Confidence + Faith + Patience = Rest

Confidence and faith in God compensate you by escorting you into a place of rest. That rest positions you to receive what’s already been done. So, what’s necessary to keep this confidence and faith? Patience. Employ patience to maintain your confidence so that your faith will continue working long enough to produce a harvest of rest.

For years, we’ve heard people say that trying your faith will produce patience. If the trials of our faith produced patience, we would be the most patient people on the planet! When your faith is being tried, employ patience so that your confidence and faith will remain at work and you can see the manifestation of what’s already finished.

People have blamed a lack of manifestation on the quality and quantity of one’s faith. In other words, “Do I have enough faith?” and the faith they have, “Is it good enough?” We seldom have a faith problem when we encounter issues after patiently waiting. It’s not that faith failed, it’s that we took it off the job; we didn’t allow faith to remain at work. We just needed to keep it working. We walk by faith and not by sight. The just shall live by faith. Born-again believers have the faith of Jesus Christ; we just have to balance faith and grace together. If grace hasn’t already made something, faith can’t make it. Faith is supposed to apprehend what grace has already made.

A fall from grace doesn’t mean falling into sin. In fact, when we fall into sin, it’s God’s grace that brings us out of it. “Fall from grace” means to fall back into your performance, self-effort, and self-dependence instead of being dependent on God. In this state, Christ has no effect on your life because you’re living by the law. Under the law, it’s all about you doing something to get something—it’s about meeting demands so you can deserve something. When you do something to try to deserve something else, the result isn’t favor, it’s favoritism and it stinks with self-effort.

You’ll see things happen for your benefit as a result of your trust, and the major thing you’ll see is rest. When you are at rest, you’re not worried about anything. You aren’t supposed to preach under stress, trying to figure out how the message will go. Study all you can and then rest in God for the rest. Ministers, when preparing to deliver a word, make sure you’re not spending more time preparing the message than you are preparing the messenger. You’ve got to marry the Spirit of God and allow Him to lead you to move and say what needs to be said. Resting in ministry is not inactivity. Study and do your due diligence, but don’t worry about it. Resting means without stress, without care, without worry, and most importantly, without unbelief.

Whatever you focus on the most is what you will empower yourself to do. So ask the Lord to help you not focus on things that will hurt you and instead focus on things that will help you. All the world’s religions demand that you meet a requirement before you get anything from God, but Christianity was never supposed to be a religion. It was supposed to be a relationship with God, a relationship where you could depend and lean on Him. In the old covenant, it was about God’s people serving Him through the Law of Moses, but under the covenant of grace, it’s about God serving you. He’s putting the apron on and saying, “What can I do for you?” That’s what living a life of grace is all about. Confidence + Faith + Patience = Rest!