experienced it. As I was reflecting on this during the week, I became very aware of the fact that it is actually quite difficult to put them into words. There is so much room for misunderstanding, misinterpretation and false judgments that it will need the help of the Holy Spirit for me to write it down right and for my readers to understand it in a way that will be helpful and encouraging for them.

Let me make this statement right at the start: I don't think, that I am better than other Christians, or that I have now arrived and know it all. This is not to put down or condemn anybody who doesn't agree with the way I see things. This is simply a testimony about how God has changed my life by revealing faulty paradigms of thinking and replacing them with more accurate biblical ones. My life has become so much better, so much more victorious, joyful, confident and consistent that I simply want to share that with my readers. And it is my hope and my prayer that this will be helpful. That's all.

The deception of the modern and post modern worldview
For me it all started, when God showed me through the Freedom in Christ course that even though I was a believer in Jesus, I was mostly operating from a modern and post modern world view in many practical areas of my life. I professed to believe the bible and what it says about God and reality, but when it came to day-to-day living, I by default acted according to the modern and post modern world view. What do I mean by that? Let me explain using the points from the Freedom in Christ course. This will be a very concise and simplified treatment, because I don't have the space here to go into much detail, but it will certainly show the main points.

The modern or western worldview can be summarized like that:

- It divides reality into 'natural' and 'supernatural' but focuses only on the natural.
- It sees spiritual things as irrelevant to daily life.
- Reality is defined only by what we can see, touch and measure

Having grown up in the modern world I had internalized it's worldview without even noticing it. God showed me that in my daily life I also divided reality into natural and supernatural and was focusing mainly on the natural. The supernatural got some attention in the morning during my quiet time, but the rest of the day I was operating in the natural, with God not really playing a big part of my daily experience.

Why was that? I really wanted to experience God. I even got up one or two hours before everybody else to pray and read my bible, and that still didn't lead me to a joyful and victorious life. There were a few things involved, legalism being a big part of it as well, but one major thing was: I came to define reality by what I can see, touch and measure. But I couldn't see God. So I had to feel him, in order for him to be real to me. If I didn't feel anything, He felt distant and unreal. So I begged and pleaded with God to pour out his Spirit and touch me, give me something "real"... When I got a feeling of God's presence I was happy, when I couldn't feel his presence, I felt down and condemned and guilty. So I was praying and hoping for revival that would just bring this overwhelming sense of his presence and glory and that would never leave me. I was deceived.

The post modern worldview can be summarized like that:

- There is no such thing as objective truth
- Everyone has their own version of "truth"
- Each person's "truth" is as valid as everyone else's
- If you disagree with my "truth" or disapprove of my actions, you are rejecting me

Now this is so obviously diabolic that I didn't really fall for most of it. It is an ingenious trick of the father of lies to invent a worldview in which there is no truth, because everything then becomes some sort of a lie. In that way there is no foundation for any faith to be exercised, because real biblical faith is being "sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Hebrews 11:1 NIV). How can you be sure and certain if there is no truth to base your certainty on? It all is left to subjective guesswork and hoping. And it flies in the face of the words of Jesus, who said that "I am the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6). "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32), and "Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth."(John 17:17). Although as a Christian I was convinced that truth existed and that Jesus was the truth, I had unconsciously accepted the post modern assumption that we are not really able to know and perceive truth as humans. That weakened my trust in the bible as a reliable guide through life and faith without me noticing it.

The Freedom in Christ course contrasted these two worldviews with the biblical worldview, or "how it really is":

The Biblical Worldview: 'How it really is'
- Truth does exist
- God is truth
- Faith and logic are not incompatible
- God's word, the bible, is truth.

Now the Bible presents us with a very distinct and elaborate worldview. It states very confidently that God is the ultimate reality and the source of all being. But God is spirit. He is not perceivable by our senses unless he chooses to make himself seen or felt by us. In fact there is a whole spiritual world that is as real as our physical world, but it is not accessible to our senses. It exists, but we cannot prove it's existence by physical means. We have to access it by faith. We have to believe. How can we be certain that what we believe but cannot prove is true? We need reliable revelation from that spiritual world to tell us, how things really are. The Bible claims to be that revelation, the reliable and infallible word of God that can be totally trusted.

The way things work in the spiritual world of faith is radically different to the way they work in the physical world. In the physical world you first prove that something is actually true, and then you believe it. In the spiritual world it works the other way round, you first trust God and believe him without physical proof, and then you see it manifest in the physical realm. That was the huge breakthrough for me and the beginning of radical change in my experience.

Rediscovering what faith is
Faith is believing God, believing that what He says is true. Even if it contradicts the physical realities, how we feel. Steve Goss gives an example in Freedom in Christ about how he first learned that truth. He had a problem with watching bad stuff on television and not being able to stop it. He would feel guilty, confess it and stop for a while, but then would fall for it again. It was one of these sin-confess-sin-confess cycles that he seemed not to be able to overcome. One day a preacher came to his church who said, that he had the answer to that problem. Steve was all ears. The preacher said - all you have to do, is just stop it. Because you are no longer a slave of sin. The word of God says in Romans 6 that you can do it. Believe it, and you will be able to do it. So he went home and knelt down at his bed and said to God: "God, I know that your word says that I am no longer a slave of sin. I feel that I can't stop it. But your word says that I can. I am going to believe your word..." After that he didn't have that problem anymore. It actually really worked. As soon as he exercised faith on the Word of God and decided to trust the word more than his feelings, he could overcome his problem.

Wow, that opened a whole new world for me. I didn't have to wait for God to make me feel his presence, before I could believe that He was with me. His word says that he will never leave me nor forsake me. So I can go by that and just believe it. As soon as I started exercising that kind of faith and believing what God says over what my circumstances and my feelings said, my life started to change.

My problem was mainly emotional. I used to have the tendency to have feelings of discouragement, inferiority, weakness. And when I felt that way, I was taught that I had to be "real" and just express these feelings and live them until they would go away. Now I actually saw that that was completely wrong. Feelings don't reflect reality. They reflect the way I think about the reality. So if I choose to believe God and His word rather than my feelings, the feelings would soon change. That was a major pointer to victory and a great liberation for me.

I remember driving in my car feeling very down and discouraged one Saturday night. It was after midnight, and I had to pick up my son from somewhere and I had to preach the next morning. I felt tired, frustrated and down. That's when the Holy Spirit reminded me of the truth of God's word. I remembered what I had learned about faith and I said to God something along these lines: God, I feel rotten and miserable, but I decide not to trust my feelings but to believe your word. Your word says that I am a loved and cherished son of God, I am strong and courageous, because greater is he that is in me than he that is in the world. I have not received the Spirit of Timidity, but the Spirit of Power, Love and a Sound Mind... And I started praising God for that. Within 10 or 15 minutes my feelings changed from discouragement to excitement and joy. Wow, I thought, that was quick. It is fantastic...

That was the beginning - making the conscious choice to unmask the ways I acted inconsistently to the Biblical worldview and choose to believe God. From here many other paradigms started to show up where I had accepted beliefs that were actually inconsistent with what the Bible teaches. An exciting and very fulfilling journey started...

In closing I have to clarify, that intellectually identifying a faulty paradigm is only the beginning. The truth has to get into our heart, before it can really start to change us. It will take time and effort. Jesus compares the word of God to a seed. A seed doesn't produce the harvest immediately. It takes time to germinate, take root, grow and develop. The harvest will come later. But while it's growing you know, you are on the right path and it is exciting, fulfilling and rewarding. And you know that the harvest will come. Likewise with these paradigm changes it takes time for them to penetrate to the heart level, where you can actually operate in them freely. But it is very worth while. Because they reflect truth, the way it really is. And it works. Life makes sense, God becomes very real and the walk with him is just wonderful!

So from this general huge paradigm shift I want to now proceed to some more specific ones that I discovered in the bible. Until next week. Be blessed everyone. God is awesome, good, merciful and loving. Trusting Him is the best thing we can ever do. Be blessed and encouraged!