As Christians, we profess to live by faith. This sounds good in theory, but it’s harder than it looks. What God asks of us isn’t just the kind of belief we shout about on Sunday, but the kind that shows up when life gets messy. We’ve all been there, staring at a situation that contradicts everything we’ve been believing for. What we consider the most is what we’ll be sensitive to; therefore, if we spend our time thinking about the problem, we’ll be hardened to the promise.
Abraham gave us the blueprint for this. When God told him he would have a son in his advanced age, “…He considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb” (Romans 4:19). Abraham didn’t spend his days meditating on the contradiction; he chose to consider the promise, and because of that, he saw manifestation. We must do the same.
The temptation to doubt is pressure applied to the flesh, and it starts in our thoughts. If we don’t think about it, it can’t tempt us, which is why the enemy works overtime to get us to consider the circumstances of what we see, hear, and feel. We must remember this when we’re struggling. “…Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).
We live in an environment that constantly challenges our faith. Unbelief comes in three ways: ignorance, disbelief, and through our senses. We fix ignorance by getting into the Word; disbelief is trickier because it’s rooted in tradition, but we overcome it by choosing truth over tradition. The hardest one is unbelief through the senses, which is where fasting and prayer come in.
Jesus had to explain this to His disciples when they couldn’t cast a demon out of a boy. “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting” (Matthew 17:21). He wasn’t talking about the demon, but about unbelief. Fasting retrains our bodies to respond to our born-again spirits instead of to our five senses. It’s our way of telling our bodies, “You don’t run this—I live by the Word.”
The disciples missed it again when Jesus warned them about the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod, thinking He meant physical bread. This was after they had witnessed Him feeding thousands of people with only five loaves and two fishes. “And when Jesus knew it, he saith unto them, Why reason ye, because ye have no bread? perceive ye not yet, neither understand? have ye your heart yet hardened? Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember? When I brake the five loaves among five thousand, how many baskets full of fragments took ye up? They say unto him, Twelve. And when the seven among four thousand, how many baskets full of fragments took ye up? And they said, Seven. And he said unto them, How is it that ye do not understand?” (Mark 8:17-21). The danger of a hardened heart is that it forgets what God has already done. “For they considered not the miracle of the loaves: for their heart was hardened” (Mark 6:52)
When unbelief tries to creep in, we speak the Word. We don’t just think the promise—we say it. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue…” (Proverbs 18:21). Every time a thought comes that contradicts the Word, we open our mouths and declare the truth. When we’re struggling, choosing the promise makes manifestation inevitable.
