Believers Believe

The Bible calls us believers. If you’re a Christian today, you’re a believer. Believing is what you do. You are good at believing, and no matter how little or how much you have believed up to now, you can believe more. Hebrews 11:6 says, “He that comes to God must believe that He is.” Most of us crossed that threshold long ago.

As Christians, we believe much more; we believe Jesus died for us. We didn’t see Jesus die for us. We weren’t standing at the foot of the cross when He died. We didn’t see Him shed His blood, but we believe He died for us. We believe He was buried. We didn’t see His body laid in the tomb, but we believe it. We also believe God raised Him from the dead, even though we weren’t there and have no firsthand knowledge—nor do we have physical proof of any of these things.

We, as believers, believe in a place called heaven. We’ve never been to heaven. We don’t know where it is, and we couldn’t point to it on a map if we had to. But we believe in the existence of heaven. We also believe we’re going there one day when our bodies die. We believe the streets of heaven are paved with gold, and we will one day live in a mansion in that holy city whose gates are made of pearl.

We fully accept all these truths and more—by faith. In fact, if we told these things to somebody who’s not familiar with them, they might think we were crazy. They would probably think the guy who believes in UFOs and aliens has more sense than we do! And yet, we believe without batting an eye because we’ve seen scriptures that promise these things in God’s word; we’ve embraced them and decided to believe them for ourselves.

Where did we get that confidence? Was it the result of some emotion or feeling? Is it something we developed in and of ourselves? No! We read the Bible; we chose to believe those promises, and they’ve become real to us—more real than evidence, more real than circumstances. And nobody can talk us out of these beliefs!

I want to encourage you to understand that you are a believer. That’s the one word we can use to describe you. You believe in the impossible. You believe in things that are invisible. You believe in things you’ve never touched or seen with your eyes. You’re a believer, and you are good at it! You were born for this. Make the decision to expand the reach of your faith. Find more promises from God that apply to other areas of your life and believe more of God’s word than you ever have before. Because in God’s kingdom, you don’t get what you deserve or what you earn; you get what you believe for!

According to your faith, be it unto you. If we believe little, we’re going to receive little. We can choose to limit our faith to salvation from sin and ensure our entrance into heaven—no doubt about it. If we accept Jesus as Lord, we are going to heaven, and we can have the assurance of that right now. But why limit our faith to the distant future when we can, as Jesus said, speak to the mountains in our lives? Why don’t we change some things in our world in the present? Why don’t we begin to believe for God to intervene in the here and now and experience some of the deeper things—some of the more amazing experiences God has for us in this life? An example of faith changing our everyday lives is found in this verse:

“For whatever (whoever) is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.” —1 John 5:4

Victory belongs to all of us. But if you’re not experiencing it, if you’re not walking in victory, it could be because you’re not believing for it. It must be activated or received. It becomes part of your experience by faith. All the blessings of God in the New Testament are made available by grace, but they’re made yours by faith.

Again, faith is more of a personal choice than some sort of extraordinary deed or some great accomplishment that only the elite can do. There are certain athletes who do things the rest of us just can’t do. We admire them, and we even pay to watch them. They become famous because they do things that very few are capable of. But we must not think the same way about living by faith and the heroes of faith in the word of God. We aren’t to sit back and read about their great faith in God as if they’re doing something that only they can do.

Faith is something we can all do. We can all believe God, and we can all do more than we’ve ever done before in the area of faith!

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God likes faith! Heb 11:6 says that “without faith it’s impossible to please Him.” One reason God likes faith is that He wants to give us things we could never earn. In God’s kingdom, people don’t get what they deserve; they get what they believe for. God has no favorites. By faith, everyone has equal access to every blessing. No one is left out or excluded. Anyone can receive God’s best, by grace through faith. In this series, you’ll see why faith is God’s chosen method to get His blessings to the world and why God’s way is always best. God likes faith, and the more you understand the message of faith, the more you’re going to like it too!