What to do when faith seems weak, victory is lost (Part 1)

Obituaries
Most of us are going through various storms in life and this at times can affect our faith. One can easily become discouraged. What do you do when your faith is negatively affected and victory seems lost?

Grace tidings with Dr Doug Mamvura

Most of us are going through various storms in life and this at times can affect our faith. One can easily become discouraged. What do you do when your faith is negatively affected and victory seems lost?

The first thing one has to do is to recognise the source of the opposition as being Satan and stand your ground (Ephesians 6: 13). It is interesting to note that so many people including believers are not very sure whether it is God or the devil causing their problems. You hear some believers saying “May be the Lord is trying to teach me something through this disease.” How can God “teach you something by inflicting a disease on you? What kind of God would do such a wicked thing? You and I evil as we are, would we do that to our own children?

We should know that Adam committed treason by handing over this world to the devil who then became the god of this world as we see in 2 Corinthians 4:4 — “But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this world has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.” This god is the source of most of our problems and challenges apart from the fact that some of us create our own problems through our foolish decisions and bad choices.

Most people accuse God of sickness, disease, poverty, disasters or death of loved ones. God is not the author or responsible for all these things.

How can God heal sickness if He is the one who caused it? Why would He silence the storms and say “Peace be still” when He is the author of those storms? This shows how much we don’t know about the true nature of God. God is a good God. He is not schizophrenic.

Why would the God who cause sickness and disease heal the same people He would have inflicted with those diseases? If He caused death, why would He resurrect dead people like Lazarus? Jesus said that a kingdom that is divided amongst itself will not stand (Mark 3:24 -25).

The word of God tells us that when Satan is finally eliminated from this world, there shall be nothing that will hurt or destroy. All these problems originate from the devil, not God.

Most of us from the time we were little children, we listened to other people who were not grounded in the Word of God instead of listening to the Word of God. Consequently, we became religiously brainwashed instead of being Bible taught. We have heard a lot of unscriptural things even preached from the pulpit. As a result, some of us don’t allow the Bible to interfere with our religion and tradition.

This is why lives are not being transformed. People preach good ideas and not the Gospel and yet “it is the Gospel which is the power unto salvation. Its amazing how some of us preachers have come up with our own philosophies. I like it when Paul says “when I came to you, I didn’t come with excellence of speech or human wisdom for I determined to know nothing except Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:1).

I remember a certain well- known pastor in town saying to me and his team “there is no need to quote the scriptures just be practical. How sad when one runs away from the Word and settles for human wisdom. Your human mind can never solve spiritual problems. The Bible talks about getting our mind renewed by the Word of God.

The crisis of life comes to all of us. When this happens, you should always ask yourself what does the Word of God say about my situation? Don’t just rush to get advice from some of your friends who don’t even have a relationship with God. So many a time we rush all over seeking advice and we use God as the last resort.

Its only the thief that comes to steal, kill and destroy. Therefore, anything that steals, kills and destroys is a thief and it is certainly not God. The Bible is a progressive revelation. You don’t get the full revelation in the Old Testament. The Old Testament is only types and shadows of that which would come. We only get the full revelation in the New Testament.

People get confused with what used to happen in the Old Testament when people broke the law and they see God as a harsh God. The reality is that it was the children of Israel in Exodus who said to Moses tell God that “we are able to do everything that God says we should do”. They were literally boasting about their efforts and yet they failed to honour the laws that they were given and had to suffer the consequences. Every behaviour has consequences and God warned them as we see in Deuteronomy 28 about how they would either be blessed or cursed.

In the New Testament we see how God had to use Jesus as our sacrifice and He bore the full wrath of God’s punishment on our behalf. This shows the immeasurable love of God towards His children.

There are laws that God put in this world such as the law of gravity. If you violate such laws you will suffer the consequences. If you fall from a tall building, you will certainly die or injure yourself because of the law of gravity. You can’t blame God for that. Similarly, sickness, disease and some of the evils we face in this world are due to the fall of man starting from Adam. Man adopted a sin nature from Adam. People are not sinners because they sin. They sin because they have a sinful nature from Adam and this is why they need to be born again.

Sin brought all these evils we see in the world today. Everything that God created was “good” and man was “very good” according to God prior to the fall. All man’s suffering is as a result of Adam’s fall. The Bible makes it clear that we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). God warned man, including Adam about the consequences of sin. However, man chose to ignore God and listen to Satan.

Satan was not the god of this world from the beginning. Adam was. Adam was given dominion over this earth and everything soon after creation. In other words, God made Adam the god of this world and gave him responsibility to run it. Unfortunately, Adam committed treason. He sold out to the devil and by so doing he sold us out. He didn’t have a moral right to do it but he had a legal right to do it and so he did it. The devil began to rule this earth and got the dominion from Adam. However, we thank because through Jesus Christ we now have victory over the devil and we can now claim back what rightfully belongs to us.

In Luke 4: 5-8, the Bible records the temptation of Jesus and it sheds light on Satan’s dominion upon the earth: “Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said to Him.” All this authority I will give You, and their glory, for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if You will worship before me, all will be yours”.

As can be seen from the above scripture, “all the authority and glory of this earth kingdom had been delivered to Satan” because of Adam’s treasonous behaviour. There are people who have argued that the devil was lying. If that was the case, then this wouldn’t have been a temptation to Jesus. If that was the case, Jesus would have known it and there wouldn’t have been any temptation. These people who say the devil lied, unknowingly are accusing Jesus of being a partner to a fraud and being dishonest. Because if this was a lie then Jesus was dishonest. Jesus didn’t dispute the fact that Satan had been given the authority, which means it was true.

We can clearly see that Satan, the god of this world, was given dominion and, hence, our responsibility as believers is to take away what rightfully belongs to us from the devil. We have to preach the good news that the devil was defeated more than 2 000 years ago and we have been handed back through the finished work of Jesus what belongs to us. We need to remain standing in faith and it doesn’t matter what comes our way. The Greater One lives inside us.

Dr Doug Mamvura is a graduate of Charis Bible School. Feedback: [email protected] or Twitter @dougmamvura