Eventually, the faith you are exercising dissolves into simply knowing. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit in you.
The Spirit’s primary task in you is to reveal me to you. And where is he going to reveal me? In you, because that’s where I live. Or, to put it another way, the Spirit comes that you might know the things that God has freely given to you. And what, primarily, have you been freely given? Me! Me living in you.
This is how God’s work is done in you. God freely gives. The Spirit reveals it to you. You choose to trust in what you’ve been shown. And eventually, by the Spirit’s work in you, your choice to trust dissolves into knowing. At that point faith becomes substance. It becomes evidence. It is as real to you as things in the physical world.
You experience this process all the time in the material world. Take the example from earlier. You are invited to sit in a chair you’ve never sat in before. You don’t know if it will hold you or not. But you trust that it will, and you sit. At that point, you know. You don’t have to keep affirming it. You simply know.
But your knowing didn’t come by you standing in front of the chair and trying to work up knowing. The knowing wasn’t produced by you at all. The chair itself produced the knowing. What you trusted in produced the knowing.
You’ve experienced this before in the spiritual realm as well. At some point in time (whether you know when that time was or not), you placed your trust in me and received the new birth from the Spirit. At that point you trusted that your sins were forgiven. Eventually, however (and it may have happened very quickly), that trust simply became knowing. You didn’t have to keep reminding yourself that your sins were forgiven. You simply knew.
Putting your faith in me in you operates the same way. Once upon a time you heard the word, “Jesus can save you.” And you may have thought, “Jesus can save me? No way.” But eventually you chose to trust. And you discovered it was true. Now I am telling you that I am in you, living my life through you. And you look at your own life and think, “Jesus is living through me? Look at all my failures! No way.”
You enter in by faith. That’s the obedience I’m looking for—not you trying your hardest to live like me, but rather the obedience of faith: you believing and affirming what I tell you.
Boldly grasp hold of me by faith. Declare by faith that we are one, that my life flows in and through you, that it is indeed me living my life through you. As you do, you will enter into what already is. You will be strong, for I am the strength in you. You will be loving, for I am love within you. You will be wise, for I am wisdom within you. You will have joy, and peace, and self-control, and every other fruit of the Spirit, for I am all of those things in you.
Declare it by faith, and keep declaring it. As you confess it with your mouth, you will begin to experience the reality of it. But your confession doesn’t make it a reality. It simply enables you to fully enter into what is already real. I am the one living through you. So your job is to affirm. Your job isn’t to work up the knowing. Your job isn’t to try hard to know. Only my Spirit can produce the knowing. You affirm. He confirms. That’s His job.
As you affirm, often despite external appearances to the contrary, faith finally becomes fact in you. My Spirit causes your affirming to become a settled awareness. You simply know. At that point you are living completely spontaneously. You know that it’s actually me living through you. Because it is. It always has been.
I’ve said all of this before:
Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God … (1 Corinthians 2:12)
But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth … He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. (John 16:13-14)
But having the same spirit of faith, according to what is written, “I believed, therefore I spoke,” we also believe, therefore we also speak … (2 Corinthians 4:13)
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)
… we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake. (Romans 1:5)
… while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:18)
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