Show Notes
It's real easy to get carried away with life and forget that we need our faith in god to be strong in order to be able to participate in whatever vision he has for us.
Here are 3 things that will help you increase your faith.
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] If you knew what it took to increase your faith in God, not just faith in anything, placing your faith in God, would you take advantage of it? Well, guess what? We're going to talk about the keys to increasing your faith in God here in this podcast. Let's get ready for it.
[00:00:26] God doesn't design us to fit. He designs us to be impactful.
[00:00:34] Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Light of Life Refresh. That was the old podcast. Oh, my gosh. Shifts and Ladders. Welcome back to Shifts and Ladders. It's Ryan. Y'all know who it is. If you haven't yet, please subscribe, Share like this episode it will bless me so much, but more importantly, it will bless other people that need to understand the message of Jesus and that God really loves them wholeheartedly, no matter what they've done. And I think this will help the algorithm and all the things that make the Internet the Internet. Right? But I truly believe that your engagement and however God decides to use this and, and he build you up and exhort you, and especially if you're going through a challenging time. We're in challenging times right now with the political climate that we're in. We need a little bit of faith and we need to really turn our faith to God. Because if we misplace our faith, misplace our hope, we will find that we will be disappointed. And we've actually put whatever we placed our hope in above what God has said.
[00:01:49] I'm getting right ahead of myself. I'm gonna do one thing and then we'll jump right into it. Matthew, chapter 6, verse 33 says this. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all of these things shall be added unto you.
[00:02:05] There's a whole different whole message in that.
[00:02:10] If we, if we start from 26 Matthew, chapter 6, verse 26, down to 34, I believe.
[00:02:19] But the. The impetus or the anchor of that scripture is. Is 33, which I. Which is what I just said. And I want to just touch on this and then we'll get right into the keys. The part, the problem with many people is that we have prioritized God in the wrong way.
[00:02:43] Let me explain.
[00:02:45] We have misplaced. We've put our hope in money. We've put our hope in other things.
[00:02:51] But also what we've prioritized has somewhat been the first thing, too. So if you prioritize your children over your time with God, or you, or your marriage or whatever good things that you have been blessed with can actually take precedence over God, believe it or not. It's crazy that some of the gifts that we've been given, we turn those into idols for worship.
[00:03:20] And unfortunately, we have to evaluate that. If you are spending more time and putting more faith in the thing that isn't God, it has now become the priority in your life.
[00:03:33] So you have to do that work for yourself. But I truly believe that God wants to be everything for us and for you.
[00:03:44] And in doing so, we have to place our hope and our faith in him.
[00:03:50] So we talked about this in numbers, chapter 13.
[00:03:55] Let me get the book back.
[00:03:58] You hear them pages?
[00:04:01] I just got a. I have a Bible that I hadn't used in a while, actually.
[00:04:06] But it's a book. It's. I mean, the pages are crispy, so I'm like. And I have it marked up in it.
[00:04:16] So I'm really excited about it. This is the other piece too. If I can just for a shout out to anyone who is looking for a Bible, get a Bible that you can write in. Okay? The Bible is meant to be written, and you will never look at the passage, the passage in this book. The same every time you read it. Life changes your perspective. So just like we talked about in the last podcast about the tale of two perspectives, but we were talking about in the last pod numbers, chapter 13, beginning at verse 26, ending in 33.
[00:04:51] Yeah. Verse 33. Yeah. Double check.
[00:04:55] Where the 12 spies came back with the bad report. While Caleb and Joshua had a good report, the 10 continued to give their negative report and really give a bad perspective of what the promise that God gave them looked like. I would be. I would be hurt if God did all of that to get me out. And they called my promise something that it shouldn't be or that it isn't, I should say.
[00:05:29] And essentially what that did was disqualify them at least this particular generation from entering into the promise, into the land of milk and honey and all the things that God had in store for them because they forgot that God, no matter what the circumstances were, God is over all of that. So you can stack up. And this is the. This is the shouting part. You can stack up your money issues, you can stack up your marital issues, you can stack up your mental issues, you can stack up your health issues. You. You can stack up so many things. And God is over all of that.
[00:06:08] God is over all of that.
[00:06:11] Somebody needs to hear that. Whatever you're struggling with, God is over that.
[00:06:17] So let's give that back over to God because he knows how to handle it better than we can. And he can heal you in the way you need to be healed.
[00:06:28] So I want to really talk about this faith thing because you can see, you can have evidence that God can, but do you believe that God will?
[00:06:42] Yes. Okay, so these are a few keys I'm going to talk to for you in this podcast.
[00:06:52] It requires you doing some personal inventory and recognizing humbly that you didn't get yourself to where you are right now.
[00:07:07] You can't orchestrate the life that you're living by yourself.
[00:07:12] You can contribute hard work, and absolutely hard work is a component, but also God's favor over your life is something that you cannot calculate in dollars and cents. The relational equity you built, the people that you come in contact with, the timing of things, you can't make this stuff up.
[00:07:36] You just can't.
[00:07:38] There's.
[00:07:40] I recently heard it this way. I believe it was Pastor Philip Anthony Mitchell from oh gosh, I just had the church 2819 Church in Atlanta.
[00:07:54] He said, you know, there isn't a thing about there. How did he say, oh, here we go. He said, coincidences aren't really random. They're not random. They're really God's way of communicating his truth to you in the moment.
[00:08:13] So if you happen like, oh, I saw that over here. No, God's trying to get your attention somewhere.
[00:08:19] It's not just by these numbers, because there's infinite possibilities.
[00:08:25] But what happened in that moment at that time that got your attention, that connected to something that you were thinking about earlier that day that got your attention. Now a few hours later, you can't really make that up.
[00:08:39] So you can call them coincidences if you want to, but I call them God's incidents into your life to communicate a message. So how can we improve and increase our faith? All right, I got a couple keys for you. First, you've got to remember God's past faithfulness.
[00:08:58] There are some times you've gotten out of a jam.
[00:09:02] I don't even know why I use jam of a situation.
[00:09:07] God's gotten you out a couple situations. Let's put the plural in it.
[00:09:13] And sometimes what we forget is what God has already done up to this point.
[00:09:21] David said it like this. I have never. I. I was young and now I'm old. I believe this is. Oh, gosh, it's in psalms.
[00:09:30] I'll put in the show notes. I can't remember the address for the scripture, but he says, I was young and now I'm old. But I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed Begging bread. He is calling out and building up God's track record that he had not failed when he was young and he had not failed when he got older. And God has stayed consistent even when we have been inconsistent. So what do we do when we don't draw on that faithfulness, God's previous faithfulness?
[00:10:01] We get stuck in negative perspectives.
[00:10:06] Clearly, what the Israelites, or at least the 10 spies of Canaan dropped into, they completely forgot that God had delivered them miraculously through the Red Sea on dry land, by the way. It wasn't even muddy, no mud. It was dry land. The Bible says they were given gold as a way to get out of Egypt.
[00:10:33] They got paid to get out of Egypt. That's a whole nother story. Okay, number three, they had been given food called manna, which means, what is it?
[00:10:48] And they found ways to use it to bake coriander and make cakes and eat from that. God provided quail. 30 days worth of quail.
[00:10:59] God said, I'm a feed y'all. And then clearly this is in the book. Actually, let me bring it up so I can. So I ain't lying.
[00:11:09] God said, I want to say this is chapter six in Numbers.
[00:11:15] I just need to make sure y'all know this.
[00:11:21] I want to say it is.
[00:11:24] Yep, it's chapter 11 in Numbers, verse 31. That's where you can find it. About quail. God sends quail and basically says, because y'all been complaining about meat, Imma give so much quail that y'all gonna be sick of it.
[00:11:39] 30 days worth of quail.
[00:11:42] That's a lot of birds.
[00:11:45] And this is what God said. He caused a wind to redirect the quail to fall and get to where it needed to get to. Isn't God so faithful?
[00:11:59] Even when we are complaining, God has been faithful. Even though it might have harmed us, God is still faithful. I'd rather God hurt my feelings, then injure me if something that I thought was best for myself, but God has to remove me from it. There's something better. I have to believe it because you have to shout out Ty Tribbett.
[00:12:26] If he did it before, he can do it again. Same God right now.
[00:12:32] Same God back then. I mean, it's a good song. We can't play it in there because it's copyright things with YouTube. But if you can, if he did it before, he can do it again. He's that kind of God. So what we have to do is we have to remember God's faithfulness in previous seasons, because that Actually encourages us to go forward because naturally we look at the past and gang and gain and glean insight on how future state future is going to work out. And yeah, I just can't, I can't get, I get excited about that.
[00:13:12] So I spent a lot of time with that. So let me go to the next one. Focus on God's promises and not your problems.
[00:13:21] Promises over problems. Okay?
[00:13:27] The folks ten spies only brought problems. We got this. We got this. We got this. Have you ever been around someone that just focuses on problems and does not bring a solution?
[00:13:39] They're always concerned about everybody else, but they don't spend the time to focus on what is promised in front of them.
[00:13:48] There's opportunity. They just don't want to wait. They're like, well, you know, there's all this happening. And okay, that may be true, but what was promised?
[00:13:59] What was promised? What did God say? The land is already yours. You just got people you got to clear out and I'm going to help you clear them out.
[00:14:09] God said that, not us.
[00:14:13] So even God is like, even God is faithful to his promises. Bible says that God is not a man, that he should lie. God is so good.
[00:14:26] There is no one that can beat God at his own word. So he says, I will put this on myself. And we usually say in, in, in hip hop culture urban colloquialisms, it says put that on God. So God said, I'm gonna put it on me, on myself. My promises are on me because there isn't anyone that can actually be like me.
[00:14:54] I'm on God. My promises are on my own, God on me.
[00:14:59] So when God puts a promise on himself to be to execute on what he said he's going to do, that is a guarantee.
[00:15:09] God says, I'm going to put that on myself because I can't find anybody else greater than me.
[00:15:15] I'm that faithful.
[00:15:19] So are you going to focus on your problems or are you going to focus on your promises?
[00:15:25] Because God basically said, I double dog dare you to believe me on the promises that I said, I'm a give to you and I promise on me that I do it. Ain't that crazy. I hit my knuckles. I'm not crazy.
[00:15:43] But isn't that how good God is though?
[00:15:46] Because he said imma do it no matter what.
[00:15:51] If you have faith to believe it.
[00:15:55] God can't work without no faith. That's like the key ingredients to faith. And then I'm let me do this. I'm a skip to scripture and I don't want to run too much out of time. But this will bring us to focusing on faith and then focusing on what God had said to us during that season, that we believe it.
[00:16:24] So while we're focusing on God's promises and not our problems, it requires our faith to focus on what those are. Right. So I want to just going to speed through. Still keeping numbers there. But there is a scripture In Matthew chapter 13, beginning at verse 53 that talks about, about Jesus going back home.
[00:16:51] And there is a little bit more in other, it's a couple other gospels. I think it's in the Gospel of Luke as well, I believe. But long story short, Jesus goes back home to Nazareth. That's where he's born and raised. He's going back to the hometown. He reads some scripture in the synagogue and essentially it astonishes the people because they're like, oh my God, who is this kid? And they say, is this not the carpenter's son?
[00:17:24] And let me read the actual thing that they said.
[00:17:29] I'm gonna read the scripture. It's short, it says. Now it came to pass when Jesus had finished these parables that he departed from there and when he had come to his own country, which was Nazareth, he taught them in their synagogue. So they were astonished and said, where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Is this not the carpenter's son? Is this is not his mother called Mary and his brothers James and Jonas and Simon and Judas and his sisters are.
[00:18:03] And his sisters, Are they not all with us? Where did this man get all these things? So they were offended at him. But Jesus said to them, a prophet is not without honor except in his own country, in his own house. Now he did not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief.
[00:18:28] Okay? That's the sad part.
[00:18:30] Now there are so many opportunities that God has when we focus on his promises with faith, not our problems. But clearly when Jesus got surrounded by people that did not have enough faith, God could not, Jesus could not do what God is able to do due to the environment. So this is part three, number three. Surround yourself with faith filled people. Okay?
[00:19:04] Caleb wasn't alone.
[00:19:06] He had Joshua. He was there with him, right? He had other people alongside him, wasn't by himself.
[00:19:15] And to be honest, there's going to be times in your life where you're going to need someone with you. And in fact you're going to. Someone's going to have to have faith for you. When you can't have faith for yourself.
[00:19:30] You may be going through something right now with your family maybe going something, going through something right now financially, and you just don't know how you're going to get out of it. You don't know how you're going to get through it.
[00:19:45] And you're not alone.
[00:19:49] You need to have someone that you can talk to that can encourage you in the Lord to speak to you, to talk to you, to help build you up. Because at some point you're going to have to have faith for somebody else. But until you get faith for yourself, a good friend, a good brother or a good sister in Christ will let you borrow theirs for a while.
[00:20:21] I truly believe that when you find yourself surrounded with people that are full of faith, there's areas in your life that you may not have faith for.
[00:20:34] And perhaps you have a friend who has faith in that area and you're like, you know, I struggle in that area and like, no, I got faith. I believe in you. I believe in what God placed in you because I can see you outside of yourself and I can give you the encouragement that you need to get through to the next thing. I can help you make the shift so that you have faith in those areas.
[00:21:05] All right, so that was a little bit of a longer pod, but I think these are critical keys. We need these keys. We need the keys of understanding that we got to remember God's past faithfulness. God's done it before, he can do it again. Draw from that. We also have to focus on God's promises over our problems. And lastly, we need to focus on being surrounded by faith filled people that can encourage and build us up when we don't have faith for ourselves.
[00:21:44] Folks, this is the end of this podcast if it's blessed. You already told you in the beginning, but I'm a double down at the end. Share it with someone, encourage someone if they're lacking in faith. And in fact, the best blessing that you can have for me is to be one of these three things I talked about. Help somebody, encourage somebody, build them up, borrow faith, or let someone borrow yours.
[00:22:14] Like I said in the last podcast and next couple weeks we're going to be getting out a newsletter for the Shifts and Ladders community.
[00:22:23] You're going through something during the week and honestly, God's word helps us shift back into abiding in the vine so that the spirit of God can encourage us, build us up and help us to become what God desires us to be in that moment for those that he cares about. You may be the only Jesus or only person that knows about God. In your vicinity. And in fact, God wants to use you in amazing ways. And the best way I know how is to send some encouragement midway through. So if you're having a rough week or you're having a good one and want to shift it to another gear, this newsletter will help you do that. So keep it locked. We're going to have that. I'll make sure to announce that in the next coming weeks. But until the next pod, we'll see you next time. Peace.
