Overcoming Faith

For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world--our faith. (1 John 5:4)

Our faith. That brings up disturbing memories of one of the many mistaken views in religion that confused my thinking growing up. Like so many around me, I thought that faith was something that I had to work up enough until it was finally sufficient to get God to answer my prayers. I was told that faith was belief, so after trying to reason this out strenuously I decided that the only faith that would move God to act for me must be believing so hard that there would be no trace of doubt left anywhere in my mind. But of course the way our mind is designed that is impossible. So once again I began to suspect that this was yet another scheme of God to prevent me from quite achieving the blessings and experience the victories that I so desired.

Did I grow up with dark views about God's intentions toward me? Yes I did. And looking back on how much I secretly resented God keeping these tantalizing promises just slightly out of my reach, I shudder at how much my thinking affected the way I talked about God to those around me. My religion revolved around trying to develop a perfect character in preparation for entrance into heaven. That is what I was taught I was supposed to do. Of course everyone knew that we cannot develop such a character on our own so my prayers (compulsive, obsessive and almost non-stop every waking minute of my life) were sprinkled generously with 'help me!' petitions meant to compel God to give me enough power to overcome temptations. That is a whole different story that I have shared at other times, but this verse reminds me of my journey toward understanding clearer truth about this word 'faith'.

As I just began to type that last word faith, the auto-word feature on my computer offered up the word faithfulness as a suggestion. I find it interesting how this feature on my computer can at times influence the direction of my thoughts with suggestive and even unexpected words. In this case that word is exactly the truth that began to finally dawn on me as the key to my dilemma. It took many years of wearing frustration and unanswered prayers and searching for better explanations before I finally began to realize that it is not my faith that has to be worked up with my effort. What is needed is for me to spend far more time dwelling on the evidences of His faithfulness. I know that may sound like an avoidance of the real issue. But as more time goes by I realize that true faith has little to do with what I can force myself to produce through mental gymnastics but everything to do with a natural, spontaneous response from discovering how good and faithful and kind God is towards me. (Romans 2:4)

The word in this verse – overcome – is closely linked in my memories to the heaviness of condemnation that weighed my heart down for many years and nearly extinguished all hope. Overcoming sin was at the center of all my religious attention as I attempted for many years to perfect holiness, live sanctification, overcome temptations and any number of other familiar religious expressions that all have to do with what was expected of me to be saved in heaven at last. I must be careful here to not imply that my parents or teachers had a diabolical plot to discourage me with perfectionism; I am sure that was not the case. They were only doing the best they knew how and many were likely also struggling in their own lives trying to figure out salvation themselves. Most of them I am sure were simply repeating the religious clichés that they had learned as formulas kept getting passed around and around like so many traditions.

But in my own experience it felt like I was at the small end of a funnel of a concentration of legalism, perfectionism and works. At the same time I had a very weak understanding and appreciation of things like grace, forgiveness and love. All of this combined to discourage and depress me and even produced the heart of a rebel in me. I see now that this has been the scheme of Satan ever since sin entered this world, to prevent people from knowing the incredible goodness, kindness and love of God that can set us free from all of these lies. I do not want to place the blame on the humans in my life from which I inherited all of these dark views of God, because our fight is not against flesh and blood but against supernatural dark forces fully intent on obscuring every truth about God from our hearts.

I do not wish to dwell too long on the darkness that has marked so much of my past. But that is the context from which my current perspective has been shaped. I find myself comparing the glory that is starting to emerge now with the darkness from which I am emerging as it sharpens my own appreciation of how good God really is.

I am amazed, humbled and thrilled as I see the increasing freedom and inner peace that I now enjoy deep inside in stark contrast to the fear and dread that verses like this used to produce in me. I still have a long ways to go, because the pervasiveness of these dark ideas about God so saturated every corner of my thinking that I still continually find them lurking behind dark corners and jumping out at me at unexpected times. I sometimes question whether I am really born again or not. But even in the face of that uncertainty I have learned to place that issue in God's hands and trust His work in my heart to follow the schedule He has for my healing.

This is not at all what I intended to write about when I began this. Maybe it is too easy for me to focus on my own experience instead of on the exciting things I am seeing about Him in the Word. At any rate, let me get back to what I first noticed as I meditated on these verses and see what else might emerge.

The first thing I saw here besides the fact that it is faith that overcomes, was the contrast between the beginning of this verse and the next one.

Who is the one who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? (1 John 5:5)

In the previous verse the subject is a what. But here in this next verse is shifts to a who. In fact, just at this moment it is breaking through to me what John might be trying to say here. Faith is the what that overcomes the world, but real faith that overcomes is a faith that is born of God, not something contrived by me Of course faith cannot even exist outside of a person so when a person allows their heart and mind to catch enough vision of the glory of what God is really like and allows their heart to respond, the inevitable will be saving, living faith or belief in how good and trustworthy God really is.

It is becoming more and more clear to me over the past few years that the kind of faith that I need to prepare me to live in God's intense presence is a confident trust in the pure reality of His extreme love. My heart must be transformed to reflect that love and to let go of every belief about Him that is tainted with darkness. This is precisely why Satan has done anything and everything possible to insinuate subtle or not so subtle accusations and lies about what God is like into every aspect of our thinking. He knows better than any other being in the universe how dangerous it is to be in the presence of the Almighty if thee is any trace of doubt or unbelief about His goodness and purity and passionate love. It is not God that we need to be afraid of as Satan has asserted, for in God there is never any thought to hurt or punish or inflict suffering on His children. Rather it is our resistance to the extreme truth about Him that creates within us liabilities that when exposed to the intensity of the passion of God's pure agape love presence, our resistance itself will overheat from exposure to God's passion and will become the cause of our own self-destruction.

This is what the focus of true overcoming is all about. It is not so much bad behaviors that we need to overcome. In fact, wrong behaviors and breaking of rules are symptoms of a much deeper problem, and that core problem is distrust and believing lies about God that increases our resistance to the truth about God. What we are battling against are not outside forces of sin from other people. No, the battle we wage is mostly taking place between our ears in the various avenues of our thinking and feelings. This is where the real war is taking place and where we need to be the most aware of our need for divine influence.

We live in this world, but we don't fight our battles in the same way the world does. (ERV) The weapons we use in our fight are not the world's weapons but God's powerful weapons, which we use to destroy strongholds. We destroy false arguments; we pull down every proud obstacle (GNB) and all intellectual arrogance that opposes the knowledge of God. We take every thought captive so that it is obedient to Christ. (GW) (2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

It is becoming clear that the faith that overcomes the world works inside our minds and hearts where the center of the real battle is taking place. This is not a faith that we work up in some sort of forced believing mentality or some formula that we figure out how to operate. No, it is a spontaneous kind of belief in who God really is, a faith that is actually a reflection of the faithfulness of God. I have been learning that just as love induces love in others, likewise faith also induces faith. So the more I come to appreciate how much faith God has in me, how much He is willing to trust me to respond to increasing revelations of His love for me, my natural reaction can be to trust His heart more and more.

The battle heats up when my responsive faith suddenly comes up against lies about God that lurk in so many places inside of me that resist the truth I am learning about Him. This is what Paul is talking about here. My growing faith has to be constantly fueled and empowered through revelations from the Spirit of God so that it conquers the strongholds of the enemy's lies inside of my heart. As I embrace the light of God's goodness it exposes and dismantles false beliefs and arguments against God that have kept me hostage to fears about Him. My growing appreciation of the amazing humility of Jesus described in Philippians 2:5-8 (who is the perfect reflection of His Father) directly attacks and pulls down every proud attitude and belief that blinds and hardens my heart. And most of all, I experience the life of overcoming as I come to really know God intimately and allow His love for me to ravish my heart, transform my perceptions about Him and draw out my affections. This is what results from knowing the God who is love.

There is much more that is jumping out at me from these verses in 1 John, but I need to save that for another time.