Feb 22nd 11 Posted by Natalie Nichols in Believing God

Your Faith: The Enemy’s #1 Target

It is vital that we live by faith. The enemy of your soul knows this and daily pulls out all the stops to attempt to keep you from living by faith.

The following are ten reasons why your faith is Satan’s number one target in your life.

1. Faith is how you perform the works of God.

In John chapter 6, people asked Jesus what they could do to do the works God requires:

^“28 Then they asked him, ‘What must we do to do the works God requires?’

^“29 Jesus answered, ‘The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent'” (John 6:28-29).

What was Jesus’ answer? “To believe…”

Jesus did the works of His Father. He said, “Whatever the Father does the Son also does” (John 5:19). Jesus moved God’s will from heaven to earth by His faith.

Faith is the key that moves God out of Heaven to earth. It is what converts the truth of God into reality in your life.

Faith is the only principle by which God works. Trying to play on God’s sympathies or attempting to bargain with Him is not what moves Him from Heaven to earth to act in your behalf.

Every time you see God move from heaven to earth, it is because He found someone who believed.

2. Faith is the only way to please God.

“Without faith if is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6).

3. Faith is the way to avoid sin.

“Whatever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23).

At the root of every sin is unbelief – whether it obvious sin such as adultery and lying, or sins we Christians mistakenly think of as benign, such as a lack of soul winning and prayerlessness.

4. Tobe righteous and upright, we must walk by faith.

“The righteous will live by faith” (Romans 1:17).

5. To be in the will of God, we must walk by faith as opposed to the philosophy of “do the best you can.”

The children of Israel who came out of Egypt had the will of God revealed to them. They knew God promised to give them the land of Canaan. But instead of responding in faith, they responded with the attitude that is prevalent in much of the modern church today – “do the best you can.”

In that case, their “best” seemed worthless against the Canaanites (and they were right). The ten spies who brought back a negative report claimed there was no way they could take the land. They claimed the land was full of giants and cities with walls to the sky.

Joshua and Caleb responded in faith. They were ready to step out on faith – on the basis of God’s promise, trusting God to give the victory. They fully expected that God would do exactly what He said He would do (see Numbers 13-14).

The ten spies were right that their best was not good enough to achieve victory. The problem with their approach (and the approach of “just do the best you can”) is that it is an approach of the flesh that looks to man’s effort rather than God’s covenant keeping nature.

Joshua and Caleb had it right! They were willing to place their entire being at God’s disposal, believing fully that God would do what He said He would do – He would give them the land.

Tragically, the ten spies won the people’s hearts and that generation of Israelites never entered into God’s will, except for Joshua and Caleb whom God rewarded for their faith.

6. We are sanctified by faith (see Acts 26:18).

“Sanctified” is a big Biblical word that simply means to be made holy, to be made pure, to have a changed lifestyle. This cannot come apart from faith.

7. Faith is the way to victory.

• More than by prayer – We can pray until we are blue in the face, but unaccompanied by real, Biblical faith, our prayers will accomplish nothing.

• More than by works – Some people think success comes through the amount of work they do for God. But if you do not have faith, you will fail no matter how hard you work for God.

Only faith makes it possible for God to operate. Unless God operates, man operates in vain. Jesus said, “Of myself I can do nothing.”

The world is not interested in what you are doing for God but what God is doing for you.

Wherever faith waivers, God’s hands are tied.

When in His hometown of Nazareth, Jesus could do no miracles because of the people’s unbelief.

“He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith” (Mark 6:5-6).

Unbelief causes us to forfeit our breakthrough!

8. Faith is how we receive the promises of God.

God’s promises are appropriated by faith.

“We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised” (Hebrews 6:12).

Our needs have already been met in Christ. Everything God has for us has already been provided.

“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life” (2 Peter 1:3).

It is by faith that we walk in that provision. Faith is about finding out what God is doing in Heaven and cooperating with Him. It’s about lining ourselves up with what God already wants for us.

The existence of a need is the evidence of God’s supply. It is God’s way of inviting you to partake of His supply – His meeting of your need. And that need has already been met in Jesus Christ who dwells in you.

We don’t need to get anything else from God. We just need to learn to walk in what He has already given us when we were saved. We need to learn to live by faith.

9. Faith is how you enter into God’s promised future for you.

This could be applied not only to yourself personally but also to your family, your ministry, your business, etc. – to all that God has entrusted to you! Faith is how you and your family, how you and your business, how you and your ministry enter into God’s promised future.

You enter the “land” (God’s promised future for you) by faith.

“Behold, the Lord your God has set the land before you; go up and possess it, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has said to you. Fear not, neither be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 1:21).

“Today, if you hear his voice, ⁸ do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the desert, ⁹ where your fathers tested and tried me and for forty years saw what I did. ¹⁰ That is why I was angry with that generation, and I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.’ ¹¹ So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”¹² See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God…

¹⁶ Who were they who heard and rebelled? Were they not all those Moses led out of Egypt? ¹⁷ And with whom was he angry for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the desert? ¹⁸ And to whom did God swear that they would never enter his rest if not to those who disobeyed? ¹⁹ So we see that they were not able to enter, because of their unbelief” (Hebrews 3:8-12, 16-19).

This is serious! The Israelites’ unbelief made God angry. The word “angry” in the original language means:

• to be vexed (with something irksome)
• to feel indignant at
• to be wroth
• displeased with
• to loath
• to spew out
• to be disgusted with

God does not excuse unbelief. The Israelites’ “dismembered bodies were strewn, were left, in the desert” (Hebrews 3:17, Amplified).

There is no sin you can commit that so humiliates and infuriates God as unbelief. There is no sin as bad as procrastination when it is time to actively believe God.

Faith is demanding. It demands that once we hear God’s word, we are to obey, no matter the obstacles and impossibilities.

10. Faith is the only law placed at our disposal that supersedes the laws of nature.

• Faith can move mountains. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain’ move from here to there’ and it will move” (Matthew 17:20).
• By faith, Peter walked on the water (see Matthew 14:22-33).
• Lazarus was raised from the dead because of Jesus’ faith. Jesus spoke by faith and commanded Lazarus to come out of the tomb, believing that His father would raise Lazarus from the dead (see John 11:38-43).
• 5000 people were fed by only five loaves and two fish because of Jesus’ faith. Jesus gave thanks in advance for the miracle. He took the loaves and fish and thanked God for what He was about to do in feeding all those people with one child’s meal. Jesus could do this because of His faith (see Mark 6:30-44). Can you imagine feeding 5,000 people on one happy meal? That’s the equivalent of what took place when Jesus multiplied the fish and loaves.

Satan’s Target

Because faith is necessary for these ten things to take place, Satan’s number one target is your faith!

The majority of Christians today who profess bold faith have no idea what real, Biblical faith is, much less how to exercise it in their lives.

To be completely candid, even though I have known and lived by strong faith in years past, I still find myself becoming complacent and lazy in faith. God never stops convicting me about my own lack of faith. He is constantly working in me to show me that although I may have strong faith in some areas of my life, in other areas I am limiting God by my unbelief.

“Again and again they put God to the test; they vexed the Holy One of Israel” (Psalm 78:41).

The King James Versions says, “they turned back and tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel” (Ps. 78:41).

As God has convicted me about my unbelief, I’ve noticed that I have slowly adopted a standard that I accept as faith, but which is really a fake out – sure to cause me to flake out…and fast!

Sadly, we have come to substitutemany things in our lives for faith – buying the enemy’s deception and fooling ourselves into thinking that we are operating in “faith”, when in fact, we are living a lie according to God’s standard.

That is why this is the first part in a series of posts about faith. I look forward to sharing more with you in posts to come!

Question: Have you noticed that the devil seems to attack your faith first? If so, how has God shown you this?

 
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