Is This What You Want?

This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture that reject fear in any form. Fear is seen as a spiritual force used by Satan to keep people down. Instead, faith is championed as an allegiance to God. The importance of obedience, choosing life over death, and relying on the Holy Spirit is emphasized. The Word of God is seen as a guide for living by faith and aligning ourselves with the Father's will. The love and security found in God's hands are highlighted, along with the reminder that God loves us just as we are. Welcome to Fear No Fear. Grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit embrace you today. This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear in any and all forms. Fear is a spiritual force, the currency of darkness and ignorance. It's what we inherited when Adam gave up his faith and Satan uses it to keep people down. His only weapon is words. If he can get you believing or looking at words of fear, he's got you. Instead, we champion faith as an allegiance to God, as a belief and trust and loyalty to the Lord God Almighty. We accept the evidence of his word as unvarnished truth, as is, just as it's written. We get close to his perfect love through the word, and perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4.18 All scripture is taken from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Visit eBible.org Isaiah 7.25 All the hills that were cultivated with the hoe, you shall not come there for fear of briars and thorns, but it shall be for the sending out of oxen and for sheep to tread on. Faith is belief as completed, eager expectation. We're not hoping, maybe, we're positive and sure. Faith is manifested obedience. Fear, on the other hand, is belief as anxious worry or selfish reliance. Fear is manifested rebellion. We're told, don't fear, because we have a choice not to do it. We're told, don't fear, because of all the negative things that it brings to our mental landscape. We're told not to fear because it robs you of positive things in your life and being in a place where you can be blessed. We're also told not to fear because of what is waiting for us when we do. This isn't a threat. This isn't the Lord with his arm up, fist clenched, waiting to smack us a good one. This is a warning from love. This is a chance to change the path that you are on. Behold, his soul is puffed up. It is not upright in him, but the righteous will live by his faith. This is one of those key verses where we see the basic principle of life in the kingdom. Will we live by our faith or will we not? Are we going to be puffed up, selfish? Is uprightness going to be in us or not? The righteous will live by faith. When the law was given, it was presented as a choice between life and death. One way leads to life. One way leads to death. In Isaiah, it is a time of judgment coming on Israel and Judah. In chapter 7, where our verse is from, it is a prophetic prophecy about the coming humiliation of Judah. The problem is that the people of the Lord have violated their covenant with the Lord. Hear, heavens, and listen, earth, for Yahweh has spoken. I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me, Isaiah 1-2. This isn't a single misstep, but generation after generation who are corrupt and intentionally moving away from the Lord. Right from the beginning of everything, humanity is warned that the ways of the Lord are life, and every other way leads to death. Genesis 2, 16-17. The people of the Lord were choosing death, and judgment was coming. There was war coming, and it was going to decimate the nation of Judah. The land was going to be empty to people. Cities were going to be thrown down. The vineyards were going to be abandoned because there weren't going to be enough workers to work them. Overcome with thorns and briars, people will stay away and not work the fields. It will be left as pasture land for oxen and sheep. The entire industry that brought much wealth to the people would be no more. Their livelihood would be impossible to continue in. Life as they knew it would be over. It would be dead. Not because God wanted them to suffer. Not because God is petty. Not because in and of Himself He wanted to bring it upon them. No. It was because of the path they chose to tread. God was using Isaiah to bring them a prophetic warning. Their last chance was before them, and they were missing it. And guess what? We have this same choice. We have accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior. We've been born again as new creatures under grace. Are we living by faith? Are we choosing to keep the Lord as first and foremost in our lives? Are we broken and submitted to Him? Or are we trying to do it ourselves? Salvation isn't a process where our works and our thoughts and our words are gaining us right standing before God. It is an instant gift of the Lord by grace through faith. Are we then walking in it, or are we turning away from it? For if we sin willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remains no more a sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and a fierceness of fire which will devour the adversaries. Hebrews 10, 26-27 Are we insulting the Spirit of grace by treating the blood of the covenant as if it was nothing? Or are we holding the Father as the highest thing in our lives? Is Jesus our way? It is something that is a conscious choice every moment of our lives. Will we be informed by the Lord or by ourselves? For you need endurance so that having done the will of God you may receive the promise. In a very little while he who comes will come and will not wait, but the righteous one will live by faith. If he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the saving of the soul. Hebrews 10, 36-39 Endurance. This admits that it is not an automatic process. It's not saved, which is instantaneous, and then you never have to think about it again. Yes, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit at the moment of our salvation, Ephesians 1.13, but we are called to live by faith, Hebrews 11, 6. Live by it. Our decisions, our words, our deeds, our thoughts, all of who we are should be motivated by faith. Each and every corner of our consciousness is meant to be motivated by faith. This is the journey we are on. We need endurance to make it through, because it isn't easy to be honest with yourself. It's even harder to be honest with the Lord, because you can't hide anything from Him. Sanctification is the process where we bring pieces of ourselves to Him and submit them for correction, to change things from what pleases us to what pleases Him. We do this with the Word. The Word is what retrains us. It is what renews us. It is what seeps through our minds and into our hearts, where it steeps like a strong tea, those little leaves slowly churning that pot of water into a whole different substance, a new thing that shares a lot of similarities to what it was, but also new and fresh. If we are reading it with intent, studying it to determine the motivations behind every verse, there will always be something to learn from the Word. We get the basics, and then we get some deeper truths. After that, there'll be another level. With the Lord, there is always another level. We never see it all at once, because unless you really know and understand a foundational truth, there's nothing to build on. God doesn't rush us through Revelation. He builds us properly and fully before promoting us to the next level. He does it so that there is structure to us. He does it so that we are strong and will not fall over. It's a partnership with Him. We choose to seek Him. He shows up. We choose to submit to Him. He does something with us. We need to take that step so that He can take His. Faith is about that which we do not see with our reason, our feelings, our sensations. It is about our spirit, and that spirit informing the rest of us as to the truth in which we imbibe. Adam and Eve did not live by faith as expectation. They met and talked with the Lord face to face. They saw Him. When we get to heaven, we won't need to live by faith as expectation. We will see Him. We won't need to believe for something to happen. We won't have eager expectation. We will see Him. We will have the things. It will be there. We will be walking in it all. But we will be able to live by faith as manifested obedience. Our obedience now is training for our obedience then. It is training our minds to rely on our spirit to get our body to do what we want. We won't perfect the process until we are fully in heaven with a new body that matches our spirit. Meanwhile, we will be doing our best to choose faith in every way, in every area, every time with this fleshly body. To do this, we rely heavily on the Holy Spirit. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of all that I said to you. John 14.26 This is why we need to be reading the Word. Every scripture has value to us. 2 Timothy 3.16-17 If it is in our mind and our heart, the Holy Spirit can remind us of it. He can bring it up and point out the lesson, show where we have something out of line with the Father's will so that we can address it by submitting it to Jesus and letting Him renew us. The Holy Spirit is our guide, always pointing to Jesus, always showing us how we can live like Him, walk like Him, talk like Him, and abide in Him. He is our renewer, Titus 3.5. If we will actively listen to Him, we will stay the course. If we are obedient to Him, we will grow every day. We will have the thoughts of the Father revealed to us, 1 Corinthians 2.10-11. And if we know His thoughts, why wouldn't we want to align ourselves with Him? This is about Jesus doing the work in us. This is about the Holy Spirit doing the work in us. We are submitting to obedience and they are doing the thing. In ourselves, we can do nothing. We can do nothing that is worthy of justification. We can do nothing that earns us brownie points or anything like that. All we can do is submit to their process, their way, in their time. And through that, God does it in us. It is grace by faith. Choose life or choose death, Deuteronomy 30.19. Choose faith or choose fear, Psalm 112.6-8. This is our daily walk. This is the battleground where we fight against principalities and powers, Ephesians 6.12. We don't stand alone, Hebrews 13.5. We don't stand unequipped, Ephesians 6.13-18. We're able to make the choice because God says we're able to make the choice. We can stand because God says that we can stand. We can endure because God says that we can endure. God cannot lie, Numbers 23.19. God keeps His word, Isaiah 55.11. He is a God of promises, and He keeps every promise that He makes, Psalm 145.13. God gave us dominion, and we have a choice about whether we will walk in His ways and walk in His promises. We can refuse Him. We can turn away. We can choose disobedience. But nothing good will happen. The word is a covenant between us and God. It is the plan God has to keep us near Him. That's where He wants us to be. That's why before anything was created, God made a plan to make sure we can be with Him, Ephesians 1.3-6. God isn't a judgmental God. He's a righteous God. Yahweh will judge us if that's the path we choose. Yahweh will accept us if that is the path we choose. See, sin has a penalty. Disobedience has a penalty. Jesus paid that price and opened a path for us to be close to the Lord. It's up to us whether we accept it, whether we go through that door, and whether we stay on the other side or not. Don't look for a quick fix. Don't look for an instant solution where you can coast for the rest of your life. Living by faith isn't coasting. Just like if you do not apply effort, you won't get anywhere on roller skates, if you don't apply choice, you won't get anywhere by faith. Faith is strengthened by us hearing the word and feeding off of it, Romans 10.17. Whenever we are facing anything, we need to go to the word and see what it says about it. The word talks about everything in our lives. It was penned by human beings, but it was written by Yahweh God Almighty. It is crafted to always be relevant, always be new, always be teaching, always be true, and a dozen or more other things. It's a remarkable book. There's none like it. It is living. It is our window into the Father's heart. It is the guidepost we can use to orient ourselves to what He wants, what He loves, what He says is righteous behavior, and how we can walk in the victory that God got for us in and through Jesus. We are asked not to fear. We are asked to be obedient. Not out of fear, not out of obligation, out of love, out of respect, out of a desire to make the Lord happy, to please Him with every word, every thought, and every deed. When we look at what He did for us, what He gained for us, what He wants for us, when we honestly look at it all, how can we choose to disobey? Why wouldn't we grab the abundant life in Christ Jesus that is possible for each and every one of us? Every day we have before us what the Lord set there, life or death, faith or fear, the blessing or the curse. Remember that Jesus redeemed us from the curse, Galatians 3.13. Remember that God didn't send Jesus to judge us, but to save us, John 3.17. You see, without the Lord, all we would have in front of us is death, fear, and the curse. The Lord set life, faith, and the blessing there. Walk in what God has for you. Walk in obedience. You don't want to have what will happen if you were disobedient. You don't want overrun vineyards. You want a vibrant industry of what God works in your life. But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be revealed, that they have been done in God, John 3.21. When you get up, when you lie down, when you walk around, when you were at home, when you were at work, listen. Listen to understand what the Holy Spirit is saying to you. Listen to prepare yourself to do what is being asked of you. Lean all of your understanding, all of your trust, and all of your strength on the Lord. Let him guide you. Let him correct you. Let him sanctify you. Let him be your all in all. In Jesus, by Jesus, through Jesus, and for Jesus, be the gift of faith that you were created to be. Our daily affirmation of God's love is John 10.28-30. We are born again. We are new creatures. We are redeemed from the curse. We are not sinners, but redeemed. We are whole, healthy, and secure. That last is hard to remember when we're watching the news. It's hard to remember when we are swamped at work with deadlines approaching. It's hard to remember when we've spent too much, have taxes hanging over our heads, or are late to an event and stuck in traffic. It's hard to remember when we're arguing with our partner. It's hard to remember when our kids are driving us crazy. It's hard to remember in this world because this world is all about insecurity. It is about the changing nature of things. The adaptation of our species to the environment we find ourselves in, physical, mental, and social. But Jesus said that we are secure. We have been given to Jesus by Yahweh God Almighty, placed in the palm of Jesus' hand. By being placed in Jesus' hand, we are in the Father's hand. Jesus and the Father are one. To be in the hand of one is to be in the hand of the other. We are double-wrapped by God Himself. We cannot be touched by anything. Trials and tribulations happen, but they do not touch the us that is in His hands. No matter what the world comes up with or comes at us with, we are secure in God. Give up anxiety. Give up depression. Give up reliance on the world's systems. Give up the shadow of security that money, property, and legal documentation gives. Rely on the Lord. Rest in those hands. Enjoy the security of the Lord. Listen to Him. Do what He says. Avoid what He warns about. You will make it through every storm, every political upheaval, every financial shenanigan, everything that can come against you or rise up around you, safe, secure. He loves you and keeps you, no matter what. As we close, remember that you have earth. You are precious and valuable. Declare this. Today, God loves that I, now you, fill in the blank. Was it a meal you made? A smile you gave? Did you get out of bed? Read? Put on socks? There's no wrong answers here. There is no end to God's love and no end to the things about you that He loves each and every day. Pick one. And remember, the Lord loves you just because you're you. 1 John 4 9-10 tells us, By this, God's love was revealed in us, that God has sent His only-born Son into the world, that we might live through Him. And this is love. Not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His perfect love turned away God's wrath because of sin. And it casts out our fear, too. See verses 18 and 19. We love because He first loved us. He just loves us. Can't get enough of us. And that is wonderful. See you next time.