Faith Enables Us to Be Overcomers
Faith not only enables us to overcome the flesh and the world, but also overcome the devil. Only faith can repel the enemy. Thus, when we lose faith, we leave ourselves wide open for his vicious attacks. Satan knows that faith and doubt cannot coexist, therefore he does everything in his power to make us doubt God and His faithfulness.
Doubt and unbelief affect every choice we make. Unbelief can destroy our sensitivity to God’s voice, and if we choose to entertain this attitude, we’ll end up spiritually shipwrecked.
This is exactly what is happening in the Christian body today. Satan is on an all-out attack in all of our lives and if we don’t recognize this and if we don’t pick up our Shield of Faith, then we will never survive! Doubt can always be traced back to unbelief in God’s Word and His promises.
Romans 10:17 tells us that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, which is one of the main reasons why being in God’s Word on a daily basis is so important. However, Hebrews 4:2 goes on to say that, “The word preached did not profit them [because it was not] mixed with faith.”
Doubting the character of God will stop your spiritual growth and ultimately devour your faith. The only way you can ever counteract such doubt is by an act of will to believe that God will never let you down and never deceive you, no matter what He allows in your life.
An Example: Aggie
I’d like to share a story from one of David Wilkerson’s newsletters, 1 that perfectly illustrates the danger of doubting God:
In 1921, two young missionary couples in Stockholm, Sweden, received a burden to go to the Belgian Congo (which became Zaire). David and Svea Flood (along with their two-year-old son) joined Joel and Bertha Erickson to battle insects, fierce heat, malaria and malnutrition. But after six months in the jungle, they had made little or no contact with the native people. Although the Ericksons decided to return to the mission station, the Floods chose to stay in their lonely outpost. Svea was now pregnant and sick with malaria, yet she faithfully continued to minister to their one and only convert, a little boy from one of the nearby villages.
Svea died after giving birth to a healthy baby girl, and as David Flood stood over his beloved wife’s grave, he poured out his bitterness to God: “Why did You allow this? We came here to give our lives, and now my wife is dead at 27! All we have to show for all this is one little village boy who probably doesn’t even understand what we’ve told him. You’ve failed me, God. What a waste of life!”
David Flood ended up leaving his new daughter with the Ericksons and taking his son back home with him to Sweden. He then went into the import business, and never allowed the name of “God” to be mentioned in his presence. His little girl was raised in the Congo by an American missionary couple, who named their adopted daughter “Aggie.”
Throughout her life, Aggie tried to locate her real father, but her letters were never answered. She never knew that David Flood had remarried and fathered four more children, and she never knew that he had plunged into despair and had become a total alcoholic. But when she was in her forties, Aggie and her husband were given round-trip tickets to Sweden, and while spending a day’s layover in London, the couple went to hear a well-known black preacher from the Belgian Congo.
After the meeting, Aggie asked the preacher, “Did you ever know David and Svea Flood?” To her great surprise, he answered, “Svea Flood led me to the Lord when I was a little boy.'” Aggie was ecstatic to learn that her mother’s only convert was being mightily used to evangelize Zaire, and he was overjoyed to meet the daughter of the woman who had introduced him to Christ.
When Aggie arrived in Sweden, she located her father in an impoverished area of Stockholm, living in a rundown apartment filled with empty liquor bottles. David Flood was now a 73-year-old diabetic who had had a stroke and whose eyes were covered with cataracts, yet when she identified herself, he began to weep and apologize for abandoning her. But when Aggie said, “That’s okay, Daddy. God took care of me,” he became totally enraged.
“God didn’t take care of you!” he cried. “He ruined our whole family! He led us to Africa and then betrayed us! Nothing ever came of our time there, and it was a waste of our lives!”
That’s when Aggie told him about the black preacher she’d just met in London, and how the Congo had been evangelized through the efforts of his wife’s one and only convert. As he listened to his daughter, the Holy Spirit suddenly fell on David Flood, and tears of sorrow and repentance began to flow down his face. Although God mercifully restored him before he died, David Flood left behind five unsaved and embittered children. His anger towards God had totally wasted his life’s potential, and created a tragic legacy for his family.
This story clearly illustrates the fact that we must never doubt God or base our faith upon our own human understanding of what God is doing. Had David Flood chosen by an act of his will to accept his situation as coming directly from the hand of God, who knows what awesome fruit God could have brought forth from his life? God is involved in every aspect of our existence, and there is no sorrow so great that He cannot “recycle” it to bring forth blessing.
The wise Christian believes that everything God allows in his life comes forth from God’s Love, and has been designed to transform him into Christ’s Image. Let’s remember to keep in mind C. S. Lewis’ words, “What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil (in His eyes).”
This is a partial transcript of a wonderful series on Faith in the Night seasons by Nancy Missler that can be found here https://www.khouse.org/articles/2000/221/#notes