My Wife and I grew up in the Faith movement. There, I said it! 😊
My Grandmother was from a Pentecostal background, so naturally, she began to teach me about having faith for healing. I remember the days, fresh out of High School and after working the night shift, I would visit my Grandmother on Sunday mornings, and we watched a Faith teacher from the West Coast. I would be absolutely amazed at the teaching about topics such as the Holy Spirit, Faith, God’s provision, and healing. Little did I know that those days would instill in me a foundation that has had a lasting impact on my life.
Not long after my Wife and I were married, we attended a church where the Pastor was from West Texas and had graduated from Rama Bible College in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We were like “fresh out of the box” Christians, with very little influence from churches steeped in religion. Back in those days, I was barely working an above-minimum-wage job; we had children, and we barely had anything of value except we knew how to put our faith and trust in God, believing God would take care of us.
Needless to say, God took care of us and more! No, we didn’t have all the finer things in life, but we never went hungry, the kids had clothes to wear, we always had a home to live in and good steady employment.
I can remember when we were running low on food, and one of my wife’s sisters would show up and say their freezer quit working and wanted to know if we wanted the meat before it was thawed. This happened twice. One day, my Wife was going through the kids’ wardrobe and realized we didn’t have winter coats for them to wear. Within the following month, someone stopped with a box of clothes that contained some used coats. Keep in mind that my wife never told anyone, not even me. I remember the time our son had come down with a fever. My Wife and I laid our hand on him and rebuked the fever. The fever left him almost immediately. Our last child was born at home; the labor was so quick we didn’t have time to leave the house. In the midst of the chaos, my Wife wanted to scream, but when she did, it came out in her heavenly prayer language. At that moment, we felt a warm, gentle breeze in the room, and instantly, there was peace. My Wife heard the word “push,” and when she did, out came the baby’s head. Without exaggeration, there are so many more examples I could use, but I hope you get the point.
I worked as a manager for a fast-growing company. The time came when I was offered a job promotion to work at the corporate office in the Midwest. We felt like God was moving us towards it, so we moved. We found a really awesome Non-Denominational church with a focus on building relationships, something we had never experienced before. We spent about 20 years building the church, but in those years, I don’t recall too many messages on faith or how to exercise our faith. In fact, I remember times when the faith movement was joked about. Word of Faith churches and para churches were not really considered churches; only the local church was supreme.
In time, something began to gnaw from within me. I couldn’t explain it, but something didn’t feel quite right, and I needed to know what it was. We ended up leaving that church because I needed to get out of that environment and find out what was gnawing from within. It took a little over five years (there were other things that needed to be dealt with), but I began to figure some things out. Through a series of events, we found ourselves in a Word of Faith conference. During those days, it was like reconnecting with our roots from earlier days. It was then I realized our faith had been lying dormant, and we had forgotten the principles of faith.
Hebrews 11:6 says it’s impossible to please God without faith. God wants us to depend on him in everything because this pleases Him. In my 30-plus years of living the Christian life, I have come to the conclusion that faith, or learning how to exercise our faith, or let me say it this way, learning how to depend on God and trust in Him, should be central to the development of Christian living.
In my last blog, I discussed Grace, God’s provision for the believer. In this new covenant of grace, God has provided EVERYTHING we need for Life and godliness. Grace supplies, but it is our faith that causes us to obtain it.
As with every past move of God, there have always been those who take it to the extreme or out of context, and the Faith movement is no exception. But as I’ve been studying God’s grace, I have come to realize that there must be a balance between grace and faith. If you lean too far to one or the other, errors in your thinking will occur. For example, I remember the so-called “name it and claim it” days when we would lay our hands on things and claim it in the name of Jesus. Here is the problem with that kind of thinking: if Grace didn’t provide it, your faith will not receive it. Another example of the misuse of faith is thinking you can use faith apart from Jesus and that is simply not going to work. Everything is connected through Jesus!
As you can tell by the title, this is just part 1 of the discussion of faith. Next time I’ll dive more deeply into this awesome gift God has given us.
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