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Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 689 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text --Brother Phil Enlow: Well, Praise God! I'm gonna exercise what I'm gonna preach about this morning, and that's faith. ( laughing ). Praise God! I believe that the Lord is with us. I believe He's here this morning and I believe He has something for us. And I just pray that if this isn't it that someone will have the grace to tell me. But, I was thinking this morning of this very basic principal and I really believe...I know for a fact that I stumble over it continually. And I believe it's something that is a simple principle that I believe God wants us to understand because it is the...I mean there's nothing more central to our success as Christians. There's nothing more central to living for God and understanding His purposes and walking with Him than this simple principle. I'd like to just refer to start in Genesis chapter 15--Genesis chapter 15. We know that God had called this man who was at this time known as Abram to leave his country, to leave his people, to go to a land that God had promised that He would show him. He didn't tell him at the time. But all He did was say, get up, pack up, and leave, and I'm gonna show you...I've got place for you--another place for you to live and it's in My purpose for your life. I want you to go. And so, of course, we know that he did. In chapter 15, it says, "After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward." (NIV). Boy, what a promise. Praise God! Do you know that God is 'your' shield? If you and I are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, we are children of Abraham. We're heirs of the same promises that he had. There're blessings that God gave to Abraham that have descended to us because we're a part of Abraham's family in a spiritual sense. Don't be afraid. Is there something making you afraid today? Are you afraid that something's gotten so big, it's too big for you to handle and it's about to swamp your boat? Well I tell you, God's word to His people is don't be afraid. And how many times do we see God begin to reveal Himself to someone in the scriptures and the first word out of, say an angel's mouth, or the first word out of the Lord's mouth is don't be afraid? Joshua, you're about to enter the Promised Land. I've dumped all this responsibility on you to lead all these people against a land full of giants. Over and over again the Lord said, don't be afraid. Don't be dismayed. Don't be afraid. So I praise God that we don't have to be. ( congregational amens ). Whatever it is that's facing us in our lives we don't have to be afraid of it. That's the first thing the devil will try to do is to get us to say, oh my God, I'm over my head here. I can't make this. But we can make it, folks. ( congregational amens ). And it does not depend upon your strength or mine. Thank God for that. And so the Word of the Lord to Abram was, "Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield..." And you want something between you and danger...the danger that the devil is whispering in your ear that you're about to be overwhelmed with? God is a Shield for His people. A shield is something that we hold up between us and danger, and God's saying I've got my hand about you. I've got a hedge about you. You're my child. I'm not gonna let anything happen to you that does not fit my purpose. The devil can...the dogs may bark. The devil may roar like that lion but there is a hedge between you and me, or between us and that danger. And "...your very great reward." You want a reward? I'll tell you, this is the only reward there is. ( congregational amens ). "But Abram said, O Sovereign Lord, what can you give me..." Now that left a question in his mind. He saw himself as a childless man. And, you know there's nothing more important than having a heritage to pass on and having someone to pass it on to. And he sensed the need here because God had given him all these promises. There were more before this. It says but, "O Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless..." I don't even have an heir. "...And the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?" Evidently a servant, a trusted servant, and in their scheme of things he was the heir at that point of all that Abram had. "And Abram said, You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir. Then the word of the Lord came to him: This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir. He took him outside and said, look up at the heavens and count the stars--if indeed you can count them. Then he said to him, so shall your offspring be." Praise God! Has God given you promises in your life? Has He ever revealed Himself to you, and caused you to begin to lift up your heart, and to begin to trust in Him, and to believe Him? Well this is what it says of Abram. Says, "Abram believed the Lord...." Now that is so simple that we stumble over it. Abram believed the Lord--Abram believed the Lord! I wonder if we get that. I wonder if I get it. I come into the service this morning and I just had to say, Lord help me. I am so full of unbelief about every little thing. My God, the keys of the kingdom begin with just this simple principle. God said something to Abram, and he believed Him. It says, "...and he credited..."--He, the Lord--"...credited it to him..."--Abram--"...as righteousness." You know there's nothing we can offer the Lord when it comes to righteousness. ( congregational amens ). "...All our righteousnesses..."--as the scripture says--"...are as filthy rags." (KJV). There's nothing that you and I can offer to the Lord that He will accept. What then will make us acceptable to Him in any sense is simply when He talks to us in a personal sense, we believe what He says! ( congregational amens ). Now in the first place, this was not theological principal that God was educating Abram about. This was not just some general principal. Hey, I'm the creator. Well, I believe you, God. This was a personal promise to Abram. This was something that affected 'his' life individually. God says, I love you. I'm going to give you an heir and not only that, your descendants are going to be like the stars of Heaven for number that you can't even count. This was a personal promise to Abram. I want to get that myself in a fresh way this morning. God has...when God speaks to you and He speaks to me, it's personal. This is not a theology class. Sometimes we deal with doctrinal issues because they affect us. They affect the way we think about things. But I'll tell you, when it comes right down to it, the one thing that matters--it's you and God, and our coming together here. And the proclamation of His word is designed for a promise of God to come from His throne and His heart--He's a real person--to come from Him and to enter into your heart in such a way that you and He get together and there is belief on your part in what He has said to you. Because what He says to you has something to do with what He intends to do for you and in you. And if we don't believe it, we miss a lot, don't we? ( congregational amens ). We would love for God to just dump this supernatural quality called faith in our hearts and it's just sort of there when we need it. But you know faith is something that we need to...that needs to grow and there's no way that it can grow except by being exercised in the face of difficulty. And of course we see that in the life of Abraham. We see that there was 25 years that transpired from the time God gave him the promise of a son and the time when that son was born. And, boy, he went through a time...25 years, think about it! I don't know if there's people here who have ever had that kind of time interval between you having a promise of God, I mean a real promise of God, that you knew God was gonna do something. You knew God spoke to you. This was not something you just wished up, that God spoke to you in a definite way, and you began to pray, and you began to wait on God, and the answer was delayed 25 years. There may be people here who have experienced that in a particular thing you can think about. I won't ask you to raise your hand. But that's a trial of faith. Now you and I are ready for the answer right then, or next week, or certainly a month or two. I mean my God, what do you expect? ( laughter ). God, you said it. What's the matter? What's going on here? But when God speaks, and He desires faith from us, faith is something that does not waver from believing the promise of God. And the fact is, we do waver but you know the bottom line...that's the one thing about Abraham that we've heard so many times, is that the New Testament records, not all the little waverings in between, not the days and the nights of doubt, not the laughing, not the side track of bringing forth Ishmael. But when all was said and done, what God reported in the books of Heaven was that Abraham believed God, that he was strong in faith, giving glory to God. Praise God! I want God to be able to write that by my name, don't you? ( congregational amens ). I can't think of any greater testimony. I mean, think about what we're being asked to do. It's simply to believe God. If we don't, what are we saying? God, you're a liar. I can't trust you. That's what unbelief is. May God deliver us from just doing anything in the world but believing the promise of God that relates to you and to me right now where we're at. I guarantee there's not a person in here that's not being challenged by the devil right now against your faith. There are thoughts coming to your minds. There are feelings. There may be physical infirmities. There may be challenges and situations in school, well not in school right now, but anyway, in jobs, in a thousand and one things your faith is under fire. And so is mine. My faith was very much under fire just coming into the service this morning, I can tell you. But do you know why God lets your faith come under fire? Because He wants to prove Himself faithful to you, and He wants you and me to be willing to believe Him in spite of everything. There is a word that God would speak to you and to me that is applicable to your situation right now. And I believe God has the power to bring it to your attention as we will wait upon God and say, Lord, I don't understand. Lord, I'm in a bad place right here. I need help in my spirit, I need help with this situation or that. Oh God, help me. How does He help you? Sooner or later, if we will wait on Him, God is going to speak a Word. It might be something that comes from the pulpit. You might have a little child come up to you and something will come out of their mouth and you'll say, oh my God, it's so simple. Just believe God. And God can give you the wisdom if our ears...if our heart, first of all, is hoping in God and we are steadfast in saying, I don't care if it takes 25 years between the time God told me something and the fulfillment is there, God help me to stand. God, help me just to absolutely be steadfast. But in that interim, Lord, help me to be listening. Help me in my present situation to realize that you love me in spite of how I feel and how things look. You're love for me is constant as has been said this morning. There's no variation in how God feels about you and about me. Boy that's hard for us to grasp. We just are so changeable. We change with the weather. We change with how we feel but God's love is an absolute constant in your life and in mine. And He wants you to know that and He wants me to know that. So what is our need this morning? Oh God, I'm waiting upon You. My expectation is from You, Lord. You know exactly what I need. You know when I need it. And if You choose to withhold right now, then I just rest in Your love, because I'm in Your hands. I'm in a perfectly safe place and there's no devil in hell that can take from me what You have put in my heart. And so I trust in You. But Lord, when You do speak to me--when You tell me something, Lord, give me the strength just to believe it. And to believe it, and to act accordingly, to stand upon what You have said. I think of other scriptures that we have heard from time to time. I think it's Jeremiah 17 is the one that comes to my mind just now. You know, when we're faced with situations in this life and we're faced with needs in our own circumstances, what do we tend to do? What do you tend to do? We tend to try to work it out, don't we? We tend to try to do something naturally to feel better, to work situations out. Whatever it is, we are looking to the arm of flesh and it may be 'your' arm. It's you trying to fix the situation that God may have put you in to teach you how to trust Him. And so the prophet here says in verse 5, "This is what the Lord says: Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives." (NIV). I wonder how much of this, we as believers sometimes experience? Some of the dryness that we experience, I believe God puts us in places to learn to trust Him. Some of it, I fear, is of our own making when we just are striving and trying and our heart begins to turn away from the simple principle of trusting God. ( congregational amens ). And what does it say? You won't see. Prosperity will come, but you won't see it. My God, I want to see it. ( congregational amens ). I want to have my heart in a condition where I can see the promise of God when it comes true in my life and all He wants to do for me. I believe that He loves me. Do you believe that He loves you personally? Do you believe that God wants to speak to you personally...that He knows your name and your address and your telephone number and even your social security number? He can remember that. He knows all about you and He loves you with an infinite love. But I just pray that God will just do something special for me this morning and for you, because I sense--I sense that there is so much...it's not a great deal of sense that it takes to sense this, but there's an awful lot of unbelief in us. We are polluted with unbelief in so many areas of our lives. And God sees how much we are going to have to be a people who simply are able to believe Him in the face of things. So why do you think God does what He does in your life and in mine? Does He do it because He's angry with us? Does He do it because He's disgusted? Does He do it because He's just sort of...for any negative reason at all? No! I believe God does things in our lives for the exact same reason He did 'em for the children of Israel. He will put us in a place of need where the only thing standing between us and real trouble, is what God has said to us. And His design is that we believe Him and we come forth into a large place and He be able to lead us forward. And when we face the next thing down the road, we'll be able to look back and say, remember how we felt in that situation? Remember how things looked? And then God spoke to us, and the devil whispered a thousand objections in our ears, but God gave us the grace to simply say, God, I believe you and I don't care what anybody says. I believe what you told me and God backed up His Word. God was faithful. And so now that I'm facing this new thing I know that God is a God who can be trusted with the issues of life and I believe again what He said. God wants us to be able to have a faith that grows and is strong. How do you think the heroes of faith in this book acquired the kind of faith that they did? They were tried. They had to believe God when multitudes of others were not believing God. But they stood fast. They said, I know my God. I believe with all my heart today that God has things ahead for us, that God is wanting to bring us to a place of greater usefulness to Him. And if we are stuck in a mode, in a place in our lives where every time something goes wrong, every time we feel bad, every time there's a challenge in our path, we just throw up our hands and we get dismayed in the face of it, how much can God really use us? But I sense a need in my life and I believe that it's something that is true not just of me...that God wants to build us up in our faith. God wants us to have more and more experiences with God. It was the experience that David had trusting God in the wilderness, watching sheep, that enabled him one day to be king, enabled him to stand before Goliath and not be dismayed. Why? He'd stood before a lion. He'd stood before a bear. May God help us to realize that the lions and bears that He allows to attack our lives are not to hurt us but they're to give us something to exercise that faith that He has given to us. I thank God it isn't something I have to muster up, but I can receive it. I can believe. I can yield my vessel to Him and say, oh God, give me the strength right now not to turn tail and run, but to believe the promise that you have given to me. There's just something personal about this that I see and I sense and I see it in myself--a need to believe God in a very personal way when God talks to me. Is there anybody here that feels that need in your life? ( congregational amens ). I believe we all can say that. I tell you what, God is in the process of doing something incredible for this church, but His way of doing it is not just that we come in here and all of the sudden there's this magical bucket of power that's dumped into our lives. I believe God is shaping vessels. I believe He is putting us through the school of faith to say, child, can you trust Me with this? Can you trust Me when you don't feel good? Can you trust Me when there's not enough money in the bank and things don't look good? Can you trust Me in this situation where it looks like you need to do something but you don't have the means to do it, and you're waiting on Me and you're looking to Me for your supply? Can you trust Me? I'll tell you what, this just comes back to me. It isn't where this came from but, I have read in my lifetime so many accounts, missionary biographies particularly, but I'm thinking of others as well. There is a common thread that flows through life of anyone that's ever been much used of God. You will go back in the early days of their experience with God and you will find them living in, many times, in lonely, isolated, difficult places in which they suffered, in which they went without. They sometimes didn't know where their next meal was coming from. God puts His servants in places where all they can do is say, oh God, I'm trusting in You. I am looking to You. You are my supply. You are all that stands between me and utter, complete failure and disaster. And God will teach them and prove Himself faithful and there will be a faith. Then all of the sudden they may be called to go to China. They may be called to go to Africa. They may be called to go into places that you and I wouldn't even imagine that we could go, but they'd already been in the school of faith. And God has shown them that He is faithful to His Word, that He can be trusted. He can be relied upon, that whatever this Book says, God makes real to our hearts. We can rely upon it more than we can rely on our own strength to take care of our needs and our problems. God is gonna make us people of this Book. I'll tell you, that's a desire, that's a hunger that I have in my heart. And I just share it so that others can pray. I believe God is really, really, really, one of the central things He's interested in is to make us people who will be able to take this Book and the truths and the simple principles that are in here, and realize that they work. ( congregational amens ). They work in the modern age. They don't just work way back there. They work now and God wants us to be able to rely on what He has said and be like little children in one sense, that we just simply say, Father, I love You. I know You. I trust You. If You said it, that's good enough for me. How many of you are there? Yeah. We've got room to grow, don't we? And so do you understand a little bit why God's doing certain things in your life? There is no way that we can grow and learn these kinds of things except having to exercise 'em. It doesn't take much faith if God is just continually pouring blessings in our lives. But when we have to say, oh God, I don't know where my next meal's coming from. Lord, I'm tired. Lord, I have something to do and I just don't have the strength to do it. Oh God, help me to be able to get out of bed this morning. Lord strengthen me against this pain, this difficulty, this whatever it is that's challenging my life right now. Oh God, I believe there's something that You would say to me right now that would give me hope and give me strength. When it does, Lord, help me to stand on that thing and just believe it and throw that thing up like a shield of faith. Isn't that what the Lord says about the shield? I believe there's a sense in which He is our Shield but He's also given us a shield. And how often do we just sort of...I guess it must be true. God's dead. It's almost that bad sometimes the way we listen to the devil. But God's not dead and His Word is true and He wants to teach us how to rely upon the simplicity of His Word and I believe that there is a rest, there is a maturity, there is a growth that God can bring about in your life and in mine where we will be able to face things that we would never have been able to face if God had not put us in this school. So I thank Him for the school. I thank Him for the battles I had to fight to get up here and to get here this morning. I thank Him for it. I understand why. It's obvious I need it. And it's just as obvious to me that you need the things that God is doing in your life right now. But oh, He hasn't left you defenseless. What stands between you and the problem and the disaster that the devil would make you fear is the Word of God, His promise to your heart. Do you believe it? Do you take it personally or are you just sort of a general believer? God wants 'you' to have a personal faith in a faithful God who can bring you through any kind of circumstance. He rewards faith. "...Without faith it is impossible to please Him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." (KJV). I tell you, God is going to be our reward just as He was Abraham's. He's gonna be our shield. His promise is true and His promises get right down to the nitty-gritty of our every day life. There is some word that God would minister to your heart that would turn you from cowering and worrying and all the negative things that go through our minds--that would turn you from that kind of a person into one that says my God is on the throne. He's in charge and I'm trusting in Him and I know He's gonna bring me through. Praise God! ( congregational amens ). 
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