This message by Glenn Meldrum was originally produced
by In His Presence Ministries for the Radical
Truth Podcast.
You can listen and subscribe to the Radical
Truth Podcast by going to www.ihpministry.com
You are welcome to reproduce this message for
free distribution.
This message is part of a series entitled
The Radical Jesus.
We are going to dig into the subject
of radical faith one more day before moving
on to our next subject, which is radical
prayer.
In our study on the radical nature of
the true faith, we have looked at two
people Jesus praised for great faith, and both
of them were Gentiles, or non-Jews.
They were the Canaanite woman that had a
demon-possessed daughter, and the Roman centurion that
had a beloved servant that was dying.
In the face of such blatant unbelief that
the majority of Israelites possessed in Jesus' day,
we see these two people stand above the
rest by demonstrating great faith in the face
of great need.
Now isn't that the way great faith works?
That it must have a great need to
act upon?
Of course, none of us want to be
confronted with such great needs that require us
to use great faith.
But until our faith is tried, tested, and
proved, we will never really know the caliber
of our faith.
Smith Wigglesworth was referred to as the Apostle
of Faith, because he operated in great faith
by seeing the power of God heal the
sick, make the blind see, the lame walk,
the deaf hear, and even saw many dead
people raise to life.
This man of God was seriously tested and
was able to say, We need to wake
up and strive to believe God.
Before God could bring me to this place,
He broke me a thousand times.
I have wept, I have groaned, I have
travailed many a night until God broke me.
It seems to me that until God has
mowed you down, you can never have this
long-suffering, this endurance for others.
We will never have the gifts of healing
and the working of miracles and operation unless
we stand in the divine power that God
gives us.
Unless we stand believing God and having done
all to stand, we stand believing.
Until we can come to a firm understanding
of the caliber of our faith, we will
never be able to grow in our faith
so that the Lord could do greater things
in and through us.
If you notice in the accounts of the
Canaanite woman and the centurion, the great need
they faced was not one that had to
do with their own personal need, but the
need of another that forced them to arise
to the occasion with great faith.
Many times our faith must go through a
maturing process by having to believe for our
own needs.
The better we are at believing God to
meet our own needs, the easier it will
be for us to believe for the needs
of others.
That is the place where I think the
Lord wants to move His people, to the
place where they are striving to believe for
others, whether it has to do with salvation,
healing, or other genuine needs.
When we look at the book of Acts,
we can clearly see that the early church
operated with signs and wonders, or we could
say that they were a signs and wonders
church.
I believe this is the normal condition of
the church, and it is what we should
be today.
When signs and wonders in one way or
another are not operating in and through the
church, it means that there is something terribly
wrong with the church and individuals.
There is something that is grieving the Spirit
right out of the church.
It may be the false doctrine that claims
the age of miracles has passed, so they
will never even try to operate in a
miracle-working faith.
Or it may be sin and compromise that
is grieving the Spirit.
Or it may be unbelief.
Or it may be the Spirit has never
even given opportunity to move in the church.
No matter the reason, if the body is
sick, then it is important that the cause
of the sickness is discovered so that the
disease will not spread or become fatal.
Do we have the courage to read the
New Testament, especially the Gospels and Acts, and
see the extremely obvious point that signs and
wonders were normal for the early church?
And if it was normal for them, then
it should be normal for us.
We need to abandon the modern faith that
is dead and barren and return to the
teaching and life of the primitive church.
What they were, we can be if we
will only be willing to live and believe
as they did.
There is much more at stake than we
think concerning this issue.
The church is in desperate need of seeing
a miracle-working God in their midst once
again.
There are so many needs in the church
from the healing of our bodies to the
supernatural power to live holy lives to the
salvation of the lost that are in the
church and to the revealing of God's manifest
presence.
We need to have a testimony in the
now, not just what Jesus did in the
past.
We need to speak of a God that
is still doing miracles, not one that did
them in bygone days but no longer does
them today.
The church needs to experience the awesome miracle
of God's manifest presence, which is seen in
the power of the Spirit revealed in vibrant
worship, anointed preaching, and altars filled with repentant
people.
We are in desperate need to see great
faith rise up in prayer so we can
once again experience full-blown revival where vast
numbers of people are being saved.
The world is also in desperate need of
seeing a miracle-working God reveal himself in
and through the church.
Otherwise, they will not be greatly interested in
our dead and boring religion.
In our present condition, the world is not
impressed with our lukewarm religion and defeated lives.
The power of God is withheld from us
because we will not meet the conditions he
has established to reveal himself as a miracle
-working God.
We cannot blame the world for the terrible
spiritual condition of the church.
It is not their fault.
There is nobody to blame but ourselves.
Most of the lost never go to church
and never will unless something dramatically changes with
the church.
They are not interested in our programs, our
fundraising campaigns, our motivational messages, and doctrinal differences.
Until we have something that can genuinely impact
their lives, they will not pay us much
attention.
Revival swept through the Philippines in the early
1960s, and the reason it happened was that
signs and wonders accompanied the preaching of the
word.
The preacher would enter a village, begin to
preach, and then pray for the sickest person
in the village to be healed.
When the person was healed and the power
of God was clearly revealed, sometimes even whole
villages got saved.
Miracles do not save because only Jesus saves,
but miracles tell people that there is a
God, and then the ministers of the gospel
can reveal who this God is and how
to know him.
The world is hurting.
The philosophies and religions of the world are
bankrupt because they cannot meet their needs.
Drugs and alcohol cannot satisfy the soul.
Their relationships are in shambles and their families
are falling apart.
Do you honestly think that tame religion will
grab hold of their attention when the glitter
and glamour of this world is all around
them?
Do you think that a spineless, faithless type
of Christianity will draw them to the Savior?
If we do not have a burning passion
for God, then why would they be interested
in what we have?
Until we live out what we say we
believe, our testimonies will be virtually meaningless.
And if there is no substantial difference between
the church and the world, why would they
give up their Sunday mornings to sleep in
for a dead church service, or give up
their beer and pot money to a church
that is little more than a social gathering?
They can get all that at the bar
or on the streets.
We will never have great faith until we
see more clearly the greatness of our God.
And until the world begins to see the
greatness of our God manifested in and through
his true disciples, they will not pay us
much attention.
This takes us back to an issue I
have dealt with in the past of a
low and high view of God, and how
our view of God directly determines how we
live and what we do with Jesus.
And according to our view of God is
how we portray Christ to a lost and
dying world, which will either bring him glory
or disgrace.
Tied into our view of God will be
the condition and strength of our faith.
A low view of God cannot produce great
faith, because when the belief in God is
small, there leaves little room for the supernatural.
But a high view of God opens the
door to see miracles, because there is a
God worth trusting, and a life that is
striving to live worthy of such a God.
Paul told us in Hebrews 11, 6, And
without faith it is impossible to believe God,
because anyone who comes to him must believe
that he exists, and that he rewards those
who earnestly seek him.
We are told that we please God according
to our faith.
This faith is expressed both in the object
of our faith and the operation of our
faith.
If the object of our faith is only
a little God that is predominantly concerned about
our personal happiness and not our holiness, then
the operation of our faith will be very
anemic, and our life of faith will be
very shallow.
And when we place our faith in the
biblical God, who is infinitely beyond what our
little minds can fathom, we know that since
he is holy, he will only fellowship with
holy people, and if we come to grasp
that he is a miracle-working God, then
we have the potential to see God do
great things in and through us.
So the only way we can please God
is to have faith in him as he
has revealed himself, and then to live out
that faith in our everyday life.
There are two things Paul told us we
needed to believe in this verse in Hebrews
11.
The first point we need to know is
that he exists, or more specifically, who he
is in character and nature.
This means that we need to know him
as he has revealed himself to mankind, not
as we imagine him to be.
Our faith cannot be pleasing to God if
it is focused on a God that does
not exist, on a make-believe fairy-tale
deity.
The Lord has revealed himself clearly enough to
us so that we are without excuse if
we do not know him and serve him.
The second point that we need to know
is that he rewards those that earnestly or
diligently seek him.
This teaches us that God can be found
because he is a personal being, and since
we are made in his image, we too
have personhood, so that there can be authentic
fellowship between God and man.
There is a condition that the Lord has
firmly established about how we can come to
know him, and that non-negotiable condition is
that we must diligently seek him.
In other words, we must want him enough
that we will invest our lives in seeking
after him.
Unfortunately, many church folk are little better than
professing agnostics that claim there is a God,
but that he cannot really be known in
a personal way.
Notice that the faith that is pleasing to
God must be focused on knowing God as
he has revealed himself in the scriptures, and
then passionately seek after him with all of
our strength.
The passionate pursuit of God can only happen
when we are striving to know him and
his nature.
We can see then that faith is far
more than just believing that God exists, but
that it consists of the passionate pursuit of
God as well.
When we understand this, then we can see
just how wicked apathy, indifference, and lukewarmness actually
are, and that they are an insult to
God.
For the Lamb deserves the reward of his
suffering, which is wholehearted, uncompromising devotion and faith
from the entire race of man, but especially
from the church.
The kind of faith that pleases God is
faith that believes in the truth of who
he is and then passionately seeks after him.
True faith is action-based.
It does something.
It accomplishes something.
This is the faith that sees miracles, the
church made holy, the sick healed, the lost
saved, and captives set free.
Great faith is not static or dormant, because
the object of our faith is a miracle
-working God that will use whosoever will believe
and put themselves in a place where God
can use them.
Without great faith, Christians will become increasingly irrelevant
in a world of great need.
They will fail to meet people at their
point of need.
Only through the supernatural power of God will
we be able to intervene for the temporal
and eternal well-being of those who are
without Christ.
Both the church and the world need more
than mere words.
They need a demonstration of the Spirit's power,
the verifiable evidence that can bring them first
to saving faith and then to a greater
faith that will see God do wonders through
them.
The true biblical faith is radical, and like
the great cloud of witnesses we find in
Scripture and through church history, we are commanded
to live this radical faith both through life
and through death.
Great faith has a daring to it.
It is not a safe, comfortable thing, because
it puts you on the edge where you
will either be victorious or defeated.
But a safe faith, which is really no
faith at all, is already defeated before the
battle even begins.
It will never obtain the victory, because it
is not willing to trust God.
So it always lives in defeat.
We see in the Scriptures that all those
men and women that live by faith accomplished
the Lord's will because they were willing to
believe God rather than man or the lies
of doubt and fear.
They stepped out to see the miraculous, and
the Lord did not let them down.
The Lord is always laboring to build our
faith.
Imagine that Jesus leads you to a gigantic
cliff.
He moves you closer and closer to the
edge, yet you frantically resist him because the
precipice is so high that when you look
down, all you see is the top of
the clouds.
The drop is enormous, so you struggle to
stay as far away from the edge as
possible.
You are seeking to save your life from
such a horrible fall.
Still, the Lord nudges you closer and closer
to the edge until your toes are hanging
over, and you quake in fear and question
why a good God would lead you to
such a dangerous place.
Then Jesus whispers some terrifying words into your
ears, My child, jump.
Your blood seems to freeze in your veins
at such a radical, terrifying command.
You begin arguing with yourself, saying that that
cannot be the voice of God.
God would not tell me to jump.
The voice of self screams out in fear,
save yourself.
The voices of the world warn you of
sure and lasting doom.
The hordes of hell add their horrifying forebodings
to fill you with fear that will immobilize
you.
Your knees go weak, and you want to
run as far away from the precipice as
possible.
Then once again you hear the sweet voice
of Jesus.
Trust me, child, and jump.
I have never lost one who trusted me.
So with trembling knees, you close your eyes
and you jump.
The next thing you know, you are safe
and secure in the arms of Jesus.
You learn once again that God always keeps
his word, for he is always faithful.
The Lord may stretch our faith and let
us fall until we are one foot from
the ground, but he has never yet lost
a single saint that fully trusted in his
infinite wisdom and power.
To trust God can be very scary at
times, but what is the alternative?
To disbelieve?
To disobey?
To rebel?
There is no joy and victory in that.
The Lord never made a promise that there
would be no pain and suffering in our
life, just that if we would trust him,
we would find that he is more than
enough for any and every situation.
Though at times disconcerting, faith remains the safest
place to be because it allows us to
rest in Christ's tender embrace and omnipotent power.
Without such precipices in our life, we will
never know how wonderful and mighty our God
is, nor will we ever have the joy
of seeing miracles operate for us and through
us.
Though true followers of Jesus are bona fide
saints, they have not yet graduated the sanctifying
process until they walk through death's door.
We are fallen and frail and weak, and
we have a sinful nature that we have
to battle with, so we can have these
terrible bouts of doubt and fear.
I did not say that to make an
excuse for sin or unbelief.
I said that we may understand our humanity
and fallen nature and go to the only
one that has a remedy to our doubt
and unbelief.
Even the best of believers are subject to
bouts of doubt and unbelief and fear, and
we have a spiritual adversary that is ruthless
in his efforts to feed our fears and
unbelief so that we do not become powerhouses
for God.
Fear is the great enemy of faith.
Paul told us in Galatians 5, 6, For
in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails
anything but faith working through love.
Through Paul we are taught that faith works
or operates through love.
I have already dealt with the subject of
how faith is directly tied into our love
for God.
The greater the love we have for God,
the greater our faith will be.
Add to this idea that faith operates through
love with what John told us in 1
John 4, 18, There is no fear in
love, but perfect love drives out fear, because
fear has to do with punishment.
The one who fears is not made perfect
in love.
Fear is a byproduct of a lack of
faith and a lack of loving God enough
to trust Him.
Fear literally causes people torment.
There is no joy or peace in fear,
only anxiety, worry, and regret.
But love drives those things out of our
heart and mind.
How?
Inherent with love is trust.
So the greater the love, the greater the
trust.
Great faith is a result of great love
that chooses to believe God in the face
of great obstacles and fear.
Another enemy of faith is our inherent self
-love that makes us so consumed with personal
happiness, success, and comfort that we refuse to
trust God or give ourselves away for others.
Here faith is strangled in one's effort to
feed the fleshly desires of the carnal nature.
Self-love will always displace love for God.
If we want to love God more, then
we must seek to die to self.
But if we will not die to self,
then we are sure to be feeding the
self-life that is contrary to God.
Great faith will never rise up in the
heart of a person when the love of
self rules.
It is impossible to live by faith when
one goes through life attempting to avoid every
difficulty and pain because they have somehow come
to believe that life is all about the
pursuit of pleasure and that God exists to
make them happy.
To love people is costly.
To do the work of God is costly.
To reach a perishing world is costly.
To have great faith is costly.
Like I said earlier, radical faith contains a
daring element.
It is willing to step outside of what
is comfortable, familiar, and safe.
Pride and the fear of man are powerful
tools in the enemy's hands to hinder the
work of God by keeping us from operating
in great faith.
How often has pride and the fear of
man stopped us from ministering to someone or
kept us from obeying what we believe the
Lord told us to do?
More ministry has been thwarted than we can
understand because of these two diabolical weapons that
have been used against the saints ever since
the fall of man.
Our natural propensity of pride and the fear
of man means that to overcome them we
are sure to have a gruesome fight on
our hands.
But if we do not strive to crucify
these two devil-inspired works of the flesh,
then we will never know the joy of
operating in the power of great faith.
Apathy and indifference are two more powerful weapons
the enemy employs against believers to keep them
from operating in great faith.
Probably the two greatest weapons the church has
against hell and the world is spirit-inspired
prayer and real Holy Ghost revival.
Apathy and indifference are killers of both.
And as a result, people will never apply
themselves to operate through great faith.
Let the world creep into the heart and
mind of believers and they will soon be
so taken up with the things of this
life that they will not have any desire
to invest in the hereafter.
They will cease being people of prayer and
cease desiring the move of God.
When people are consumed with this life, they
will not have the desire to sacrifice themselves
to be used by God through acts of
great faith.
I want to close this section on radical
faith with a few concluding remarks.
If we get down to the nitty-gritty
about radical faith, we will see that it
is ultimately about surrendering to Jesus.
No matter what weapon the enemy uses against
us, they really only have one purpose, to
kill our faith in God, which moves us
away from knowing Him.
Just think about this for a moment.
Faith is all about surrendering to Jesus.
Just like the Canaanite woman and the Roman
centurion that we looked at in our last
two podcasts, they both had come to the
place of surrendering to Jesus so they could
have great faith.
They had to acknowledge that they were not
good people, but sinners that were in desperate
need of Christ's intervention in their lives or
they would have never obtained the remedy to
their problem.
We have to surrender to Jesus to make
leaps of faith when He moves us to
the edge of the precipice.
To throw ourselves off the safety of whatever
cliff we have been hanging on to means
that we have to surrender to Jesus, that
we cannot resist Him or His commands any
longer.
To step out in faith, to believe for
the need of another, means we must go
deeper in our surrender to Jesus because great
faith is rooted in great surrender.
Smith Wigglesworth once said, I know that Jesus
was separated from His own family and friends.
He was deprived of the luxuries of life.
It seems to me that God wants to
get every one of us separated to Himself
in this holy war, and we are not
going to have faith if we do not
give ourselves wholly to Him.
That is a profound statement.
We are not going to have faith if
we do not give ourselves wholly to Him.
This man knew what faith was all about.
This man saw the miraculous in a tremendous
way.
Surrender is one of God's great principles to
our having great faith.
Let me take this just a little bit
further.
Can God bless disobedience and rebellion?
No, for they are thoroughly hostile to His
will.
Can God bless sin?
No, for sin in all of its various
forms are hostile to God's will and nature.
And when they are in the life of
a person, faith is dead in trespasses and
sin.
From these two simple questions, we can see
that whatever is contrary to God is sure
to suffer His disfavor.
Great faith comes out of lives that are
the complete opposite of lives of sin and
rebellion.
Great faith comes out of lives of loving
devotion, explicit obedience, and absolute surrender.
Now this leads me to the next point,
that God blesses those who walk wholly, so
great faith must come out of holy lives.
Look at the church in compromise and you
will not see the power of God.
Look at those who are striving to be
as worldly as possible, yet think that they
will still go to heaven.
There is no Holy Spirit power in their
lives.
They are defeated by their compromise and blinded
by their sin.
God blesses those that walk before Him in
holiness out of loving devotion.
When faith is operating through a life that
is striving to live wholly, then powerful things
can happen.
Charles Finney was probably the 19th century's greatest
revivalist.
He stated, true faith in Christ will always
and inevitably produce a holy life.
Then let me quote Smith Wigglesworth again, purity
is vital to faith.
We need to listen to the testimonies of
those who lived out lives of great faith
and learn from them, not from those who
are living lives of compromise and worldliness.
Personal holiness is central to a life of
great faith.
We cannot escape this.
Though I have dealt with this already, I
want to once again highlight that faith operates
by love.
At the root of our lack of faith
is a lack of love that is strong
enough to cause us to trust Him in
any and every circumstance.
Smith Wigglesworth was noted for this simple statement
of faith, God said it, I believe it,
and that settles it.
It was Wigglesworth's passionate love for Christ that
brought him to such a point of great
faith.
His passionate love for God caused him to
seek hard after God, even when it looked
like there was no possible answer to the
problem.
So he saw miracle after miracle because he
profoundly loved the God in whom he believed.
Faith must be more important to us than
all the wisdom and wealth of this world,
or we will not operate in great faith.
Faith compels us to trust and obey, even
when it seems contrary to our emotions or
reason, even when the world is hostile against
us or family is rejecting us.
This kind of faith is rooted in a
firm relational knowledge of who Jesus is and
what He promised to do.
Leonard Ravenhill so aptly stated, faith links our
impotence with His omnipotence.
Our reasonable service and the only wise thing
for those who would be true followers of
Jesus is to have wholehearted, persevering faith, and
as Finney once said, persevering faith is that
which gets an answer.
Such faith acknowledges that God is good and
can only do good, and that He wants
to do good for us and through us.
It was great faith and dependence upon God
that caused the early church to turn the
known world upside down, even in the face
of severe persecution.
God is not a respecter of persons.
What He has done before, He can do
again.
The revivals of old are prophecies of what
God wants to do once again, and the
miracles of times past are testimonies to boost
our faith for the present.
We are living in times of great evil,
and nothing but great faith in an infinitely
great God will be able to do anything
of substance in such a time as this.
Let me close with a short account from
one of Smith Wigglesworth's meetings that took place
in Ireland.
There were many sick carried to that meeting.
Many people were seeking the baptism in the
Holy Spirit.
There were sinners there who were under mighty
conviction.
A moment came when the breath of God
swept through the meeting.
In about ten minutes, every sinner in that
place was saved.
Everyone who had been seeking the Holy Spirit
was baptized, and every sick one was healed.
God is a reality, and His power can
never fail.
As our faith reaches out, God will meet
us, and the same rain will fall.
It is the same blood that cleanses, the
same power, the same Holy Spirit, and the
same Jesus made real through the power of
the Holy Spirit.
What would happen if we would believe God?