EXCERPT THREE.
2 Cor. 4:13 says we have the same spirit of faith in us as Jesus because the Holy Spirit is the spirit of faith, too. As He lives with us, then His faith actually joins with ours. So faith is a gift of God, from God, for God. So God has us covered, whichever way. It is the product of a Spirit-filled lifestyle coming from the inner man of the spirit.
The evidence that you are alive is that you breathe. When you are dead what they normally say is, “Well, he is not breathing.” So that is the evidence of being dead. You can’t be alive and not breathe, and you can’t be in Christ and not believe. It doesn’t make any sense to be in Jesus and have misplaced your faith. That is not possible! What you have misplaced is your relationship somewhere along the line. Faith is not the issue. The issue is your relationship with God. If you are in relationship with God, you are in faith. You can’t be in Christ and have misplaced your faith. It doesn’t work like that. Faith is the evidence that you have a relationship with God. You are in relationship; it is easy to believe because God is a believer.
I Cor. 2:12 says Now we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God so that we may know the things freely given to us by God. Col. 2:6 Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him. We have received the Spirit of God who is a Spirit of faith, who comes daily with a measure of His own faith to show us how to believe as a normal part of living.
Faith is not an event. Believing is like breathing. There is no “special faith” just powerful, ordinary believing. There is a gift of faith for when God allows you to be in situations that are larger than your current experience of Him. How many of us understand God loves those moments? To thrust you in to an experience that is bigger than what you know of God and to get you over that hump, to get you across that divide, He has to give you a gift of faith. He loves those times.
I think everyone could, and should, have a gift of faith experience at least once. At the very least it will kill panic. It will kill it stone dead because you are going to have to face it and eat it.
Faith is part of God’s nature. We should receive it in the same way that we receive love, joy, or peace. It is part of His nature; we should receive it in the same way. Faith is always supernatural because it transcends the normal, logical, and the reasonable. In fact, God puts faith in your heart, not your head. This measure of faith that God has given us has a quantity and a quality attached to it.
