Reply To: Grace and Faith Discussion Board 1

[Amotsuka Caleb]

It is true that faith is powerful and always produces results. 1 John 5:4 says, “And this is the victory that overcomes the world, even our faith”. Faith always gets the victory.
However, Hebrews 11:39 says, “And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise”. On the surface, this statement seems to depict that though these people were in faith, they didn’t receive the end of their faith i.e. the thing(s) they were in faith for, but this interpretation isn’t accurate.
Faith begins where the will of God is known.
Faith is not a magic wand to get anything you want. This means that you cannot just wish for something out of God’s will and try to use your faith to make it a reality. That is not faith, that is wishful thinking at best. This means that we cannot say we are in faith when we haven’t identified God’s will concerning a situation. Though the heroes of faith didn’t receive the promise till they died, their faith was fruitful because, in God’s plan, they were never meant to receive the promise of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit at that time. After all, the promise was for another time. All of them, however, played their part in that time of history according to God’s will and divine plan. They believed the promise and responded in faith and thus were able to align themselves in their own time to be vessels for God to develop the storyline of salvation. Though they didn’t receive the promise, they obtained a good testimony meaning that they pleased God by fulfilling His will for them at the time. The reason they didn’t receive the promise was not as a result of lack of faith as no amount of additional faith could have made the promise materialise at that time.
It is also important to note that faith receives in the supernatural realm before having it in the natural realm.
All the heroes of faith had connected with the promise in the supernatural and that is why they were able to live beyond their time and manifest results that were a wonder to the people of their generation. Even though Christ had not come, and the Holy Spirit had not been poured out, these heroes received a foretaste of the promise due to their faith.
God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as the sands on the sea, and they would be a blessing to all generations. Abraham believed this even though he didn’t live to see this fulfilled. This doesn’t mean that his faith didn’t produce results. The manifestation of the result of our faith will come over time according to God’s will. Once we are fully aligned with God’s will then we can be assured that at every point in time, once we are in faith, we have the victory already irrespective of what we are experiencing in the physical realm.