What a blessed month of March it has been, our faith has been strengthened in every of our services and we are the better for it. Last Sunday, Pastor Kola taught on a lifestyle of faith, he began by noting that while many Christians are concious of faith as a tool with which we receive our desires from God, faith can be and should be more than a tool, it should our lifestyle as believers, he called our attention to Hebrews 11 being a documention of those who not only used faith as a tool to get something they wanted but who had a lifestyle of faith and pleased God thereby.
Reading from 1 John 5:4, he pointed out that faith is the means by which we walk in the manifestation of the victory God has given us and so to live a life of consistent victories, we must cultivate a lifestyle of faith and this is God’s expectation for us as seen in Romans 1:17 and Hebrews 10:38 where it says that the just shall live by faith.
He went on to explain that the world does not inspire faith because it operates by sight but we have been delivered from that way of life, we are those that believe and have the spirit of faith. In Matthew 4:4, Jesus quoted where it was written in the scriptures that men are to live by every word that proceed out of God’s mouth and not by the things they can see, feel or hear showing us that from the very beginning, God never planned for man to make his choices or be influenced by anything other than his word and Jesus lived his life this way as an example to those of us who believe; a life totally dependent on the word of God.
We also learnt about the Apostle Paul who in 2 Corinthians 5:7 declared confidently that he walked by faith and not by sight and we saw this statement demonstrated in his life, on his journey to Rome as a prisoner, he had the witness of God’s spirit that the journey was going to be turbulent and he believed God’s word enough to warn the centurion and masters of the ship about the journey but they chose to respond to what they saw instead and went ahead being confident in the calm weather, eventually, things took a turn according to Paul’s warning and after days of struggling on the sea, while the others were scared for their life, Paul received God’s word through an angel that no life on the ship would be lost and he allowed this word to influence his actions when the others had given up, when they eventually got to land and a viper bit him on the hand, he shook it off without fear because he believed God’s word that nothing could hurt him inspite of what everybody else thought and knew about the snake, his lifestyle of faith set him apart in all of these situations.
Pastor Kola charged us to have a lifestyle of faith such that no matter what we see or hear, our stand will be on God’s word, he reminded us that faith begins with the word of God and emphasised the need to pay attention to God’s word in order for it to influence our responses in life, he admonished us to ensure that everything we do, and every choice we make is inspired by the word of God because only the word of God abides forever, in concluding the message, he read from Colossians 3:16 where we are instructed to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly because in doing so, we are positioning ourselves to be totally influenced by the word of God.
