Faith Is Your Servant: Give It Instructions Before You Sleep

Sermon outline

Faith is a seed you plant with your words and a servant waiting for your instruction, so stop hoping and start speaking to the mountain in front of you.

1. Number one: faith works like a seed

   What you do with a seed is plant it, and faith is planted by speaking. Speaking to a situation that is not a person can feel almost like insanity, but this is the edge a Christian has over a world that gives up in despair. When the doctor's letter says cancer, you can either cry that you are going to die or use it as an opportunity to make your faith active and say what Jesus says.

   Illustration: A letter arrives from the doctor: you have cancer, make your will, deal with your estate. You can go to your wife and say, "I'm going to die", or look her in the face and say, "Jesus said I'm going to make it."

   “What do you have to do with seed? Plant it. That's it. Just plant it.”

2. Faith and unbelief do not go together

   If you accept death or defeat, that is what you will have, and a miracle obtained by faith has to be kept and protected by faith. A family cannot plan the funeral in one corner and call the pastor to pray in the other and expect a result. At Jairus' house the first thing Jesus did was put the people out.

   Illustration: While he was in Johannesburg he was told his mother was dying of cancer and had six months to live, and family members began making funeral arrangements. He and Pastor Zubeda said, "No way. She will not die. She'll live." Fourteen years later she was still alive, and told them it was because of their faith.

   “If you obtain your miracle by faith, you're going to keep it by faith, protect it by faith.”

   • Mark 5:35-43

3. Faith is your servant, waiting for instruction

   You are the master and faith is the servant, but many believers have it the wrong way round and end up serving their faith. You put faith to work with words: speak over your vehicles, your sales and your week before you go to bed, and faith works on your behalf while you sleep, like the man who plants seed and sleeps without knowing how it grows. Hoping puts it in the future; faith is now, and your words create just as God's words created the universe. He adds that words can also destroy.

   Illustration: At home he asks for tea and it is brought, with biscuits and toast if he wants them; at work the salesman comes to the manager for the day's instructions, not the other way round. He himself is walking around saying, "Television equipment, you're fully paid for in the name of Jesus."

   “You are the master of your faith.”

   • Psalm 91
   • Mark 4:26-27
   • Hebrews 11:1

4. Speak to the mountain yourself

   When a situation confronts you, do not say you do not know what to do, and do not only ask the pastor to pray. After you have prayed, stand up and speak to it in the name of Jesus. Simply saying it requires faith, and once that faith is released it goes to work. Nothing is too hard for the Lord: no sickness, no bill, no situation.

   Illustration: Freddy, an imaginary 18-year-old son on drugs who will not listen, even after the police have arrested him. The parent commands him to be released from the grip of the devil, and then the phone rings: "Mommy, I want to come home." He says he and Pastor Zubeda did this when one of their own sons was going wayward, and saw a result within two weeks.

   “Just for you to say that required faith. And when you release that faith, faith's going to work.”

   • Mark 11:23
   • Genesis 18:14
   • Matthew 19:26