Nothing is superior to the sacrifice of Jesus. Our boldness in approaching God at any time is by the blood and would never be as a result of anything. You would never be qualified to stand before God by yourself. Your qualification is made by the blood.
One way to summarize the sacrifice of Jesus is by the blood.
Reasons why people don’t have confidence in the finished work of Christ.
1. Lack of understanding – Hosea 4:6
The challenge sometimes is not that one isn’t born again or that he’s new in church but if there’s a knowledge gap you may not be able to take advantage of everything that the father has done for us in Christ. Our responsibility is to see how the knowledge gap will be breached. The word of God through teaching is what the father put in place to ensure the gap is breached.
At the point of salvation there’s a huge tendency for a knowledge gap to be there but consistently you keep learning at the feet of Jesus.
Matthew 13:13-15
The possibility of conversion or healing is largely dependent on when people actually see.
There’s a possibility of a man trying to see or capture the revelation of God’s word. One can have the desire/intention to learn the truth of God’s word but it’s not automatic. The spirit of God has to help a man to understand the scriptures, not human’s intellect.
There’s a possibility that a man is reading as in the case of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch. He was reading but couldn’t understand until Philip came and expounded it.
It’s beyond the letters, it’s the spirit that brings light and illumination. If there’s no light and illumination there can be no understanding and if there’s no understanding the knowledge gap will exist. So when you come before the Lord, you should believe in God to help you consistently to close up the knowledge gap and access the thought of God.
If you’re able to see with your eyes, hear with your ears and understand with your hearts, you will be converted. Converted here means transformed. It’s the word of God that transforms.
The reason why people are not transformed can be traced to not being able to close the knowledge gap because there is no understanding in their hearts which results in them not being able to see or hear and as long as they’re hindered from capturing what the Lord will have them to see. If that does not happen to them consistently over time, the Bible says there’s something called “dull in hearing” and ultimately they won’t be converted.
That’s the reason why people are not walking fully in embracing all that the Father has done for us in Christ Jesus because for you to enjoy it and maximize it, there must be an understanding.
Your responsibility is to constantly believe the Spirit of God to constantly help you to see and hear what the Father has for you at all times. The more you hear and see, the more understanding you receive and the more transformation you experience, and that knowledge gap is being bridged.
2) Unbelief and doubt: (Mark 6:6)
The above scripture reveals the reason why Jesus could not actually give expression to the power of God upon his life. It was because he saw unbelief in the lives of the people and that hindered him from giving expression, not that the power of God was not present with him.
As believers one of the things you should not do is to doubt the power of God, what God has made available for us in Christ Jesus, through the death and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
He has made available for us power, grace, healing etc. You must have confidence in what the Father has made available for you in Christ Jesus. It’s very likely that because you have experienced delays in your life, you become less excited about the word of God and that’s an attack on your faith and confidence in God.
Hebrews 3:12-13 calls unbelief as coming from an evil heart and that unbelief may bring about departure from God. Departure from God may not necessarily mean backsliding, it may connote a loss of confidence in God, the joy of your salvation, bearing on Christianity.
Believers sometimes attempt to find solutions outside God. They still attend church, but their confidence in what God has done is eroded, and what causes that is unbelief.
As a believer you need to come to a place where you can integrate your learning into the affairs of your life, if you cannot integrate the learning into your life, then you are not learning.
Your knowledge ought to produce fruits. We must understand that what the Father expects of us is that our faith and confidence are rooted in everything the Father has done in Christ Jesus. It’s not just for the sake of learning but to appropriate it to your life. If you cannot apply your learning and revelation to your life, then something is wrong, and that’s the hallmark of our faith and Christianity.
This separates the boys from the men. It separates the one that is standing on the word of God and promises of God. The one that is standing on the finished work of Christ. The believer must say by the reason of his or her understanding and the exposure to the truth of God’s word, he will live his life on the word of God and that his life will be shaped by it. So you must not let only revelation or having a note to write be the reason why you hear the word of God. Growing in the culture of our faith must have value in taking note and studying your Bibles. You must not just have a note. Having notes is not enough. The Hallmark is to do life with what we are writing. Writing does powerful things. There are limitations to what we can write and check what has been written.
Thirdly, the reason why some people have not taken full advantage of what the Father has provided is because of LEGALISM and performance based Christianity.
Galatians 3:2-3 This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? (KJV).
The word “Spirit” and the “flesh” in that context is the choice of the believer. That is the choice of the believer concerning the gospel. The flesh will be everything outside what the Father has made available to us in Christ. How a believer gets saved is how He is going to continue; and that is by faith. The way we became righteous is the way we will still be righteous. This is why not thinking along this line would make us become performance-based christians. That is, in doing a particular thing, their prayers will be answered by God faster or being answered.
This thought has made us believe that there are things that have made God to hear us and they are by our fasting. This knowledge is a fallacy. Little did we know that fasting allows us to be consecrated and to hear from God but does not make prayer answers fast. There is a terrible theology that fasting is the reason that our prayer can get answered.
Concerning Jesus rebuking His disciples concerning their unbelief during the healing of a girl, He said, “…this kind goeth not except by prayer and fasting.” Jesus said this truly; but at the point when Jesus said this, the disciples were not praying in His name. This was done before the resurrection. He said, when He rose up the third day, then will they ask anything in His name. Therefore, at the time it was said there was nobody praying in Jesus’ name.
The fundamentals in the aforementioned verse are two testaments – the old and the new covenant. The new testament did not start from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. What makes it new is the blood of Jesus. This is not a physical blood but the Spirit of life of Jesus.
Acts 10:38 How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him (KJV).
Jesus healed, but at that time the name had not been given to believers to heal. It is very necessary to understand we cannot place the name of Jesus in the same way we placed fasting. They cannot be placed side by side. When this is not done it will turn to legalities and a performance based Christianity.
Luke 10:17 And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name (KJV).
Contextually, we cannot use one phrase or word to come to the conclusion of a whole body of knowledge. Basically, not deviating from this is by staying with the consistent truth. Consequently, not walking in this will lead to legalities.
For example, believers have believed the reason why they should pray at night is because there is a mystery attached to it but this is not true. The reason why some do this is to stay away from any form of distraction. This is done in order to have full concentration. The reason why some people cannot pick the voice of God is because of noise and distraction but when we go into fasting it is for us to be focused.
At times if the distractions are not being taken care of, for example, from phone calls, the essence of that retreat will be eroded. The reason why we set out time for retreat is because we want a better atmosphere of concentration, we want an atmosphere that is less of distraction. And once we can attain that it seems to us that we hear God faster. The point here is we can talk or hear God anywhere.
Even when you declare a prayer and fasting for yourself, make sure you take out time to study the scripture and also pray. There are different ways people fast, not only for abstinence from food. All this is for concentration and self-denial. Your body is subdued when you fast.
One of the reasons why people have not taken advantage of the grace of God and the sacrifice of Jesus is because they actually live under legalism and performance based Christianity. As good as praying in the night is, don’t add mystery to it. Night prayer is good, it can be rewarding, effective. And it is effective because there are no distractions.
Quiet time is not when there is no noise around you, quiet time is you and God.
What we are saying is that Jesus’s sacrifice is enough. Jesus has satisfied God, nothing else can satisfy him. Your fasting cannot satisfy God, he is satisfied. When he sees his son and the sacrifice of his son, he is satisfied.
Your effectiveness as a believer is not in your performance, it is in Jesus. You are permitted to cast out the devil in his name. Don’t tie yourself to legalism.
The devil has a way of distorting what God has planned for. We should be mindful of the distractions the devil tries to bring our way. He tends to shift our gaze from the reality of Christ to religion where we begin to add things. Religion will always want to add something. He does it as if our faith is dependent on the acts. This is the fight we need to fight. It is the fight of Faith. Jesus is sufficient.
We do not necessarily need to visit Jerusalem to confirm that Jesus is no longer in the grave. We do not need to see the empty tomb to believe the works of Christ. He is alive. Scripture makes it clear to us that how do we find the dead among the living?
The fight of Faith is we standing on all the father has done, then accepting that it is sufficient and enough. Nothing is required to be added again. Any shift away from that, the devil has captured your heart and you are being distracted. Your gaze has been shifted away. The father is pleased with him.
We are at peace with God. While we fast and pray, our confidence is in him not in our works. Interpreting the bible properly is not jumping into conclusion from just one verse of the bible. Whatever you want to run with must be in line with a consistent truth of the word of God.
The New Testament started when Jesus rose from the dead. The New testament is not the chronological arrangement of the bible. David spoke of the depth of our reality in Christ just as Paul did. When it was written that our sins will not be imputed on us. It is majorly about having a consistent truth with the word of God.