Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”
Fear is a form of worry. We worry about so many different things. Ninety-five percent of the things we worry about never happen.
Then suddenly multiple things happen that we were not worried about, which creates a huge emotional storm in our life. Often when something bad happens almost every aspect of our life is impacted. We feel like we are being bombarded and attacked on every front.
How we react is determined by what level of faith we have ascended to. It has been said that the Bible says at least 365 times, “do not fear.”
God is very clear that He does not want us to spend our lives in fear. We have several Bible verses that teach us how not to be afraid, but Romans 8:28 is one of my favorites.
In 1 John 4 we learn that “perfect love casts out all fear.” In 2 Timothy 1:7 we find that God did not give us a spirit of fear or of timidity, but He gave a spirit of love, power, and sanity. Fear very easily evolves into insanity and that is not God’s intended purpose for any of us.
Moving from fear to knowing is a progressive process that carries us through belief, trust, faith, and eventually to knowing.
For a Christian, fear is a lack of trust in God. My good friend Pastor Doug Sager used to say that faith is confident obedience to God’s word, regardless of circumstances or situations. Faith and fear are polar opposites. There is a good kind of fear, which is respect or reverence for God and His word, the Bible. That is not the fear I am focusing on here. The biblical definition of faith is found in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:6 goes on to say that it is impossible to please or even seek God’s presence without diligent faith.
We have simple faith in many things. We have faith that the light switch will turn on the light. We have faith that when we turn the water faucet water will come out. We have faith in the unintelligibly scribbled prescription order from a doctor when we give it to a pharmacist that he is going to be able to read it and give us the correct medicine.
Biblical faith is more simple and much more powerful, but biblical knowing is even more powerful than faith. Real faith must be practiced.
George Müller (German – born as : Johann Georg Ferdinand Müller) (27 September 1805 – 10 March 1898), a Christian evangelist and director of the Ashley Down orphanage in Bristol, England, cared for 10,024 orphans in his life. He was well known for providing an education to the children under his care, to the point where he was accused of raising the poor above their natural station in life.
He also established 117 schools which offered Christian education to over 120,000 children, many of them being orphans.
Once, while crossing the Atlantic on the SS Sardinian in August 1877, his ship ran into thick fog. He explained to the captain that he needed to be in Quebec by the following afternoon, but Captain Joseph E. Dutton (later known as "Holy Joe") said that he was slowing the ship down for safety and Müller's appointment would have to be missed. Müller asked to use the chartroom to pray for the lifting of the fog. The captain followed him down, claiming it would be a waste of time.
After Müller prayed, the captain started to pray, but Müller stopped him; partly because of the captain's unbelief, but mainly because he believed the prayer had already been answered.
When the two men went back to the bridge, they found the fog had lifted. The captain became a Christian shortly afterwards. Muller had practiced his faith so much that it became part of his nature.
Christian faith operates like one of the laws of physics. The sun will come up tomorrow no matter what happens. This is a physical certainty. If you step off a 40 story building you will fall and probably die. This is the law of gravity.
Biblical faith is a spiritual law that is manifested in physical reality. That is the gist of what Hebrews 11:1 means. Biblical faith must be activated with a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, which begins with faith.
Jesus said in John 6:47, “He who believes in me has everlasting life.” A Christian matures from believing to faith to knowing. Believing in Jesus opens the door to heaven. Faith in Jesus opens the door to the associated benefits of being a Christian. Benefits like the abiding presence of God in our lives.
Knowing is probably the highest level of faith that we can achieve. Knowing is belief manifested in faith, plus personal experience. Experience is how faith is proved and stored in the recesses of who we are.
When we had faith that God would bring us through a situation, we mentally recorded the steps that brought us through. It may not have been the outcome we wanted but we are still standing!
The best biblical example is to read and study the book of Job. Job lost everything he had but he never blamed God through the entire process of losing his possessions, his family, and his health. Job’s friends began a dialogue with him with long diatribes of how Job must have sinned to bring on the disasters that surrounded him. Job was not perfect in his responses to his friends, but he maintained his integrity and his faith in God.
On a side note, when Job’s friends came to visit him, they did not speak a word for a week. They just sat with Job.
The ministry of presence is one of the greatest things you can do for a person that is hurting. Then Job’s friends opened their mouths, which would later result in God telling them to let Job pray for them if they wanted forgiveness for their big mouths.
Belief is hoping something will happen. Faith is acting on the promises of God to believe that something will happen. Knowing is realizing that a born-again Christian living right, believing the Word of God, trusting the Holy Spirit of God has a formula that cannot fail.
Two plus two equals four no matter how you add it up. It is a logical fact that we can easily prove. If you add two apples to a bag of two apples, you have four apples in the bag, which cannot be denied. Every adult has experience adding two plus two to get four of something.
Knowing is just personal experience of what has happened in the past, coupled with faith in what God is doing now and will do in the future, to produce confident obedience to God’s word, regardless of how bleak the circumstances and situations appear.
God allowed Job and his friends to ramble on about justice and causes until he showed up in their meeting and proved He is past understanding. At that point Job repented of his arrogance and God began the process of restoring him.
Job would go on to say in Job 42:5, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.”
In terms that we can understand, what Job was saying was that he heard all the Sunday School lessons and Bible stories about God, but through Job’s trials, he had experienced who God really is, which resulted in Job’s repentance that lead to God’s restoration process.
In Job 42:6 Job repented in dust and ashes. He very much humbled himself. We know that God resists the proud and gives grace the humble. The “know” of Romans 8:28 only happens through faith and experience. We live in a fallen world where bad things happen and we know that bad things happen to good people.
Only when we “know” can we understand that even in the bad things that happen God can bring something good, if we trust Him and “know” that it will all work out.
I know this is hard to grasp and I can’t fathom the pain and hurt that some of you have had to endure, but just remember that God proved how much He loved you by allowing His own son to die on the cross in your place so you could escape hell and have eternal life.