The Established Heart - Part 4 - Firmly Relying Trust

Welcome to Faith Builders.

My name is Michelle Steele, and I'm so glad that you've tuned in today for this broadcast because we are learning how to establish our hearts on the Word of God.

We want to have a firm foundation of God's word so that we can stand and overcome and be in the position to execute the perfect will of God, to bring into manifestation what the word of God says belongs to us.

It's not going to happen just because you are saved.

It's automatically yours because you're saved, but it's not automatically activated until the word goes to work in your life.

And so we're learning about how to establish our heart.

And this is going to be lesson number four in this 12-part series.

We have 12 lessons on the established heart.

And they will help you because it will strengthen you to stand and strengthen you to overcome.

And so this is a study guide that we have prepared that has all of the lessons.

It has all of the different versions and of the verses that we have prepared.

We've got subjects such as the word foundation, invisible evidence, established for believing, having a firmly relying trust is what we're going to talk about today.

And so I know you want to get a hold of the study guide, you want to get a hold of the audio teachings.

You can find this on our store at lifeoffaith.net.

It's free as well on our YouTube channel.

You can go watch these videos again.

You can access all of the audio through our podcast as well on your favorite podcast channel.

So we are in this series because we don't want to be moved.

We don't want to be moved by what we feel.

We don't want to be moved by what we see.

We don't want to be moved by the latest news report.

We don't want to be moved by the opinions of other people.

We want to be established.

And as I said, it's not automatic that you become established.

You can have every translation of the Bible.

You can have a Bible on your tablet, your phone, you can have it by your bedside.

But if you don't have it in your heart, and if you don't have your heart established on the word, it's not going to work for you.

And so that's what we're learning about today.

And so today we're going to specifically talk about how faith is a firmly relying trust.

Firmly relying.

If you are relying on something, you have your dependence.

You are, if you're firmly relying, you are steadfastly depending and expecting and requiring that thing to work for you.

For instance, I sat down in this chair a few moments ago and I relied on it to hold me up.

I relied on it to provide me this stable position.

And when you're putting your life in the putting your life on the basis of the word of God, you're relying on that word to bring into your life what the word says should be in your life.

You're relying on that word to establish the peace of God that passes all understanding, to guard your heart and your mind.

You're relying on the word of God to establish your marriage, to establish your finances, your health.

And so we want to develop this firmly relying trust.

And to have a firmly relying trust in the word of God, you have to learn about God's perception concerning his word, how Jesus took his word seriously.

They never dealt with words lightly and still don't.

God and Jesus, the Holy Spirit, they take their words very seriously.

They do not use their words lightly.

They don't say things they don't mean.

Jesus never had to stop and say, Oh man, I didn't mean to say that.

He said, I only say what my father has said.

And so he became disciplined in his mouth as an example for you and I, how we can take this same seriousness concerning our words and concerning the words of God and the words of Jesus.

I want to read to you from Luke chapter 8, and I'm going to start in verse 22.

Luke 8 · chapter mention

Now it came to pass on a certain day that he, Jesus, went into a ship with his disciples, and he said to them, Let us go over unto the other side of the lake.

And they launched forth.

But as they sailed, he fell asleep.

And there came down a storm of wind on the lake, and they and they were filled with water and were in jeopardy.

And they came to him, awoke him, saying, Master, Master, we perish.

Now couldn't have you just woke him up and said, Help?

Why did you have to go to the extreme and start calling an end that is not yet established?

You know, Master, we perish.

We're dying.

I mean, that just went all the way to full extreme of the situation.

They could have said, Hey, help.

We're in trouble.

Help.

Water's come in in the boat.

They could have explained, we've got water, we've got a storm.

There's there's the wind is is blowing hard and it's filling the boat with water.

They could have said that, but no, they had to open up their mouth and say, We're dying.

Master, we perish.

Then he arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water, and they ceased, and there was a calm.

And he said unto them, Where is your faith?

Where is your faith?

They, being afraid, wondered, saying to one another, What manner of man is this?

For he commands even the winds and water, and they obey him.

So Jesus expected them to have faith and was reprimanding them for their lack of it.

They were not firmly relying in what he had said when he said to them, Let us go over to the other side of the lake.

It's clearly written in the Bible so we can know what he said and what they should have been trusting in.

Instead, they were trusting in what they could see, they were trusting in what they could feel, they were trusting in their previous experience because they were all fishermen and they had previous experience of being in storms and knowing of boats out on the lake in storms like this.

And so they're trusting in everything except what Jesus had said to them.

Let us go to the other side of the lake.

And so Jesus is calling them on the carpet about it.

Where is your faith?

Where is your faith?

It's not in what I said, it's not in the love of God for you, it's not in anything except what you're experiencing at this moment.

So Jesus said what he meant when he said, let us go over to the other side of the lake, regardless of the storm that came up.

That didn't change what Jesus said.

That and regardless of what circumstances you're facing right now, that doesn't take away, that does not negate the promises of God to you.

God said what he said, and now you can take what he said and you can resist the circumstance with the word of God.

You can tell the circumstance, you're not blowing me off course.

You're not taking me in that direction.

You are not taking me under, you're not taking me out.

I have the promise of God.

And so I'm going to take the promise of God and I'm going to establish the promise in my heart.

I have a firmly relying trust in what God has said to me.

God said, Great shall be the peace, the nothing missing, nothing broken of my children, and my children shall be taught of the Lord, regardless of how they're acting today, regardless of what they're saying today, regardless of the life that they're living today.

I stand on the promise of God.

And the promise of God is more true to me than all of the circumstantial evidence that's being presented through my eye gate, through my ear gate, through my previous experience.

I believe God.

And that's what we have to train ourselves to do.

A firmly relying trust doesn't just happen.

It is something that we have to choose.

We have to set our trust.

We have to fix our heart.

We have to, I'm talking like fasten it down, like, you know, tie it down, uh, um put the the straps down on that believing and say, I'm not being moved by the wind, the waves, the circumstance, the opinions, the reports.

I'm being moved only by what the word of God has promised me.

Jesus never wastes words.

He never wasted a word, God never wasted a word, and they are not about to start wasting their words now.

If he spoke it to you, he is watching over his word to perform it.

And you have to have a firmly relying trust that God will do what he said he would do.

So when Jesus said, Where is your faith?

And that's why we need to feed on the word of God.

We've got to let the word of God be our source of nutrition.

We've got to let the word of God be the light that we live by.

If we look through the Bible, we can look into the lives of ordinary people just like us who have come into contact with God and His Word.

And when you see someone take God at His Word, you see them accelerating.

You see them moving forward in the plan.

You see them on a firm foundation.

But when those who who took God's word and treated it as something casual, and they treated it as something that was um possible, but not established to them.

It was it was something that, well, yeah, I know God said it, but this is what I feel, this is what I see, this is what they said.

Well, we've got to take God's word and put it in a different category.

It cannot be in that in all those other categories.

It cannot be in that same kind of estimation that I would have for what I see on the news or on the internet.

It can't have the same kind of value or the same, hold the same kind of weight that something that comes across the six o'clock news or something that's posted by somebody or something that I heard somebody say in the office or as I was walking by the aisle at the grocery store.

No, I have to take God's word and put it in a whole nother place, a whole nother category.

It holds an authority that nothing else holds.

The word of God has an authority over my life even more than my feelings, even more than the opinions of my family, even more than what I have experienced in the past.

The word of God has the position to influence me like nothing else has.

And that's where we are going to experience the real success in our life.

Wisdom is knowing the supernatural ability of God's word.

When you understand that the word of God is more than just information, the word of God is supernatural in its essence.

The word of God contains the creative force and power of God.

Everything that exists exists because the word of God created it.

All things are by the word.

Without the word, there was nothing made that was made.

That means the stars, the air, the ocean, the planet that we're on, the sun that's warming this planet.

Nothing was made that was made.

God created the sun.

God created space and time.

God created everything that exists by his word.

That alone brings the word over into a position of influence that nothing else has, because everything else that exists in your universe was created by the word.

So the word is the source, the word is the origin, the word is the raw material of everything that exists.

And that means everything in your life will respond to the word.

So when when we look at our need for the word, we recognize just like our body feeds on physical food to create physical strengths, and our mind feeds on information so that we can develop knowledge.

And our will exercises choices so that we can develop will power.

Our emotions feed on relationships so that we develop feelings.

In the same way, your spirit feeds on the word of God to produce or develop believing power.

This firmly relying trust is not going to happen without the word of God.

The word of God is the source, the nutrition necessary to produce faith, the nutrition necessary to produce this power to believe God, this ability to believe God.

You know, sometimes in teaching faith, people will say to me, Oh, faith is hard.

And you can hear in their voice if you say, Hey, praise the Lord, how are things going for you today?

I've been praying with you about that.

Oh, I'm believing.

And on their face, it unbelieving doesn't come out with the victory that the word of God says should be associated, because faith is the victory.

If you're in faith, I'm going to hear victory in your voice, I'm going to see victory on your face.

I'm going to, you're going to have victory on display.

There's going to be victory evidence if there's faith evidence.

If there's no faith evidence, then what we need to do is go back and feed on the Word of God until there is evidence of faith.

And so don't just think you're in faith because you own a Bible, or think you're in faith because you attend church, or think you're in faith about a certain subject because you've heard a sermon on that subject before, or you heard a lot of sermons.

You can have heard hundreds of sermons and not be in faith, not have a full measure of faith today because you've used that faith.

You know, my husband, Pastor Philip Steele, wrote the book.

And he wrote that book because God began to deal with him about the need for believers, mostly for those in our church, you know, our responsibility to develop the people we all get to benefit from it.

But the need for believers to build their faith every day, to develop their faith every day, because they use their faith every day.

Every day you're making a demand on your faith, the just live by faith for my life, just my daily life, even without an issue, without a problem, without circumstances and situations that are placing extra pressure on my faith.

Just my daily life requires faith.

And if I want to make any progress, if I want to make financial progress, if I want to make progress in my health, I'm going to have to put a specific demand on my faith for those areas.

And so if I'm going to place a demand on my faith for those areas, I need to develop faith.

And that requires feeding on the word of God.

Your heart is your spirit.

Your spirit is your heart.

Those two words are interchangeable.

You can, you can, when Jesus is talking about the spirit of man, when the word of God is talking about the the spirit of the man is the candle of the Lord, he's talking about your heart, your the heart of your spirit.

And the heart is where the believing power is operating.

It's where it functions.

And the believing power of your heart is going to ultimately determine your destiny.

Romans chapter 10, verses 9 and 10, talking about faith, gives us an understanding of how vital the believing of the heart is to our eternal destiny.

Romans 10:9

It says, if you shall confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and shall believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved.

If you will believe, you shall be saved.

If you'll believe and confess.

For with the heart man believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth, confession is made unto salvation, because faith is of the heart and the mouth.

I have to have faith working in both locations.

But notice the believing power of my heart is so valuable that it will determine whether I live forever with God or separated from God based on what I believe.

If I don't believe in my heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, then there's no hope for me to be raised from a condition of spiritual death.

The believing of my heart is what connects me to the life of God.

The sacrifice of Jesus that He paid for me, for me to get it accounted to me, for it to be put on my books.

I've got to believe him.

That's it.

I gotta believe him.

I say that's it, but that's enough.

I mean, that's that's important, that's vital, that's enough for us to give our attention to the word of God.

Believing power is produced by putting the raw material of God's word in your heart.

Romans chapter 10 says, so then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Romans 10 · chapter mention

So hearing by the word of God, hearing the word of God is what will produce faith.

In the same way, hearing the evidence of the problem will produce fear.

Or you could say faith in the problem.

If you want faith in your rescue, hear what God said about freeing you, what God said about saving you, what God said about setting you free.

Hear, if you want faith for healing, hear what God said about by his stripes you are healed.

Hear what God said about himself took our infirmities.

You've got to believe a specific thing to receive that specific thing.

And if you don't believe it, God can't force it on you.

So the believing is like a spiritual transaction.

It's a transaction with something that's even more valuable than money, more valuable than gold or silver.

It's the value of what you believe, it's the value of God's word and you taking God at His Word and putting firmly, relying, trust.

So we can see then that all of this begins with contact with God's word.

When I first heard that contact with God's word that Jesus died for my sins, that's when I had faith to believe him to save me.

And it's true about everything he's provided in the covenant.

When Adam and Eve heard the word of God in the Garden of Eden, it says in Genesis chapter 2, verse 15, the Lord God took the man, put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

Genesis 2:15

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat.

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat it, for in the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die.

So God had given a word thou shalt not eat.

Do not eat the fruit of this tree.

If you eat it, you will die.

As long as Adam and Eve kept a firmly relying trust.

That God's word was true, they remained victorious.

They remained safe.

They were established in the garden.

But Genesis chapter 3, verse 11, after they had fallen into sin, after they had taken the words of Satan and believed them in their heart and acted on the words of Satan, then they fell and spiritual death entered into their life.

Genesis 3:11

They no longer had the life of God in them.

Now they have the condition of spiritual death in their heart.

And God said, Who told you that you were naked?

Because he came to them in the garden and they said, He said, Why did you hide?

And they said, We hid ourselves because we were naked.

And God said, Who told you that you who told you that?

Have you eaten of the tree whereof I commanded you that you should not eat?

So, in other words, I gave you a word to live by, but you've taken somebody else's word.

Who told who who gave you these words that you are regarding as something to be believed and acted upon over my words?

So that's what God is identifying.

You have regarded someone else's words over mine, and you've gone against my word.

And that's what Jesus was dealing with his disciples.

Where's your faith?

You got faith in what you see more than what I said, you've got faith in what you feel more than what I said.

The ten spies who went into the promised land, they had more firmly relying trust in what they could see than what God had spoken.

God said, I've given you the land.

Go in and possess the land.

I've given it to you.

Go look and see how good the land is.

But they came back and they said, Well, we do have evidence that it is everything God said, nevertheless.

And so that was a disregard.

And the word nevertheless just canceled out everything that they had seen concerning the promise of God.

And now they're looking at we are like grasshoppers in our own sight.

And so the the dilemma then is we've got to have the word of God so in a place of respect that even if I can see it with my eyes, I don't take it, the report of what I see with my eyes, over what God said.

God's word, even if I can't see it, I can believe it.

I can stand in faith and say, I know what I see with my eyes, but God said.

But God said, and that is a key.

That is a key for you having an established heart.

And that's what we want.

We don't want to be moved.

And there are things that come to move you.

That's why God said that you've got to uh uh hold fast to the profession of your faith.

Why why do you need to hold fast?

Because there's winds, there are waves and winds that come to try to move you off the word of God.

The whole parable of the sower is about the word being ineffective in the person's life because of the cares of the world, because of the offense, because of the the fact that it wasn't understood.

And so we've got to take the word of God and we've got to give it our attention, and we've got to let the word of God be our persuasion more than the feelings, more than the report, more than a medical report, more than that what they say about your children.

You've got to believe what God said about everything and a greater place of authority.

The word of God has the greater place of authority.

I'm so glad that you tuned in today.

We're gonna have more concerning this being established in the Word of God.

Go to our website, find information that can help you grow in this truth, and uh lifeoffaith.net.

I look forward to being again with you next week.

Remember to build your faith and frame your world by the word of God.

The key to a stable life is to establish your heart on the word of God.

In this 12-part series, Pastor Philip Steele and I explain how to establish your heart in faith on God's Word.

God's plan for the believer is to have their heart fixed, trusting in the Lord.

Psalm 112, verse 8 says, His heart is established.

Psalms 112:8

You shall not be afraid.

While this is available for you, it's not automatic.

You have a responsibility to set the Word of God as the foundation of your thoughts, actions, and decisions.

This insightful 12-part series is available in digital or physical format, including a comprehensive study guide with the sermon outlines, the Bible verses, and study points to help you internalize these truths and apply these revelations on a daily basis.

The 12-part series, the established part, will help you strengthen your position in God and live victoriously over the situations you face in life.

You can watch these videos through our YouTube channel at Life of Faith Church in Little Rock or Life of Faith Church, Kansas.

Also, you can order these resources by calling 501-4877 or visiting lifeoffaith.net.

Call or go online now.

You are invited to Life of Faith Church in Little Rock, where we are building people's faith, producing life, city, state, nation, and world.

Our address is 116-20 Rainwood Road, just one block off Rodney Parham, near Green Mountain Drive.

Our Sunday service begins at 10 a.m.

and offers classes for children and youth, in addition to the adult service in the main sanctuary.

On Wednesdays, we have an hour of power as we dive into Bible study.

We have a place reserved for you and your family at Life of Faith Church.

For more information, visit lifeoffaith.net.