Jerry Mercer

Faith, the Substance of My Hopes

What are you hoping for, and what kind of vision does your hope produce?

We as believers must have an earnest desire of what we are expecting our outcomes to be. Our faith builds as we examine God’s word and then start implementing it in our lives. Amen!

These building blocks of faith keep fear at bay and we stop pondering all the, “what could happen scenarios.” Then we stay with the vision God gave us out of His word and into our spirits.

God speaks in visions; His word gives us an image of our future and our future in Him gives us “High Hopes.”

When we follow God’s word for our lives as a way of living, our obedience then fuels our hopes.

And “High Hopes” produce our desired expectations, bringing our faith into realizing. Our realizing pleases God because faith pleases God. Amen!

True faith would conquer all pressure and we would not even think on the, “what could happen” scenarios. When we stay rooted and grounded in the word and the vision God gave us, we increase our belief in the truth.

True faith relieves our bondage again to fear, our hopeful expectation expels all fear. Because hope sees the future outcome of our situations, and all situations come out for our good and God’s glory!

God’s word and Spirit give us a faithful vision, a vision full of faith. And by faith, we lay hold of peace, a peace that can only be attained when we stop allowing other visons to play out in our minds.

Our mind truly is the battlefield where all our faith battles are fought. A heart full of God’s word and a strong spirit which has been fed on Godly vision will intervene in the battle of the mind and cause you to see your victorious outcome.

There is always more with us than there is with them; them being the negative pull of the devil and his cohorts. God always causes us to triumph.

We overcome in every situation when we get our vision past the battlefield of our mind, and into our hopeful outcome. God and His spirit are with us in every small situation, up to and including life-changing situations and dreams!

When we feed on the Word of God, our Word-filled inner encouragement becomes the catalyst that portrays the vision of our hopeful outcome.

God will always give us a vision of a good outcome, as we walk by faith in Him!

God is always checking our heart condition to gauge our level of faithfulness. He knows where our faith really is, and sometimes we need to cry out to Him, “Lord I believe, help me with my unbelief.” This moves us into a place of humility and allows God to release more grace to us, and with enough grace, we can do anything! Amen!

You see grace isn’t too far from faith, and our true faith causes a release of more grace, which will produce for us our hopeful vision. We must get real with ourselves to allow and enjoy all the gifts that God has to offer.

God is always standing at our call, with His arms wide open. His embrace is full of love, full of guidance, and full of wisdom giving us that warm fuzzy feeling when we know we have pleased Him.

God is always pleased with our faith abiding in Him, humbly crying out for and accepting His help, which is His grace shown to us His people.

By allowing God to direct our path, “By Faith”, we are given His light, and with His light, we see our desired outcome and avoid all the, “what could happen scenarios.”

God really wants us to have our hearts desire in every situation, in every dream. He just wants us to attain them through Him and, “By Faith.”

As we look past what we see, our desired outcome is produced by our Godly vision, and the more light we have the more vision we have, the more vision gives us the reality of what we started out hoping for.

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Hebrews 11:1.

Let your hopes fuel what you’re seeing, “get your hopes up today.”

If you need a faith boost, please leave a comment and I will prayerfully respond.

If you liked this content, please consider signing up for my newsletter to receive emails directly.

Scriptures of encouragement and content: James 1:22-25, Psalm 89:19, NIRV translation, Hebrews 11:6, Romans 8:15, 2 Kings 6:16, 1 John 5:4, Mark 9:23-24, Hebrews 4:16, Psalm 37:4, and Hebrews 11:1 in the New Living Translation, Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see. Amen!

I’m Not Worthy, but I’m Worth It

“I’m not worthy, but I’m worth it, a saying I am sure you’ve heard. Another like it around church-going people is, “I’m not worthy, but Jesus makes me worthy”, very truthful but let’s look deeper into this truth.

As I was praying one morning, this word came up in me, “You’re a wise and worthy God”, and “When I pull from Your wisdom, my life becomes worth it.”

Two words stand out here, wisdom and worth; let’s define these two words in Webster’s dictionary.

Wisdom: Knowledge and the capacity to make due use of… Worth: Equivalent in value to the sum of the item specified… Wow!

My life becomes equal in value or worth it, based on the sum of the wisdom that’s been given to me by God, and my acceptance of it.

So I (we) have a part to play in being worth it. We must humbly seek God’s wisdom and be open to accept and receive it. By doing so our lives produce for us a value in the Kingdom of God! Amazing right?

This leading from God in my prayer that morning was grounded in Colossians 1:9 that says; “For this reason since the day we heard about you we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of His will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives”. Amen!

After reading this passage it sparked another word that came up in me; “Wisdom begins in wonder, and is found in the Spirit”. So our worth begins in our acceptance of the wonder of Jesus, but it doesn’t stop there. Hallelujah!

As we continue in the wisdom and knowledge of God and His Word, His Word leads us right into “His will” that we just read about in Colossians 1:9.

God’s will for us requires our wise behavior, which is actually the Hebrew word “tushiyah” (too-shee-yaw). Biblical verses about wisdom can also be categorized in the Latin meaning “wise and powerful”.

Wise and powerful behavior gives us a Kingdom worth that only God can provide in us so that in God’s Kingdom we become totally worth it.

Following God’s character found throughout the scriptures sets us apart as worthy.

We should revisit the definition of worth.

Equivalent in value to what has been specified…

When we line our lives up with God’s specifications we rise up to a worth that is not even measurable on earth, it takes a heavenly measurement to even get an accurate reading of our worth. Wow!

We can then understand the “On earth as it is in heaven” passage that is found in Matthew 6:10, a part of the Lord’s Prayer. Amen!

As a person with wise and powerful behavior, we believe a few things about God; He is God, He is the Creator and Ruler of all things, and that He has placed His divine order within us.

When we receive Jesus as our Lord and Savior we become saved and wise people, able to operate in moral laws, guided by moral principles, always aware of God’s characteristics working in and through us to uphold justice and make peace!

We must look at the world through the grid of “God’s Truth” we then base our decisions and actions on our inner ability to obey these truths.

The Holy Spirit in us gives us this inner ability and our obedience to the truth brings us through the heavenly measuring system by which we will soon see our Savior and King, and His name is Jesus!

Oh what a wonderful name, and to see Him face to face… Oh My!

So let’s prepare our minds for action and exercise self-control. Put all your hope in the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world! Amen! 1 Peter 1:13

If you need a faith boost today, please leave a comment and I will prayerfully respond.

If you liked this content, please consider signing up for my newsletter to receive emails directly.

Scriptures of encouragement and content: 1 Kings 1:52, Mathew 8:8, Matthew 22:8, Matthew 7:21, 2 Peter 3:9, James 1:17, John 3:16, and Romans 12:18.

I will leave you with the Passion Translation of 1 Peter 1:13, “So then, prepare your hearts and minds for action! Stay alert and fix your hope firmly on the marvelous grace that is coming to you. For when Jesus Christ is unveiled, a greater measure of grace will be released to you, Amen!

Let us be found worthy and wanting this amazing grace!

May the Lord bless you while you listen to the song by Chris Tomlin, Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone).

Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) by Chris Tomlin https://youtu.be/KKo3T0j9qqo

Dear Missy for the month of November

Jeremiah 32:17, “O sovereign Lord! You have made the heavens and earth by Your great power. Nothing is too hard for You.”

Dear Missy, God created everything we have and everything we see, and it is true that nothing is too hard for His power. Nothing physical, spiritual, mental, or emotional! His power is love!

I love you, Daddy

Jeremiah 32:21, “You brought Israel out of Egypt with mighty signs and wonders, with great power and overwhelming terror.”

Dear Missy, We must stay in God’s power and keep ourselves out of Egypt, which is a type of the world. God gives us the power to live and love in the world, but He also gives us the power to not get caught up in it.

I love you, Daddy

Jeremiah 51:15, “God made the earth by His power, and He preserves it by His wisdom, He has stretched out the heavens by His understanding.”

Dear Missy, God’s power is all inclusive, it creates, saves, and preserves everything that comes into it and remains under it. Amen!

I love you, Daddy

Daniel 2:20, “Daniel answered saying”, praise the name of God forever and ever, for He alone has all wisdom and power.”

Dear Missy, when we truly “Praise the Lord” and rejoice in His name, His wisdom brings to us the power to do!

I love you, Daddy

Harden Not Your Heart

Do you ever get a feeling in your heart that things are heading the wrong way?

Having that feeling is a built-in guidance system that if followed will lead you away from harm and allow you to have and follow God’s witness.

And being a follower of God, or someone that God is drawing to Himself, you don’t want to push that feeling aside; it is our spiritual warning system alerting us of present or future danger.

The danger is that if we push these inner alerts or knowing’s aside continually we become calloused to them, and callouses become hard and lose their feeling.

We need these inner feelings to have the ability to follow God; if we harden our hearts and become calloused we lose our sensitivity to the leadings of the Holy Spirit.

When we have hardened ourselves against our inner man (our conscience) we have cut ourselves off from God’s help.

There is no grace available to a hard-hearted, rebellious person, and hard-hearted leads to hard-headed or stubborn. In this condition, a person cannot find God’s grace or help and they would not be open to the inner gracious leading.

God’s grace is our help and it comes in the form of an inner leading, a guidance system that leads away from evil and toward good.

As we open ourselves up to the inner witness, our heart becomes pliable and God can work with them as with clay. Molding us into the witness He created us to be, reaching out to the people around us with a message that is vastly different from the message that the world is sending.

Worldly, selfish people have become so hardened against everything and everybody around them that it is very difficult to decipher what they are for or what they are against.

God loses His ability to mold and shape those that are continuing to harden themselves against the truth and if we follow in that direction we will end up broken because God intended us to stay moldable, softened, with the ability to deliver His message, lovingly and full of grace! Amen!

Peter the Apostle of Jesus spoke about this in Acts 15:7-9, “Brothers, you all know that God chose me from among you some time ago to preach to the Gentiles so that they could hear the Good News and believe. (I will pause here for effect— so we could hear the Good News and believe, ponder that for a minute.) Now continuing with the scripture, “God who knows people’s hearts confirmed that He accepts Gentiles by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He gave Him to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for He also cleansed their hearts through faith! Amen!

God knows the condition of our hearts and so do we. I repeat so do we!

If we continue to harden our hearts against our inner knowing of right (our conscience), we remove ourselves from God’s help and start down a path that leads to a heart condition that might not be curable.

If God turns His grace from you and He hardens your heart, then you will follow evil, right into the Red Sea, and perish as the Egyptians did.

If God blinds your eyes and hardens your heart you can’t see or understand and have no way back to grace – John 12:40. So it is imperative that we follow God’s Word and God’s Witness very closely, staying in tune with our spirit; not allowing ourselves the pleasure of picking and choosing our stance if it goes against God-given directions.

If it bothers the inner man and goes against our conscience, we must cut it off immediately, never pushing down the inner witness, but always pushing away the evil that is trying to get us to compromise what we know to be right.

God placed this Witness inside of us for our good and His glory, so I will go back to the earlier statement I made, “God knows our hearts and so do we.”

Let’s let our hearts be our guide, casting down imaginations, arguments, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” Amen! 2 Corinthians 10:5 NKJV.

What are we thinking on today and where did the thoughts come from?

Let your heart overrule your head because in your heart is where true life is found. Proverbs 4:23.

If you need a faith boost today, please leave a comment and I will prayerfully respond.

If you liked this content, please consider signing up for my newsletter to receive emails directly.

Scriptures of encouragement and content; Jeremiah 16:12,

1 Timothy 4:2, Acts 15:7-9, Jeremiah 18:1-8, Exodus 14:17, Joshua 11:20, and Proverbs 4:20-23 NKJV, “My son, give attention to my words; Incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your eyes; Keep them in the midst of your heart; for they are life to those who find them, and health to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.” Amen!

Be it unto us Lord, just as you have said!