Crash Tested Faith: Learning to Ride with God

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to the podcast. You know, if you are successful at anything, if you're good at anything, at some point, you learn the fundamentals of what you're now good at. If you're good at riding a bicycle, you didn't start out that way, remember?

Remember them training wheels you used to have on your bicycle? And man, you couldn't wait to get those training wheels off, but they were on there for a purpose. These training wheels, they help protect you as you learned the fundamentals of riding a bicycle.

You had to learn how to pedal that thing and how to stop it. You had to learn how to steer it and maneuver it. And then eventually, once you kind of mastered those fundamentals a little bit, it was time to pull them training wheels off, and that's when things got crazy.

That's when you ended up in the bushes a couple of times, crashing your bicycle, man. I have had some epic bicycle wrecks in my career. I told you on the last episode that we moved out there to the country in Howell County, off that dirt road.

And I remember one day, I decided I was going to set a bicycle ramp up in the road down at the bottom of the hill, right there by Eric Judd's house, right past our place. You climbed what seemed like a mountain when I was a little kid. It's probably just a small hill now.

But back then, that thing seemed like Mount Everest, man. And I remember I set a ramp up down at the bottom. It was a hot summer day, and I had this bicycle tuned up and ready to go.

It was firing on all cylinders. And so I went and got mom and brought her out there. I said, hey, sit down here and watch this.

I'm getting ready to do something awesome. And for some reason, she let me do it. But I got up at the top of that hill, Mount Everest, and I pedaled down that thing as fast as I could go.

And I hit that ramp, and I looked like Evil Knievel coming off of that thing. And when I landed, I ate that dirt road like a McDonald's Happy Meal.

I was face first, man. I was eating rocks like they were salted french fries. And I remember my elbows were skinned up, and I was beat up.

And that was one of many I had. I had some epic bicycle crashes. And I witnessed some, too.

Even as an adult, I've witnessed some dandies. How about you? You ever crashed a bike when you were learning how to ride?

You know, it's part of the process, learning the fundamentals. You know, now I've matured, I've grown up enough, I know better, than to do something that stupid. But back then, it seemed like a genius idea to get full speed and jump a bicycle ramp.

But now, I know better. I've grown, I've matured, I've developed and gotten smarter. And you know, the Bible tells us in many places that we are to grow.

We are to mature in our faith. We are to develop in our faith walk. We want to get better.

We should be getting better at living the faith life. But that doesn't just happen without us putting in some effort. God is always going to be faithful to do his part, but the problem is we often aren't.

You know, we can choose if we want to go further in the plans of God for our life, and the reality is most of us are too spiritually lazy to get better. And I know that might sound harsh, but it's the truth. I promise you that I could be more developed in my faith than I am today.

I could be further down the road, but there have been times, there have been seasons in my life, that I've been rebellious and I've been lazy, and I didn't want to do it God's way. And the truth is, I still struggle with that at times now. How about you?

Now, one way that we can overcome this, one way that we can stay alert and be aware and get stronger is to talk about it. We can talk about this. And that's why we're taking the time on the podcast to talk about the fundamentals of faith and how important it is for us to be practicing these fundamentals on a regular basis.

They need to be a big part of our life. And so in the last episode, I introduced the five fundamentals that we need to be working on. Do you remember that?

Do you remember what they are? Remember, we called them the A through E's of faith because we assigned a fundamental to each letter A through E in hopes that that would help us remember them moving forward. I know it's helped me.

Hopefully, it's helped you. But let's review them real quick and go over them. The five fundamentals, the A through E's of faith that we're going to be talking about in this series, titled, The Fundamentals of the Faith Life.

Here's the A through E's. The A, remember we talked about, the fundamental that starts with the letter A is to acknowledge the truth of God's Word. If you and I are going to move higher in the things of God, if we're going to handle more and go further, it's going to start with us having developed faith, developing the fundamental of acknowledging the truth of God's Word for our life.

That's such a big fundamental.

The B was to believe. The faith fundamental that starts with the letter B is to believe. If we're going to go further, we have to go from just acknowledging the Word.

Another way you could say acknowledge is agreeing, agreeing. We want to agree with the Word. But if we're going to go further, we've got to move beyond just acknowledgement and agreement, and we've got to move in to actually believe in what God's Word says.

The C that we talked about, the third one, is our confession. What we say, we want to confess what we believe. We want to practice the fundamental of confessing our faith, confessing what we believe God's doing in our life.

You know, like I said last time, if you don't believe it enough to confess it, if you don't believe it enough to say it, then you really don't believe it. You need to backtrack and go back to fundamental of faith number two and work on your belief so that it gets down in you, because the scriptures tell us out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. So once you get this promise, this word, this faith down in your heart, it's going to start coming out of your mouth.

You're going to start speaking it and confessing it. And so that was the third one, the C. The fourth one, the D, the faith fundamental that starts with D is to be a doer of the word.

If we want to keep developing, we want to keep growing, we've got to become a doer, not just a talker, not just a pew setter, not just a church goer, not a podcast listener. We got to move beyond that, and we got to start doing. The scriptures make it clear.

It's only the doers that get results. You can hear it all day long. You can confess it.

You can even believe it and acknowledge it. But if you don't do anything with your faith, you'll see no results. And then finally, the last one that we talked about, the E was a spirit of expectation.

One of the fundamentals of faith for us is we have to live with an expectation that God is going to be faithful to see us through. He's going to be faithful to do what he tells us he'll do. And so that's the A through E.

We want to acknowledge and agree. We want to believe. We want to confess.

We want to do, and we want to expect. Those are some faith fundamentals that we're going to be covering here in the next several episodes on the podcast. And so today, I really just want us to develop this first fundamental of faith, the fundamental of acknowledging that God's promises, his word, is for you.

And I think maybe even bigger than that, it's acknowledging that God is still leading his children today. God is leading me right now. God is leading you right now if you're a submitted child of God.

He's leading you. And sometimes I think we can get so caught up in studying other people's lives and studying even scripture and the accounts in the scripture. We can get so caught up in that, that we forget that God's leading us now.

God is the God of now. He didn't go away at the end of the Bible. I shouldn't just be reading about other people's faith.

I should be telling my own stories of faith. You should be telling your own testimonies of victory. We should be talking about how we're winning, just like the people who operated in these faith fundamentals in the scriptures.

But in order for that to take place, we must acknowledge, we must agree with the reality of who God is for us today. When we see accounts of people having faith failures in the Bible, it's because they refuse to agree with God's Word. They just refuse to agree with it.

They refuse to acknowledge it. If they failed in their faith in the Scriptures, it started with them refusing to acknowledge God's Word or acknowledge His promise. And the opposite is true when we see people having faith victories.

It's because they chose, they made the decision to agree with and acknowledge God and what He promised them, what He told them. And this is consistent in the Bible. This is a consistent principle throughout the Scriptures, and it will be consistent, it will be a consistent principle in your life as well.

When you have faith failures, you refuse to agree with God's Word somewhere along the line. When you have faith victories, you chose to agree. That's how important this is.

This is how fundamental it is, and it's why we must practice it, why we must talk about it, and be aware of it, and practice. So, let me give you a quick example from the Bible, from the Word of God, of each of these. A faith failure and a faith victory.

And I don't even have to go far in the Bible. I mean right off the bat. In the first chapter, the chapter of Genesis, the very first book of the Bible, we find the creation account of man, don't we?

We find the creation account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. And we've all heard this story. We know what happened here, what happened.

God put Adam and Eve in charge of the earth. He gave them dominion and authority, and he blessed them and empowered them to be successful. And he told them, don't eat the apple off of that tree over there.

Don't do it. He was very clear. He gave them a very clear word that they had to choose whether they were going to acknowledge that word and agree with it or not.

And we know what happened. They made a decision not to acknowledge it. They were talked out of it.

And the enemy will try to talk you out of acknowledging God's promises for your life, his instructions, his directions for you. The enemy is a snake. And he has no sympathy for you.

He will do anything he can to try to talk you out of believing God's word and out of acknowledging it and agreeing with it. And that's exactly what he did to Eve in the garden. And we know that because of their decision to not agree with the word of God, the promise of God to them, the direction of God, they had a major faith failure that has influenced and impacted the earth even to this day.

A faith failure. It started with them not agreeing, not acknowledging what God told them. And then we can look at another example of a faith victory just a few chapters over from that.

In Genesis chapter 6, we find a man named Noah. I mean, anybody that's heard Bible accounts, Bible testimonies, and scripture, and stories from the Word have heard about Noah in the Ark. And what happened here?

God comes to a man named Noah, and he says, look, here's what's going to happen. It's going to start raining. Water is going to start coming out of the ground, and it is going to cover the earth.

And this evil generation, the scriptures tell us that it was so evil that Noah was the only righteous man left on the planet. That's how bad, that's how dark it had gotten. And God told him, he said, look, we're going to redo this.

And I need you to build a boat so that you and your family can survive, and I'm going to bring animals to you and load this boat so that we can start over. Now, put yourself in Noah's shoes. He's never seen rain.

He's never experienced anything like this. So he has at this moment, God's given him a word, and he has to make a decision whether he's going to acknowledge that and agree with that word or not. He could have chose not to.

He has a free will, just like you and I do, and you can choose whether you're going to agree with the word or not. But here we see a faith victory. Praise God.

Thankful for that. We all come from that victory in one way or another. We come from that seed that was saved from Noah and his family on that boat.

And we can be so thankful that Noah was faithful to agree with the promise of God with the word of God. And we could go into so many things here. We could go get so deep into this.

There's so much here. But I really want to keep these podcasts short and simple. And the reason why is because if you'll spend time talking to God about this faith fundamental of agreement and acknowledging him, it will give him the opportunity to teach you about acknowledging him in your life.

You know, I can't teach you everything there is. You don't need me to teach you everything because I don't know everything. But you have the Holy Spirit in you, the great teacher.

And if you'll take these simple truths, and I'm going to try to keep them real simple on this podcast, if you'll take this and just go to the Lord with it and talk to him about it, say, Lord, you know, I see that faith failures and faith victory start with acknowledging you. What have you told me about my life that I haven't come into agreement with? Or let's look back and celebrate some times that I did.

Remind me, Lord, when were some times that you asked me to do something, or I saw something in your word that I needed to act on, and I chose to acknowledge it and believe it, and I acted on it? And how did that turn out? And just spend some time with the Lord.

He'll teach you. He'll help you. But this is a faith fundamental.

This is something we have to get better at. We want to be a fundamental master. We want to be a pro at this, so that when God wants to take us into the greater things for our life, we're like Noah.

We're ready to rock and roll. We're loaded up and we're ready to act. Praise God.

And so that's what we're going to be believing for as you search your heart and as you meditate on these truths that we covered today. And I'm just going to keep it right there. We're going to stop.

Next episode, we'll move into the next one. We're going to be talking about believing. Remember, the faith fundamentals, the five fundamentals, are to acknowledge and agree with God's Word, His promises, and acknowledge that they're for you.

The B is to believe. The C is to confess. The D is to do, be a doer of the Word.

And the E is to live with the spirit of expectation. Hallelujah. We want to live like that.

We want to walk like that. We want to play like that. We want to be ready and loaded up to have victory in life.

So let's pray real quick, and then next episode, we'll get into the believing part. We're going to move into the next faith fundamental, so I pray that you'll come back and join us for that. But let's pray.

Father, we thank you for this time together. We thank you for each person that has taken their time to listen. And Father, I pray that they're not just hearing me and my voice, but they have opened a door to hear from you right now.

And I pray that as they meditate on this, as they consider these truths that we're talking about, these faith fundamentals, that they would have communion and fellowship with you about their life. Lord, you know things about their life that I could never know. And so I can't teach them all the details that will help them specifically, but you will.

And your word tells us that you will direct the steps of the godly. And that's something we have to choose. Do we acknowledge that?

Do we agree with that or not? And I pray that each person listening would come into agreement with that promise, that you delight in the details of their life, that you'll direct their steps. And so, Father, I pray that you would draw them near to you this week and in the days ahead as they focus on these faith fundamentals, and that you would help us all to come up to a higher level, help us to live this life of faith at a different level than we currently are, help us to grow, help us to develop and mature in your things.

And we want to do it to your glory. In Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Well, thank you again for listening to the podcast, and we'll be talking to you soon. But until next time, be blessed.

Thanks for listening to the podcast. To find this and other teachings, simply search for The Branches on any of your regular podcast platforms. Thank you.