TWO KINDS OF FAITH ; real faith and mental assent

 Romans 4. In verse 19, he found three words that exposed everything. "He considered not." This teaching walks through the four things Abraham did that almost no believer has been taught to do, tested in a widow's kitchen, a deacons' meeting and a hospital parking lot at 11:40 at night. You will see the difference between real faith and mental assent, why your senses mislead you in a crisis the way a pilot's inner ear does in a cloud, and why God's word is more real than anything you can see.

One Chapter in the letter to the Romans Will Change How You Understand Faith.

What you will learn in this message:

One Tuesday night in March of 1989, an 83-year-old retired railroad man named Amos Whitfield walked into my office, laid a yellowed paperback on my desk, tapped the cover twice with one crooked finger, and said a sentence that took my ministry apart. "Pastor, you've preached on Abraham for 14 years. You have never once done what he did."

I wanted to be offended. I wanted to tell him about my seminary degree, my 612 sermons, the three times I had taught through the book of Romans, verse by verse. But I couldn't say a word because he was right.

And somewhere deep inside me, I had known it for years.

There is a chapter in your Bible that the enemy could never cut out of it. So, he did the next best thing. He taught

the church to read it as history, instead of instruction. And as long as you read Romans 4 as the story of an old man who

lived 4,000 years ago, hell is perfectly comfortable.

Because the moment you read it as the blueprint for your own faith, the adversary loses the one weapon he has used against you your entire life. I want to tell you about the night I found out my faith was a counterfeit. Not the night I lost my faith. Not the night I doubted God. Not the night I walked away from the church. I never did any of those things.

I am talking about the night I discovered that the thing I had

been calling faith for 14 years was not faith at all. It looked like faith. It sounded like faith. It sang like faith and it preached like faith and it collapsed the very first time it was

asked to carry real weight.

For 14 years, I stood in a pulpit and told people to trust God. I prayed over patients on hospital beds. I anointed foreheads with oil. I quoted the scripture promises with a steady voice and a sincere heart. I counselled couples whose marriages were coming apart and widows whose bank accounts were empty.

And I watched most of them walk out of my office exactly the way they walked in. I didn't blame God. I was too well-trained for that. I blamed timing. I blamed sovereignty. I blamed the mystery of His ways.

But late at night, after my wife had gone to sleep, I would sit at the kitchen table with my Bible open and ask a question I never once asked out loud from the pulpit. If I believe all of this, why does none of it happen? That question followed me for years. It sat beside me in deacons meetings. It rode with me to funerals. It whispered to me in the middle of my own sermons. I believed every word of the Bible. I would have died defending it. And yet there was a gap between what the book said and what my people lived. And that gap was swallowing my congregation one disappointment at a time.

Then an old man put a book on my desk. A book by a

preacher. A man who pioneered The Faithbuilder. That book

sent me back to one chapter, Romans 4, 25 verses. And in the 19th verse, I found three words that exposed everything I had been doing wrong. Three words, he considered not.

Over the next 6 months, those three words would be tested in a widow's kitchen, in a deacon's meeting that nearly split my church, and finally in a hospital parking lot at 11:40 at night when the test was no longer somebody else's problem. It was my wife.

I am going to take you through all of it today. Every verse, every failure, every turn. And before we are finished, you

are going to see four things Abraham did in Romans 4 that almost no one in the church has ever been taught to do.

Four things.

And I promise you the fourth one will change the way you look at reality itself.

But before we begin, I want you to do something. The last thing Romans 4 says about Abraham's faith is that he was fully persuaded. Not partly persuaded.

Not persuaded on Sunday mornings. Fully persuaded.

So, I want you to write those two words on a piece of paper, right now. Fully persuaded. Not because writing words

carries some power of its own, but because faith always begins with agreement.

And I want your very first act today to be agreeing with what God said about the man who believed Him.

Write it , fully persuaded , and let's begin.

Let me tell you who I was before that Tuesday night because I suspect some of you are going to recognize yourselves in

him. I was born in a farmhouse outside Chilikothy, Ohio.

My mother prayed out loud while she needed bread. My father said grace over every meal, even the cold ones. I gave my life to Christ at a tent meeting when I was 11 years old, and I meant it with everything an 11year-old has.

At 22, I felt the call to preach.

At 27, I finished seminary training in Kentucky with honors in New Testament Greek.

And in the spring of 1975, I became pastor of 64 members, a leaking roof, a boiler that only worked when it was kicked. I loved those people. I want you to understand that I was not a hireling. I was not a performer. I visited every member in the hospital. I learned the names of their children and their dogs. I preached every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, and every Wednesday. And over 14 years, that little church grew from 64 people to 180 worshippers. By every measure a denomination uses, I was a success.

But there is a measure the denomination doesn't use. And by that measure, I was failing. Here is what I mean.

In 1983, I preached a sermon on Romans 4:21.

Romans 4:21 states that Abraham was "fully persuaded" (or convinced/assured) that God was able to do what He had promised. This verse defines the nature of saving faith by highlighting Abraham's complete confidence in God's power and faithfulness, even when circumstances—such as his and Sarah's advanced age—made the promise of a son seem impossible.

I still have the notes, three pages typed on a Smith Corona with the title underlined twice.

Being fully persuaded, I told my congregation that Abraham was fully persuaded that what God had promised, He

was able to perform. I told them that God wanted them to be fully persuaded, too, and it was a good sermon.

People shook my hand at the door. Two of the ladies asked for a copy. The next morning, I sat beside a woman  in her living room. She had rheumatoid arthritis so severe that her hands had curled into fists. I opened my Bible. I read her a promise. And then I prayed the prayer I had prayed a thousand times before. "Lord, if it be thy will, touch our sister. " If it be thy will," do you hear what I did? Less than 24 hours after I told the church that Abraham was fully persuaded, I sat in a living room and prayed a prayer that was not persuaded of anything. I preached certainty on Sunday and I practiced uncertainty on Monday and I didn't even notice. Nobody noticed because the whole church had been trained to do exactly the same thing. I want you to see what that little phrase really was. It sounded like humility. It sounded like reverence. It sounded like a man bowing low before a holy God. But it wasn't any of those things. It was an escape hatch. It was a back door I built into every prayer so that when nothing happened, nobody had to be embarrassed. Not me, not the believer, and not God. And nothing happened. Her hands stayed curled. I went home and wrote her name on my prayer list, and it stayed on that list for six years. Let me give you three more names because each one taught me the same lesson, and I refused to learn it. 

Walt Sorenson, a dairy farmer, fourth generation on the same land. In 1985, the bank called his note during the farm crisis and he came to my office with his cap in his hands. I prayed with him. I quoted Philippians 4:19, "My God shall supply all your need." And then I told him very gently that sometimes God's supply looks different than we expect. He lost the farm that November. 

The Dunham boy, 14 years old, asthma so bad his mother slept on the floor beside his bed. I laid hands on him four Sundays in a row. And every time before I prayed, I spent five minutes asking his mother how bad it had been that week. I wanted the details. I wanted to know exactly what I was praying against.

And me, my own body. I had a stomach ulcer for 9 years. I prayed about it every night and every morning I woke up and checked. I would lie in bed, press my hand on my stomach, and wait to see whether it hurt. Before I read my Bible, before I thanked God, before I said good morning to my wife, I checked the symptom. Let me say that again because it matters more than anything else I have told you so far. The first thing I did every morning was consult my body to find out whether God had kept His word.

I didn't have a word for what I was doing then. I have one now. I was living by sense-knowledge. I believed what I

could verify. I believed God was good, but I needed my stomach to confirm it. I believed God provided, but I needed the bank to confirm it. I believed God heals, but I needed Doris's hands to uncurl before I could say so with a straight face. 

The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:7, "For we walk by faith,

not by sight." I had preached that verse at least a dozen times, but I was walking by sight. I was walking by sensation.

I was walking by reports. I simply had a Bible in my hand while I did it. And here is the most dangerous part. I

thought I was a man of faith. I really did. If you had asked me in 1988 whether I believed the Bible, I would have been

insulted by the question. Of course, I believed it. every word, cover to cover.

I could defend the virgin birth, the resurrection, the inspiration of scripture against any professor in America. 

But believing that the Bible is true and believing God, are not the same thing. It took me 14 years and an old railroad man to find that out. 

Maybe you are where I was. 

Maybe you know your Bible. 

Maybe you have taught Sunday school for 20 years.

 Maybe you can quote Romans 8:28 in your sleep. 

And maybe if you are honest, there is a gap in your

life between what you can quote and what you actually see. You pray and you check. 

You confess and you check. 

You hope and you check. 

And every time you check, the symptom wins.

If that is you, I want you to stay with me because what I am about to show you is not a new doctrine.

It is the oldest doctrine of faith in the Bible.

 It is the very chapter apostle Paul wrote to explain how faith works. And the reason you have never seen it is not that it was hidden from you. It is that you were taught to read it like a museum plaque instead of a set of instructions.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking.

You're thinking, "Pastor, praying " if it be thy will "is just being humble, nobody can be sure what God is going to do." That is exactly what I thought. And that is exactly what old retired railroad man took apart, one sentence at a time, the night he put that book on my desk. He was the oldest

member of my Church. He sat in the same seat every Sunday, third row, left side by the window. He was born in 1906. He had worked 41 years on the railroads, most of them as a switchman, and his hands looked like old tree roots. He never taught a class. He never served on a committee. He never once raised his hand in a business meeting. But every Sunday while I preached, he took notes in the margins of a Bible so worn that the cover was held on with electrical tape. I thought he was taking notes on my sermons. I found out later he was correcting them. That Tuesday night in March, he came into my office without

knocking. It was 9:40. I was working on the next Sunday's message. And I remember being irritated because I had nothing yet and the deadline was getting close. He didn't sit down. He just laid that yellow paperback book on my desk. The pages had turned the color of weak tea. The spine

was cracked in four places, and on the cover was a name I had heard only in passing, usually from professors who said it with a sneer.

He said, "Pastor, You've preached on Abraham for 14 years. You have never once done what he did." Then he told me a story I had never heard. In the 1930s, he worked in the rail yards in Seattle. Those were the depression years. Men were laid off by the thousands. He had a wife, four children, and a job that could disappear any Friday afternoon. And every morning in a switchman's shack heated by a coal stove, there was a cracked radio that one of the older men kept tuned to a program called  Church of the Air. The preacher started that broadcast in 1931. He was in his 60s by then and he became one of the pioneers of Christian radio on the whole Pacific coast. People called him the faith builder because that was what happened to people who listened to him. Their faith got built.

Now, here is what most people don't know about this preacher, and it is the reason I want you to trust what came out of his ministry. He was not born with unshakable faith. He was born in Saratoga County, New York. He preached his first sermon at 19 years old and then like me he hit a wall. For about two and a half years he went through a crisis of faith so deep that he stepped away from ministry altogether. A young preacher with gifts and training and he could not make what he preached work for himself. It was that time before he found his way back in a church pastored by a man named AJ Gordon. He and his wife Eva gave their lives to the Lord all over again. And he came out of that valley with a hunger that never left him. A hunger to know why the Bible works for some believers and not for others. He spent the rest of his life on that question.

In 1898, he opened Bethel Bible Institute in Spencer, Massachusetts, and ran it for 25 years. Then he moved west. He pastored. He broadcast. He founded the N C B Church in Seattle. He wrote book after book, still preaching, still writing, still building faith in people who had given up on it. He used to say that most Christians don't have faith. And he died in 1948.

 Amos told me, "They have something that sits next to it in the pew." I asked him what he meant. He held up one finger, hope, then a second, agreement, then a third, feelings.

Then he put his whole hand flat on the book and faith.

I want to walk you through what he taught because it is

the frame for everything else in this message and I will give it to you in my own words the way Amos gave it to me

that night.

1. First, there is hope. Hope is a good thing. The Bible commands it. But hope always lives in the future. Hope says, "Someday God will do it." Hope is a man standing at the window watching the road for a car that might come next week or next year or never. Hope waits. And if hope is all you have, you will wait forever because hope never arrives.

It is always one day away.

Second, there is what he called mental ascent. This is the one that ruined me. Mental ascent agrees that the Bible is true. It agrees that it came from God. It agrees with every single

promise. And then when the crisis comes, it doesn't work. Mental ascent admires the book. It defends the book. It underlines the book, but it does not act on the book. It says, "Yes, that's wonderful, and I know I ought to have it. I just don't, and I can't understand why." 

Third, there is sense-knowledge faith. Sense-knowledge faith say "When I see it, I'll believe it. When I feel it, I'll know I have it. " 

In John 20:25, the disciple Thomas (also called Didymus) expresses skepticism regarding the resurrection of Jesus, having been absent during Jesus' first appearance to the other disciples.  When they told him, "We have seen the Lord!" Thomas replied, "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." 

It is the faith of Thomas in John 20:25, except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails I will not believe.

It needs evidence first. And because it needs visible evidence first, it can only ever believe what has already happened. 

And fourth, there is real faith. Real faith says, if God said it, it is so. If he says I am healed, I am. If he says he will supply, he has. And I will act on what he said whether my senses agree with it or not. 

Amos looked at me across the desk. "Pastor," he said, "which one have you been preaching?"

I didn't answer him. I couldn't because in the space of five minutes an old man with a switchman's hands had described my entire ministry. I preached hope on

Sundays. I lived in mental ascent every day. And I made my decisions by sense-knowledge like every other man in town. 

And real faith, real faith I had only ever read about. I want to pause here because some of you are feeling the same thing I felt in that office. 

A kind of sinking, a quiet recognition. You are realizing that you have been calling something faith that is actually agreement. You have been admiring the promises from across the room the way you admire a painting in a museum without ever taking one down off the wall and carrying it home.

Let me say that again. You can admire every promise in the Bible and possess none of them. That is not a criticism.

That is a diagnosis. And a diagnosis is good news because you cannot fix what you cannot name.

   Before he left that night, Amos opened my Bible to the book of Romans, turned to the fourth chapter, and set it in front of me. "Read it tonight," he said, "not as history, as instructions. Then tell me what you find in verse 19." I almost laughed. I had read Romans 4, a 100 times. I had preached through it three times. I had diagrammed its Greek sentences in seminary.

What could an old switchman possibly show me in a chapter I had already mastered? I did what Amos asked. After he left, I made a pot of coffee, turned off every light in the office except the desk lamp, and opened Romans 4. And for

the first time in my life, I did not start at verse one. I started at the end because something in the way Amos said instructions made me want to know what the chapter thought it was for. And the last three verses told me plainly Romans 4:23, "Now it was not written for his sake

alone that it was imputed to him." Verse 24, "but for us also to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead."

Verse 25, "who was delivered for our offenses and was raised again for our justification. Not for his sake alone."

I sat back in my chair. I had read that verse a hundred times . I had always taken it to mean Abraham's story is a nice example. But that is not what it says. It says the chapter was written for us. It says the same thing that happened to Abraham happens to us in the same way by the

same faith. The Holy Spirit did not put Abraham in Romans 4 so you could admire him. He put him there so you could copy him. 

Romans 4 is not a portrait. It is a pattern. 

And once I saw that, the whole chapter rearranged itself in front of me like iron filings. when you bring a magnet close.

 Let me walk you through it the way I saw it that night because this is the map for everything that follows.

Verses 1-8 are about how Abraham received righteousness.

Apostle Paul asks, "What did Abraham find? Did he earn it? Did he work for it?" And he answers with Genesis 15:6 ,

verse three. For what saith the scripture, Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness?

Now, I want you to notice something because this is where my seminary Greek finally earned its keep. That word counted is the Greek word logizomai.

It is an accounting word. It means to reckon, to calculate, to credit something to an account. It is the word a bookkeeper would use when he writes a figure into a ledger. And here is the remarkable thing. That word in one form or another appears 11 times in this one chapter. 11 times in 25 verses. Counted, reckoned, imputed, credited. 

Romans 4 is a chapter about accounting.

It is about what God writes in His ledger and whether you will believe His ledger over your own.

Verse 5 drives it in deeper. But to him that workketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.

God doesn't credit righteousness to the man who works hardest. He credits it to the man who believes Him.

And then apostle Paul brings in David who says in verses 7 and 8, "Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin." Do you see the pattern? 

God writes righteousness into the ledger before the man feels righteous, before he acts righteous, before anyone else can see it. The entry comes first. The evidence comes later. 

Verses 9- 12 make it even more pointed. Apostle Paul asks, "When was Abraham counted righteous? Before he was

circumcised or after?" And the answer is before. Before the outward sign, before there was any physical evidence at all, Abraham was declared righteous while there was nothing on his body to prove it. 

Verses 13- 16 tell us the promise did not come through the law. It came through faith. And verse 16 tells us why. Therefore, it is of faith that it might be by grace. To the end the promise might be sure to all the seed.

Sure, that the promise might be sure.

That word stopped me because I had spent 14 years making the promises unsure.

Every "if it be thy will" was a man taking a sure promise and turning it back into a maybe. God built the promise on faith specifically so that it would be certain. And I had been treating it as the most uncertain thing in the world.

Then come verses 17- 22 and that is where Paul stops arguing and starts describing. These six verses are the only place in the entire Bible where the Holy Spirit slows down and shows you step by step what is happening inside a man while he believes God. Not the results, the process, the inner

mechanics of faith laid out like the parts of an engine on a workbench.

And verse 19 sits right in the middle of that workbench.

Now, I want to stop and talk to you directly because this

matters for you today. Wherever you are reading and listening from, you have probably read

Romans 4 as a theology lesson. A chapter about justification, a chapter for the scholars and the

seminary students, full of words like imputed and circumcision and seed, and you skimmed it. I don't blame you. Most preachers skim it, too. and the ones who don't usually turn it into a debate about doctrine.

But Romans 4 is not a debate. It is a demonstration. It is the Holy Spirit taking one man's faith, cutting it open, and showing you every working part so that you can build the same faith in your own life. Not a similar faith, not a lesser faith, the same faith. 

Verse 16 calls Abraham the father of us all, not the father of the Jews only, the father of everyone who believes, and a father passes his nature to his children. If you are a child of faith, then the faith of Abraham is not a museum piece. It is your inheritance.

Let me say that again. Abraham's faith is not your example. It is your inheritance. And that changes the question. The question is no longer, can I ever have faith like that. The question is, why haven't I been using what I already inherited?

I wrote those words on a yellow legal pad at about 11:00 that night. Then I wrote under them, "What is the faith of

Abraham?" And I underlined it twice because I realized I didn't actually know. I knew the story. I knew the timeline. I knew he was old and Sarah was old and God promised them a son. But I had never once asked what was going on inside the man during all those years of waiting. What did he do with his doubts?

What did he do with his body? What did he do with every morning when he woke up and there was still no child?

And I had a feeling sitting there in that lamplight that the answer to those questions was the answer to every unanswered prayer on my prayer list.

Now, some of you are thinking, "But Abraham was a giant of faith. He was a patriarch. God talked to him directly. Of course, he believed. What does his faith have to do with my diagnosis or my bills or my marriage? That is exactly the right question. And the only way to answer it is to see just how hopeless Abraham's situation really was. 

Because he was not a giant when this began. He was an old

man with an impossible promise. And for 25 years, everything he could see told him God had lied. I pulled out my study Bible and a calendar, and I did something I had never done in 14 years of ministry.

I built Abraham's timeline year by year, the way you would build a timeline for a patient in a hospital chart. And when I

finished, I understood for the first time how much this man had to believe against. Genesis 12:4 tells us that

Abram was 75 years old when he left Haran. 75. Most men that age are thinking about their pension, not their future. And God says to him in verse two, "I will make of thee a great nation, a great nation, from a man with no children and a wife who had been barren her entire life." That was the promise. And then the years began to pass. 1 year, 5 years, 8 years. Every morning Abram woke up in his tent and

there was no child. Every evening Sarai lay down beside him and nothing had changed. Their neighbours had children.

Their servants had children. Their servants' children had children. And the man God had promised to make a great

nation still had nobody to carry his name. Then comes Genesis 15. Abram is discouraged. He says to God in effect,"Lord, what are you going to give me since I go

childless? My servant Eleazar is going to inherit everything I own." That is the voice of a man who has started to make other plans. He has started to adjust the promise to fit the facts. And God does something beautiful. He takes Abram outside at night and says in verse 5, "Look now toward heaven and tell the stars, "If thou be able to number them,

so shall thy seed be." And then the verse that apostle Paul quotes in Romans 4:3, is Genesis 15:6, "And he believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness."

There it is. The ledger entry log.

God wrote righteousness next to Abram's name the moment he believed. Not when the child was born.

Not when the nation appeared. The moment he believed. But I want you to see what happened next. Because this is where most of us live. Genesis 16.

10 years have passed since they arrived in Canaan. Sarai is still barren. And Sarai has an idea, a practical idea, a sensible idea, an idea that every one of us has had in our own way. She says, "In effect, God has kept me from having children. So take my servant Hagar. Maybe I can build a family through her." and Abram agreed.

Now listen to me carefully.

Sarai was not being wicked. She was being reasonable. She looked at her body. She looked at her age. She looked at the calendar. And she concluded that God must need some help. And Abram, the man who had believed God under the

stars, went along with a plan that was built entirely on the evidence of his five human senses.

Ishmael was born. Genesis 16:16 tells us Abram was 86 years old. And then the Bible goes silent. 

The next verse, Genesis 17:1, tells us Abram was 99 when the Lord appeared to him again. From age 86 to 99, 13 years. There is no recorded word from God to Abram in all that time. 13 years of living with the result of a shortcut.

I want to be careful here because I am not telling you that God punished him. God loved Ishmael. God blessed Ishmael.

But Ishmael was not the promise. Ishmael was what happens when a believer gets tired of waiting and starts to

manufacture the answer with his own hands. And when I read that sitting in my office that night, I thought about my

own Ishmaels. The benevolence fund I started so that I wouldn't have to believe God with people for their rent.

The church growth program I bought from a denominational catalog for $249 because I didn't believe God could fill

the pews. The way I counselled the Dunham boy's mother to just learn to live with it because living with it was

something I could produce and healing was not. Every one of those was a Hagar.

Everyone was a sensible plan built on sense evidence designed to give me something I could see because I didn't

trust what God had said.

Here is what I want you to understand. The opposite of

faith is not always doubt. Sometimes the opposite of faith is a good plan, a reasonable plan, a plan built by a believer who has decided quietly that God's promise needs to be helped along by something more visible. Then comes

Genesis 17. Abram is 99 years old and God appears and does something that I had read past my whole life. He changes his name.

Verse 5, neither shall thy name anymore be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham, for a father of many nations have I made thee. Have I made thee, past tense.

God didn't say, "I will make you a father." He said, "I have made you a father." to a 99-year-old man with a 90year-old wife and no child of the promise. God spoke about it as though it were already done. And apostle Paul quotes that

exact line in Romans 4:17, as it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations.

Now, think about what that name change meant in practice.

Abram means exalted father. Abraham means father of a multitude. From that day on, every time a servant called him to dinner, every time a neighbor greeted him in the road, every time Sarah spoke his name in the dark, they were saying, "Father of a multitude, to a man with no child of promise." His name became his confession. Every time anyone spoke to him, they were declaring what God had declared. And Abraham had to decide hundreds of times a day whether he would answer to the name God gave him or to the facts his body gave him. And God changed Sarai's

name to Sarah, Princess, a mother of nations, a woman who was 90 years old.

And Genesis 18 tells us she laughed when she heard the promise. Then one year later, Genesis 21:5, "And Abraham was 100 years old when his son Isaac was born unto him." 75 to 100. 25 years.

I put my pen down and stared at that timeline. 25 years of waking up to the same evidence. A 13-year detour through

a shortcut, a name that mocked him every day until it didn't. And through all of it, Romans 4 says something about him

that I could not have said about myself after 25 days.

So, here is what I want to ask you.

Wherever you are, how long have you been waiting? 6 months, 5 years, 20 years? And somewhere in that waiting, have you built a Hagar? Have you made a plan that quietly assumes God isn't going to do what He said?

You may be thinking, "Well, if Abraham went through all that and still received the promise, there's hope for me." There

is. But there is something you need to see first, and it is not comfortable.

Because when I finally reached verse 19 that night, I didn't find hope. I found myself, and what I saw frightened me.

Romans 4:19. And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about 100 years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb. He considered not.

I read it four times. Then I got up, walked to the window, and stood there in the dark looking at the parking lot

because something about those three words was pressing on my chest, and I didn't want to admit what it was. I went

back to my desk and opened my Greek New Testament, and this is what I found. The word translated 'considered' is katano. It is not a casual word. It does not mean to glance at something or notice it in passing. It is built from a root that means to perceive, to think, to understand with a prefix that intensifies it. It means to fix your mind on something, to observe it closely, to study it, to look at it carefully, and keep looking until it fills your understanding.

It is the same word Jesus uses in Luke 12:24 when he says, "Consider the ravens."

Study them. Fix your attention on them. Let them teach you." 

So when apostle  Paul says, "Abraham considered not his own body," he is not saying that Abraham never noticed

he was old. Abraham knew he was old. His knees told him every morning.

What apostle Paul is saying is that Abraham refused to make his body the object of his study. He refused to fix his attention there. He refused to let his body become the teacher of his faith. He did not consult his body to find out

whether God would keep His Word.

And I had done exactly that every single morning for 9 years. I told you about my stomach ulcer. I told you how I woke up and pressed my hand on my stomach before I did anything else. That was katano.

That was me fixing my attention on my body, studying it, letting it teach me. And every morning, my body taught me the same lesson. God has not done it yet. But it was worse than that. Much worse.

Sitting at that desk, I started to remember the way I prayed for other people. And I realized I had been training my whole congregation to do the same thing. Every Wednesday night, our prayer meeting opened with what we called sharing. People would stand up one by one and describe their problems in detail. Sister Keller would tell us how many nights she had been awake with the pain in her hands. Brother Sorenson would tell us how far behind he was on his payments. The Dunham boy's mother would tell us how many times they had been to the emergency room that month. And we listened. We nodded. We asked follow-up questions. We wanted the details.

Sometimes sharing lasted 45 minutes and then we prayed for 10 minutes. Do you see what we were doing? We were holding a 45 minute meeting dedicated to considering the problem. We were studying the body. We were fixing our attention on the deadness of Sarah's womb. And then we spent 10 minutes quoting a Bible promise that none of us were looking at anymore because our eyes were already full. We called it compassion.

It was katano.

Now I want to be fair to myself and to those dear people. We were not wrong to care. We were not wrong to know what our brothers and sisters were going through.

Love listens. But there is a difference between listening to a problem and studying it until it becomes the largest thing in the room.

And here is the law I discovered that night. I wrote it on my legal pad in capital letters. Whatever you study, you will eventually believe. WHATEVER YOU STUDY, YOU WILL EVENTUALLY BELIEVE.

Let me say that again. Whatever you study, you will eventually believe. If you study your symptoms, you will believe your symptoms. If you study your bank statement, you will believe your bank statement. If you study the medical report, the X-ray, the eviction notice, the text

message from the person who walked out on you, then sooner or later that report will be more real to you than anything God has ever said concerning you. Not because you are a bad Christian, because that is how the

human mind works. The thing you fix your attention on grows. The thing you look at longest becomes the thing you trust.

Abraham understood that. And so he made a decision, that I had never once made in my life. Abraham refused to give his body his attention. Think about what that would have required. Abraham was surrounded by evidence. He was 99 years old. He could feel it when he stood up. He could see it in the mirror of a still pool. Sarah was 90 years old and had passed the age of childbearing.

Every physical fact in their tent was screaming one word at him, impossible, and he considered it not. Not because he was ignorant, not because he was in denial, but because he had something else to study. He had a promise. He had a night sky full of stars that God had told him to count. He had a new name, ABRAHAM, that the whole camp was saying out loud, and he gave those things his attention instead.

This is the first of the four things Abraham did that I promised to show you.

He considered not. He refused to let his circumstances become the object of his study.

And I want to warn you because this is where many people misunderstand.

Considering not is not pretending. It is choosing. It is choosing what you will look at, what you will rehearse, what you will talk about, what you will think about when you lie down at night, and when you rise up in the morning.

It is choosing to fix your attention on God's word with the same intensity that you use to fix it on the problem. I closed the Greek New Testament and sat there for a long time. It was after midnight now. The coffee was cold and I felt something I had not expected to feel. I felt afraid because I realized that for 14 years I had stood in front of people every Sunday and pointed them to the promise. And every Wednesday I had sat with them and studied the problem. I had been teaching them faith with my sermons and teaching them unbelief with my meetings. And the meetings had been winning. How many people had I sent home more fixed on their problem than when they arrived?

How many prayers had I prayed that were really 10-minute descriptions of the disease with an amen at the end? How

many times had I asked how are you feeling? Before I ever asked, "What has God said?" I didn't have an answer, and I wasn't sure I wanted one. 

Now, some of you are already pushing back. You're saying, "Pastor, that sounds like denial. You can't just pretend your

problems aren't there." Hold on to that objection. I am going to answer it fully because a deacon in my own church threw it in my face a few weeks later in front of the whole board.

But first, I had to find out the name of what I had been living in, and Amos had it waiting for me. The next morning, I

didn't sleep that night. I got home at about 2:00 in the morning, and instead of going to bed, I sat down at the

kitchen table where I had asked that same question for years. If I believe all of this, why does none of it happen?

And for the first time, I thought I knew the answer. I just didn't have a name for it yet. At 7:30 the next morning, I

drove to Amos's house. He lived alone in a small white bungalow on Mill Street, and he was sitting on the porch in a

cardigan with a cup of coffee, as if he had been expecting me. He probably had been.

"Well," he said, "verse 19."

I said, "he considered not."

Amos nodded slowly. "And what have you been considering ?"   "Everything except the promise." 

He smiled for the first time since I'd known him. Then he said, "The preacher had a name for a man like you. He called it mental ascent." 

I told you about mental ascent in the second chapter. But that morning on Amos's porch, I finally understood it because Amos didn't explain it to me with theology. He explained it with a railroad.

When I was a young man in the yards, he said, "We had a fellow who knew every switch, every signal, every time on the whole line. He could recite the rule book from memory. He could tell you the weight limit on every bridge between

Seattle and Spokane. And he never once climbed onto a moving train. Not once in 20 years. He was afraid of them. Amos sat down his coffee. That man agreed with everything about the railroad. He just never rode it. That is mental ascent. It agrees with everything. It rides nothing. 

Let me show you the difference. The way it finally became clear to me. 

Mental ascent says the Bible is true. Faith says what the Bible says about me is true right now. 

Mental ascent says God is able to heal. Faith says God has said I am healed and I am acting on it. 

Mental ascent says, "I know God will provide." Faith says, "He

has provided and I will thank Him before I see it."

Mental ascent is a spectator. Faith is a passenger. 

James 2:19 puts it in the most uncomfortable terms in the

whole Bible. Thou believest that there is one God. Thou doest well. The devils believe and tremble. 

The demons have perfect mental ascent. They agree with every doctrine. They know Jesus is the Son of God. They know the blood was shed. They know the tomb is empty. And their agreement does nothing for them because agreement is not the same as trust.

 Romans 10:10 tells us where real faith lives. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation, with the heart, not with the head. 

Mental ascent lives in the head. It is an opinion about God. Faith lives in the heart. It is a dependence on God.

And here is how you can tell which one you have. I worked out five signs on Amos' porch that morning, and I want to

give them to you because I believe some of you will find yourself in every one of them.

The first sign of mental ascent is that you can quote the promise, but it changes nothing about how you feel.

You know Philippians 4:19 by heart, and you are still lying awake at 3:00 in the morning doing math.

The second sign is that you add "if it be thy will" to things God has already said are His will. You would never pray, Lord save me if it be thy will, because you know His will on salvation. But you pray it over everything else he has promised just as clearly. 

The third sign is that you need constant updates to keep believing. You need to hear a good report, see a small improvement, feel a little better just to keep your faith from falling over. Your faith is fed by evidence instead of by the Word.

The fourth sign is that you are much stronger in church than you are at home. On Sunday, you sing, "It is well with my soul," with your hands raised. On Monday night, you sit in the car in the driveway because you can't face what's inside.

And the fifth sign is that you talk about the promises in the third person. You say, the Bible says God heals. You never say, God has healed me. You say scripture promises provision. You never say my God has supplied my need. The promises are about somebody. They are never about you.

 I sat on that porch and checked every one of them off iin my mind. 

1 ✅

2 ✅

3 ✅

4 ✅

5.✅

And then I did something I had not done since I was a boy. I wept in front of another man. Not because I was ashamed of my sins. I had confessed those.

 I wept because I realized I had built a church on mental ascent, 180 people, 14 years of sermons, and I had trained every one of them to agree with God without ever trusting Him. I had made them excellent spectators.

You may be feeling something like that right now. That sinking feeling, that recognition.

You thought you were a person of faith and you are discovering that you are a person of agreement.

You admire the train. You know the timetable. You just have never climbed aboard.

I need you to hear what Amos told me next because it is the most important thing anybody said to me that whole

year. Don't you dare start feeling sorry for yourself.

He said, "Mental ascent isn't a sin, pastor. It's a starting point. You can't trust a God you don't agree with. You've done the first part. Now you climb on the train." 

That was the moment the dread began to lift. Not completely, but enough. Because I realized that mental ascent is not the opposite of faith. It is the waiting room of faith. It is faith standing on the platform with a ticket in its hand. All it lacks is the step, the decision to act on what you already agree with, to stop admiring the promise and start leaning your full weight on it. 

Romans 4:20 says, "Abraham was strong in faith, not strong in agreement, not strong in theology, but strong in faith. He leaned his whole life, his whole future, his whole name on what God had said. 

And the rest of Romans 4 is the story of what happens when a man stops admiring the promise and starts writing it. I drove back to the church that morning with a strange feeling in my chest. Part fear, part hope, and part something I had not felt in years. Expectation.

I didn't know yet that God was about to give me a chance to climb on that train.

I didn't know that within 48 hours someone would knock on my office door with a problem that would test every word Amos had said. But she was already on her way. 

Her name was Clara Bennett. She was 34 years old. Two years earlier, her husband Rey had been killed in an accident at a grain elevator outside of town, and she had been raising their two children alone ever since. Tommy was nine years old, Rachel was six years old. She came to my office on a Thursday afternoon holding a piece of paper folded into a small square, the way people fold things they don't want to look at. She sat down, unfolded it, and set it on my desk. It

was an eviction notice. 30 days, she was 3 months behind on her rent, $380 a month, total $1,140.

In 1989, in Marian, Ohio for a widow working part-time at a dry cleaner, that might as well have been a million dollars. And I want you to know exactly what I felt because this is the moment the whole thing could have gone the other way. The old man pastor in me rose up immediately. I knew what to do. I always knew what to do. I would open the benevolence fund. We had $200 in it. I would call a few families. I would help her look for a cheaper apartment. Maybe one of those units out by the highway. and I would pray with her,"Lord, if it be thy will, make a way for our sister." That was my Hagar. It was right there, ready,

reasonable, compassionate," and I almost reached for it, but Amos's voice was still in my ears. "Now you climb on the train." So instead, I asked Clara if I could come to her house that evening. I asked her to make sure the children were there. And at 6:30, I sat down at a kitchen table covered in a yellow vinyl cloth with a nine-year-old and a six-year-old staring at me. And I opened my Bible to Romans 4. I didn't preach. I just read. I read verse 19 and told them about katano. 

I told them that Abraham didn't make his old body the thing he studied. And then I asked Clara a question I had never asked anyone in 14 years of ministry.

How many times a day do you look at that notice? She looked at me strangely. Then she said very quietly. I don't know. 20, 30. I take it out of my purse at work. I read it in the car. I read it before bed, 30 times a day. She was studying it. She was considering it. And every time she read it, it taught her the same thing.

You are going to lose your home.

"Clara," I said, "I want you to put that notice in a drawer. Not in the trash. You're not pretending it doesn't exist. Put it in a drawer and leave it there. And every time you want to look at it, I want you to look at this instead. I took an index card and wrote on it in block letters.

Philippians 4:19. BUT MY GOD SHALL SUPPLY ALL YOUR NEED ACCORDING TO HIS RICHES IN GLORY BY CHRIST JESUS.  And underneath it, I wrote Romans 4:21, BEING FULLY PERSUADED THAT WHAT HE HAD PROMISED, HE WAS ABLE ALSO TO PERFORM. 

 She taped it to the refrigerator and then Tommy, who was nine, asked if he could make one, too. So, he did in crayon and he taped it on the door of his bedroom. We didn't pray long that night. I didn't describe the problem to God. He knew the problem. We thanked Him. We thanked Him that the promise was sure. We thanked Him that He was able.

And then I drove home and I want to be honest with you. I sat in my car in the driveway for 20 minutes terrified because I had just put my faith where a widow and two children could see it. If nothing happened, I couldn't blame sovereignty. I had made a sure promise sound sure. 

The next nine days, nothing happened. On day 10, it got worse.

Clara's car broke down, the transmission. The mechanic said $400.

She called me, crying and I could hear that the faith had drained right out of her voice. "Pastor, I think I've been foolish."

And this is where I learned something about faith that nobody ever told me.

The test does not usually come when you begin. It comes after you have committed. It comes when you have put the notice in the drawer and taped the verse on the fridge and then the circumstances get louder. 

The enemy waits until you have climbed onto the train and then he shakes the car. I told her what Amos had told me. 

Clara, the transmission is your body, now dead. It's another fact for you to consider. Don't consider it. She didn't say anything for a long time. 

Then she said, "Tommy read his card to me this morning out loud before school." 

On day 17, nothing. 

On day 22, nothing. 

On day 24, Clara got a letter from the company that had owned the grain elevator.

There had been a mistake in Ray's death benefit. A form had been filed incorrectly two years earlier and part of the settlement had never been paid out. The letter included a check, $3,200.

She called me at 7 in the morning. She was laughing and crying at the same time, the way Sarah must have laughed.

She paid the back rent. She fixed the transmission. She paid two months ahead.

And on the next Sunday, she stood up in church, held up Tommy's crayon index card, and told the whole congregation what had happened. I wish you could have heard that at the sanctuary. People who had sat in those pews for 30 years. People who had never said amen above a whisper were on their feet. And I was standing in the pulpit with my heart pounding, thinking, "I've found it. I've finally found it. This is the key." 

Romans 4. Consider not, but fully persuaded. It works.

 I preached on it for three Sundays in a row. I rewrote the Wednesday night prayer meeting. No more 45 minutes of sharing. Just 10 minutes on the need, and 35 minutes on the promise.

I told everyone in the church to make an index card. Attendance went up. People started bringing their neighbours and I felt for the first time in my ministry like a man who knew what he was doing.

 I want you to sit with that for a moment because I suspect some of you have been there. You've had a breakthrough. You've seen God move once. And you thought, "I've got it now. I understand faith. I'll never struggle like that again." That feeling is relief. And relief is a wonderful thing. 

But relief is not the same as being fully persuaded.

Because I had learned to believe God for Clara's problem, Clara's rent, Clara's transmission, Clara's kitchen.

 I had learned to stand on the promise when the storm was in somebody else's house. I had not yet been tested where it would cost me. And before that test arrived, I had to face a different kind of opposition. Not from the devil, not from circumstances, from my own deacon board. Harold Puit was the chairman of our deacon board. He was 61 years old, a retired high school principal, and the most respected man in

our congregation. He had been a member of G C church for longer than I had been its pastor. He had voted to call me in 1975.

And in 14 years, he had never once raised his voice at me. On the second Monday in May, he called a special meeting of the board. Seven men around a folding table in the fellowship hall under fluorescent lights that buzzed.

And he laid one of our new index cards on the table in front of me. "Pastor," he said, "I need to understand what you're

teaching these people." I told him, Romans 4, consider not. fully persuaded.

He listened to all of it. Then he folded his hands and said, "That's denial. You are teaching people to pretend their

problems don't exist. You are giving them false hope and when it doesn't work, they are going to blame themselves, and they are going to blame God and some of them are going to leave the faith altogether."

 Then Harold said something I was not prepared for. 

" In 1979 my sister Ruth went to a healing meeting in Columbus. She was a diabetic. The man on the platform told her that if she really had faith, she would throw away

her insulin. She did. She was dead in 11 days."

He looked straight at me. "I will not sit on this board and watch it happen again. I want to stop right here and tell you something with all the seriousness I have."

 Harold was right about that. Completely right. What

happened to his sister was not faith. It was a man using the Bible to put a woman in her grave. And I said so to Harold that night, and I will say it to you right now. 

Faith is not throwing away your medicine. Faith is not refusing to see a doctor. Faith is not ignoring a lump or skipping a healthy scan or pretending a broken bone isn't broken.

Nobody in my church has ever been told by me to stop their treatment and nobody ever will be. Doctors fight disease. So

do we. We are on the same side. But Harold's question was a real question and it deserved a real answer. Is considering not just denial with a Bible verse attached. I didn't have a good answer that night.

I mumbled something about faith and facts and the meeting ended without a vote. But I went home and I couldn't

sleep because I knew that if I couldn't answer Harold, I couldn't answer anybody.

So I went back to Romans 4:19.

And I found something that I had never noticed in all my years of study. If you read Romans 4:19 in the King James

version, it says, "He considered not his own body now dead." But if you open many of the modern translations, the New American Standard or the English Standard Version, you will find it reads differently.

Something like this. He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead. The

difference comes from the ancient manuscripts.

Some of them include the little word not. Some of them leave it out. And for a few minutes sitting at my kitchen

table at 1 in the morning, I was rattled. Did Abraham consider his body or didn't he? Then I saw it and it was

the answer to Harold's question. Both readings say the same thing. One says, "Abraham did not fix his attention on

his body." The other says, "Abraham looked squarely at his body, fully aware that it was as good as dead, and his faith did not weaken. Either way, the facts did not win. Either way, Abraham was not ignorant of his condition.

1Either way, he did not let his condition outvote his God." That is not denial.

Denial says there is no problem. Faith says there is a problem and it does not get the final word. 

Let me say that again because this is the line that separates biblical faith from foolishness. Denial says there is no problem. Faith says the problem does not get the final word. Abraham never said I am not old. He was a hundred years old. He knew it. Sarah never said, "I am not past childbearing." She laughed precisely because she knew she was. Faith does not require you to lie about the facts. It requires you to rank them. There are facts and there is truth. Facts are what is happening. Truth is what God has

said. And when the two disagree, faith chooses which one will rule.

Your X-ray is a fact. 

Your bank statement is a fact. 

The eviction notice is a fact. 

You don't throw them away. 

You don't pretend they are blank. But you refuse to let them be the last word because there is a higher word. 

2 Corinthians 4:18. 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. 

Temporal, subject to change. The things you can see are real, but they are not permanent. They can change and they will change when they come under the authority of something eternal. 

The next Monday, I asked Harold to meet me for breakfast at the diner on Center Street.

I brought my Greek New Testament and a copy of the ESV and the KJV, and I laid it out for him exactly the way I just laid it out for you. 

He read both versions three times. Then he said, "So, you're not telling people to ignore the facts?" 

No, I said I'm telling them to stop studying the facts until the facts become their god. 

He was quiet for a while. Then he said something I respected. "I still don't like it. I've seen too much damage done in the name of faith. But I'll give you this. That is not what happened to Ruth. That is not what that man on the platform was teaching."

He didn't come over to my side that morning. He was too careful a man for that. But he stopped fighting me and he told the board he would wait and see.

Wait and see. I remember thinking that's sense-knowledge. Harold, you want to see first and I felt a little proud of myself for noticing it. I should not have felt proud because Harold was about to watch me face the one test where waiting to see would be the most natural thing in the world. But before that test came, Harold asked me one last question across that diner table, and it haunted me for weeks. "Pastor, explain one thing to me. How can a sane man believe something that his own eyes are telling him is impossible without lying to himself?"

I didn't have the answer. And I found it in the most unexpected place, not in a book of theology, not in a commentary, but in the cockpit of an airplane flying blind into a cloud.

We had a man in our church named Gary Lindquist. He was 44, quiet, a little shy, and he taught flying out at the Maran Municipal Airport. Small planes, Cessnas and Pipers, mostly farm kids who wanted their license and businessmen who wanted to fly themselves to Columbus.

One Sunday in June after the service, Gary waited until everyone else had gone. Then he came up to me and said,

"Pastor, what you've been preaching about Abraham, I see it every week in the cockpit. I just never knew it was in the Bible." I asked him what he meant.

And over a cup of coffee in my office, he told me about something called spatial disorientation.

Here is what happens when a pilot is flying in clear weather. He knows which way is up because he can see the horizon. His eyes tell him the truth.

But when he flies into a cloud, the horizon disappears.

Everything is gray. And now his body has to figure out which way is up without his eyes.

The body tries to do that with the inner ear. Deep inside your ear, there are small canals filled with fluid. And when

your head turns, that fluid moves and your brain reads the movement. It works beautifully when you are walking down the street. But in an airplane, it lies.

Gary explained it this way. If the plane begins to bank into a gentle turn, the fluid in your inner ear moves and you feel the turn. But if the turn continues after about 15 seconds or so, the fluid catches up and settles. And now your inner ear tells your brain that you are flying straight and level. You are not. You are still turning, but every nerve in your body is telling you that you're level. And if the pilot trusts his body,

he will gently, steadily, with complete confidence, fly that airplane into a tightening spiral toward the ground.

Pilots have a name for it, the graveyard spiral. Then Gary told me about a study.

In 1954, researchers at the University of Illinois took 20 pilots who had never been trained to fly by instruments and had them fly into simulated cloud conditions. Every single one of them lost control of the aircraft. All 20 pilots, the fastest lost control in 20 seconds. The longest lasted eight minutes and the average was 178 seconds, less than three minutes.

That's how long a pilot's senses can keep him alive once he can no longer see the horizon. 3 minutes. Then his body

flies him into the ground with perfect confidence. I asked Gary, "So what saves them?" He pointed to his own eyes. The instruments right in front of you on the panel. There's an attitude indicator. A little picture of an airplane and a line for the horizon. It doesn't care how you feel. It shows you what is actually happening. When I train a pilot to fly in clouds, the whole job comes down to one thing. teaching him to believe the instrument when his body is screaming the opposite.

And here is the part that made the hair stand up on my arms. Gary said that study didn't end with the bad news. The

same kind of pilots, after they were given a short course of training in trusting their instruments, learned to turn the airplane around and fly safely out of the cloud.

Same pilots, same bodies, same inner ears telling the same lies. The only difference was what they had been

trained to believe.

I sat there in my office and I understood Romans 4:19 in a

way I never had before. Your senses are your inner ear. They are wonderful gifts. In clear weather, they serve you well. But when you fly into a cloud, when the diagnosis comes, when the money runs out, when the marriage falls apart, the horizon disappears. And in that cloud, your senses will lie to you with total confidence. They will tell you that you are going down. They will tell you that God isn't there.

They will tell you that the promise is false. and they will feel completely absolutely true. The word of God is your

instrument panel. It doesn't care how you feel. It shows you what is actually true. And the entire Christian life when you're in the cloud comes down to one thing. Will you believe the instrument when your body is screaming the opposite? That is what Abraham did. He was in a cloud for 25 years. Every human sense he had said he was going down and he flew by the instrument. 

So, here is the answer to Harold's question, and I want you to write it down. 

How can a sane man believe something his eyes tell him is impossible without lying to himself?

The same way a pilot does. He knows his senses are real. He knows they are giving him real information. He also knows by training that in a cloud his senses are not reliable and there is a higher authority on the panel in front of him. 

Faith is not the absence of feelings. Faith is the decision to fly by the instruments.

Let me say that again. Faith is not the absence of feelings. Faith is the decision to fly by the instruments when every nerve in your body insists you're flying level. 

And now look at Romans 4:17 because it tells you something astonishing about the instrument panel itself. Abraham believed God who quickenth the dead and calleth those things which be not as though they were.

God calls things that are not as though they were. When God named Abraham the "father of many nations," He was not lying. He was not exaggerating.

He was reading a different instrument.

God sees reality from where he stands outside of time. At the end of the story, when he says something is so, he is describing what is true from his vantage point before it becomes visible from yours. God does not describe what is visible. He describes what is true.

And faith is simply agreeing to read the same instrument God reads. If this is landing for you right now, if you feel

something shift, I want you to stop and write one word on a piece of paper, instruments.

Because that is what you are deciding today. You are deciding that from this moment on, you will fly by the

instruments, not by your inner ear.

I preached this the next Sunday. Gary sat in the fourth row and cried. Harold Puit sat with his arms folded, but he was nodding. And afterward, three different people came up to tell me that they had been flying by their feelings for years and never knew it. I thought I had it all now. The chapter, the Greek, the answer to the objection, the perfect illustration. I thought my faith had finally caught up with my preaching.

Three weeks later, on a Thursday morning in late August, Helen came out of the bathroom with her hand pressed against her side, and her face was a colour I had never seen it before. "I found something," she said, "and I flew straight into the cloud." Helen was 41 years old. We had been married for 18 years. She had taught piano to half the children in Marian, played the organ every Sunday at G C church service, and she had never once in her life been seriously ill. Not once. The lump was on her left side near the edge of her breast. It was about the size of a marble. It was hard, and it didn't move when she pressed on it. I want to tell you exactly what I did in the next 5 seconds because it is the most honest thing I can tell you in this entire

message. I forgot Romans 4. I forgot verse 19. I forgot katano.

I forgot Abraham and Clara and Gary's instrument panel. Everything I had preached for five straight months

evaporated out of my mind like water on a hot stove. And what replaced it was a single word that rose up from somewhere deep in my stomach. Cancer. We called the doctor that morning. He saw her that afternoon. He felt the lump and I watched his face and I saw something flicker across it that he tried to hide. He sent her for a mammogram the next day.

And 2 days after that, we sat in a small room with a radiologist who held a film up to a light box and used words like irregular margins and highly suspicious.

He scheduled a surgical biopsy, 11 days out, 11 days. I want to tell you what I did with those 11 days, and I am not proud of it. I went to the public library on the second day and checked out every book they had on breast cancer. I read them at night after Helen went to sleep. I read survival rates,

cancer stages, treatments. I read about mastectomies and radiation and what chemotherapy does to a woman's body. I

memorized the statistics. I knew by the end of the first week more about breast cancer than I had ever known about

Romans 4. I was studying it katano.

I fixed my attention on the problem with an intensity I had never once given to the promise. And every night those books taught me the same lesson. You are going to lose her. By day six, I had planned her funeral. I didn't mean to. It just happened in my head. I picked the hymns. I knew who would play the organ since she couldn't.

I saw myself standing at the graveside.

I saw myself coming home to an empty house. I lived through her death a dozen times in my mind before a single test had come back. And on Sundays, I stood in the pulpit and preached, fully persuaded. Do you see what was

happening?

I was doing everything I had warned Clara not to do. I had a notice in my hand, and I was reading it 30 times a day. Only my notice was a library book, and I didn't put it in a drawer. I took it to bed with me. 

   Now, I need to tell you something about the enemy because I learned it in those 11 days in a way that I will never forget.

The enemy did not need to make Helen sick to defeat me. He did not need to do anything to her body at all. All he

needed was for me to stare. That is his strategy. It always has been. He is not primarily after your body. He is not primarily after your bank account. He is after your attention. He knows that if he can get your eyes fixed on the problem, your faith will collapse on its own. He doesn't have to destroy your faith. He just has to redirect your gaze

and your faith will spiral into the ground like a pilot trusting his inner ear.

Turn your eyes upon Lord Jesus Christ, look full into his wonderful face, and the things of this world will grow strangely dimm , in the Light of His Glory and Grace

Let me say that again. And I want you to hear it as if your life depends on it. The enemy does not have to destroy your faith. He only has to get you to stare. Think about how he works in your life. A symptom comes back and suddenly you are thinking about it every waking hour. A bill arrives and you check your account four times a day.

Someone says something cruel and you replay it in your mind for weeks. He does not need to add anything to your

situation. He just keeps your eyes on it.

And whatever holds your eyes holds your faith. This is why Abraham's three words are the first line of defense in

spiritual warfare. He considered not. He would not give the enemy his attention. And the enemy had no other way in. But I didn't know that yet. Not in my bones. I knew it in my sermons. I had only ever had it in my mouth. I want to say something here for anyone who is walking through a medical crisis right now.

Because I don't want anything I say to be misunderstood.

I drove Helen to every appointment. I sat in every waiting room. I would have carried her into that hospital on my

back. Going to the doctor was never the problem. The doctors were on our side.

The problem was not that I listened to them. The problem was that I worshiped what they said and I made it larger than what God had said. The biopsy was on a Tuesday. Helen had a bad reaction to the anesthesia and they kept her overnight.

Visiting hours ended at 9:00. A nurse walked me out to the elevator very kindly and told me to go home and get

some rest. The results would be back by Friday.

I walked out to the parking lot of Maran General Hospital. I got into our old blue Buick. I put the key in the ignition and I couldn't turn it. I sat there with my hand on the key and my forehead on the steering wheel and the clock on the dashboard said 11:40.

I had been sitting there for over 2 hours, unable to drive home, unable to go back inside, unable to pray because for the first time I understood that all my preaching had been mental ascent.

 I had believed for Clara. I had believed for Gary's students.

I had believed in other people's kitchens. But in my own car, in my own crisis, with my own wife lying upstairs, I had nothing. I agreed with Romans 4. I just couldn't write it. That was the deepest dread I have ever felt. Not the fear of losing Helen, though that was crushing me. It was the fear that I had been a fraud, that everything I had told Clara and Harold and the whole church had been true for them and empty for me.

That when the cloud finally came to my house, I was just another pilot trusting his inner ear, and I had 178 seconds left.

Maybe you have been there. Sitting in a car outside a hospital, sitting on the edge of a bed after the phone call,

standing in a kitchen holding a letter, and everything you have ever believed feels like paper. If that is where you

are, I want you to stay with me because it was right there in that parking lot with my head on the steering wheel at

11:40 at night that I finally understood the second thing Abraham did. And it is the one most of us have never even heard of. There was a pocket Bible in the glove compartment of that Buick. Helen had put it there years earlier. The way she put tissues and peppermints and a flashlight in every car we ever owned. I took it out. I switched on the dome light. And with hands that would not stop shaking, I turned to Romans 4. I didn't go to verse 19. I had been living in verse 19 for five months and it had not held me. I read the next verse.

Romans 4:20. He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strong in faith, giving glory to God. He staggered not. 

I had read that phrase a hundred times and always thought it just meant he didn't doubt. But sitting in that car, I remembered the Greek word.

And for the first time, I felt what it meant. The word is diakrino.

It means to be divided, to separate into two, to judge back and forth between two things. It is the same word James uses in his letter when he says, "Let him ask in faith, nothing wavering, for he that waverth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed, wavering, staggering. Diakrino."

Diakrino (Greek: diakrino) is a Greek verb found 19 times in the New Testament, primarily meaning to separate, make a distinction, discern, or doubt. 

The term is derived from dia (through) and krino (to judge), encompassing two main contextual uses:

Discernment and Judgment: It refers to the ability to distinguish between things, such as discerning signs of the times (Matthew 16:3) or judging disputes within a community (1 Corinthians 6:5). 

Doubt and Hesitation: It describes being at variance with oneself, leading to wavering or doubt, particularly in contexts of faith where one must not doubt (Mark 11:23) or when acting with conviction (Romans 14:23). 

 Picture a man who has had too much to drink, trying to walk a straight line.

He lurches left, then he lurches right.

He takes one step toward the curb and one step toward the road. He is not lying on the ground. He is still moving, but he cannot hold a direction because his balance is gone. That was me. For 11 days, I had been staggering. In the pulpit, I lurched toward the promise. In the library, I lurched toward the medical statistics. At breakfast, I told Helen we were trusting God. At midnight, I read survival rates. I was a man divided right down the middle, judging back and forth between two reports, and I was getting nowhere because a divided man cannot walk.  And I realized that the problem was not that I had doubts.

Abraham had doubts. Abraham laughed in Genesis 17 and Sarah laughed in Genesis18. The problem was that I kept switching sides. I would agree with God for an hour and then agree with the library book for an hour and I gave each one my full attention while it had me.

Abraham did not do that. He made one decision and he stayed on that side of the line. He staggered not. 

So, in that car at 11:40 at night, I did something I had told Clara to do, but had never done myself.

I reached into my shirt pocket and took out the only paper I had. It was the stub from the hospital parking lot, and

on the back of it, with a ballpoint pen, I drew a line down the middle. On the left side, I wrote what the doctors

said. On the right side, I wrote what God said.

On the left, I wrote irregular margins, highly suspicious biopsy results Friday. I didn't lie on that side. I didn't soften it. Those were the facts and I wrote them exactly. That is

the honesty Harold had demanded and it was right.

Then on the right side, I wrote what God had said. I wrote Isaiah 53:5. With his stripes we are healed. I wrote Psalm 91:10. There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling. I wrote Romans 4:21.

What he had promised, he was able also to perform.

Then I looked at that little stub for a long time. Two columns, two reports, and I made a decision. Not a feeling, a decision. I decided that from that moment forward, I would stop moving between the columns. I would not read another statistic. I would not plan another funeral. I would not spend another night studying the left side of that stub. I would take every fact the doctors gave me and I would act on their advice and I would let the right side of the stub have the last word. And then I prayed, not the way I had prayed for 14 years. I didn't describe the lump to God. I didn't tell God how scared I was. He already knew. I didn't beg. I didn't bargain. I thanked Him. That is the third thing Abraham did. Look at it again. But was strong in faith, giving glory to God. He gave glory before there was anything to give glory for. Before Isaac was conceived, before Sarah's body changed, before anything at all had moved in the natural world, Abraham was praising the God who had promised. 

So I said out loud alone in that car, "Father, I thank you that you are able to perform what you have promised. I thank you that your word over Helen is stronger than any report. I thank you that you call things that are not as though they were. I don't know what Friday will bring, but I know who You are, and I will not stagger."

I'm not going to tell you a light filled the car. It didn't.

I'm not going to tell you I heard a voice. I didn't.

But something happened inside me that I can only describe as balance coming back.

The lurching stopped. The two voices that had been fighting in my head for 11 days became one. I started the car. I drove home. And for the first time since Helen had found that lump, I slept through the night. The next morning, I went to the hospital to bring her home.

And when I walked into her room, she was sitting up in bed, her hair a mess, still pale from the anesthesia.

And before I could say anything, she said, "I've been lying here since 5:00 thanking God." She had been ahead of me

the whole time. While I was studying the library books, she had been quietly playing hymns on the piano in the afternoons.

While I was planning a funeral, she had been planning the Christmas recital. I had been so busy staggering that I never

noticed my wife had been walking a straight line.

The results came on Friday afternoon. The doctor called us

into his office. He sat down across the desk. He didn't need to say anything. I could see it. Malignant. 

I want to stop here and be honest with you because I've heard a lot of testimonies in my life and many of them stop being honest right at this point. They tell you they believed and the report came back clean.

That happens. I have seen it happen. But that is not what happened to us. The report came back worse. It was cancer.

And if that had happened 11 days earlier, I would have gone straight back to the library, straight back to staggering. I would have decided that faith doesn't work, that Romans 4 was a pretty story about an old man, and that the left side of the stub was the only real one. But something had changed in the parking lot. I had made a decision, and a decision made in faith doesn't move just because the report gets louder.

I took Helen's hand and I said, "In front of that doctor, then we will do everything you tell us to do and we will

trust God with the result." The doctor looked at me with a kind of puzzled respect. He had seen a lot of husbands

fall apart in that chair. I think he was waiting for me to fall apart, too. I didn't fall apart, not because I was strong, because I had finally stopped switching sides. The surgery was scheduled for 9 days later, and that left me with a question every one of you will face at some point. What do you actually do with your days when you've decided not to stagger? And the outcome still hasn't come. The nine days between that report and Helen's surgery were the most important nine days of my spiritual life. Not because anything dramatic happened, because nothing did. And in that waiting, Helen and I learned how to live Romans 4 on an ordinary Tuesday.

This is the part of the message I most want you to take home. not the story, the practice. Because a revelation that

doesn't become a practice is just a nice memory. And I don't want you to leave here with a nice memory.

I want you to leave with a way of living. So here are the five things we did every day for nine days. I have taught them to hundreds of people since and each one comes directly out of Romans 4 and the life of Abraham. The first practice is the fact appointment.

In the parking lot, I drew two columns on a stub of paper. What the doctors said and what God said. In the days that

followed, I learned to use that stub in a particular way. Once a day at 4:00 in the afternoon, Helen and I sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the left column on purpose. We went over the doctor's instructions. We wrote down questions for the surgeon. We made phone calls to the insurance company. We handled every fact with complete honesty and complete responsibility.

And then when we were finished, we turned the stub over and read the right column out loud. And we did not look at

the left column again until 4:00 the next day. Do you see what that did? It took the facts out of our whole day and gave them an appointment. The facts were not ignored. They were scheduled. And for the other 23 hours, our attention belonged to the promise.

That is what considered not looks like in practice. Not pretending, scheduling.

If you are facing a crisis, give your problem an appointment. 15 minutes. Deal with it honestly, completely, responsibly. Then close the file and do not open it again until tomorrow.

The second practice is answering to your new name. Remember what God did for Abraham in Genesis 17. God changed his name to father of a multitude while he was still childless. And from then on, every time anyone called him, they were speaking God's verdict over his life. So Helen and I wrote down three new names, three sentences in the first person in the present tense taken directly from scripture. The first was from Isaiah 53:5. By his stripes, I am healed. Not I will be, I am. 

The second was from Philippians 4:19.

My God supplies all my need because the medical bills were already coming.

The third was from 2 Corinthians 5:21. I am the righteousness of God in Christ because I had discovered that the devil's favorite question in a crisis is, "What did you do to deserve this?" And Romans 4 had already answered it.

God counts righteousness to the one who believes. I was not standing on my record. I was standing on His. Every morning before I checked anything, before I said anything else, I spoke those three sentences out loud. I made them the first words of my day. The way the ulcer used to be the first thought of my day. You need new names, too. 

Find the promise that speaks directly to your situation. Turn it into a first person, present tense sentence and answer to it every morning before your body has a chance to give you its report. 

The third practice is the glory appointment.

Romans 4:20 says, "Abraham grew strong in faith, giving glory to God." The giving of glory is not the reward that comes after faith. It is the exercise that makes faith strong. So three times a day, morning, noon, and night, Helen and I stopped whatever we were doing and gave thanks, not for anything that had happened, for what God had said, for who He is, for His ability to perform His promise. 

We borrowed the idea from Daniel. Daniel 6:10 says he knelt three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God as he had always done. Even when the king's decree said that doing it would get him thrown to the lions. He gave thanks with the lion's waiting. That is the glory appointment . You thank God at set times, whether you feel like it or not, before you see anything change, not because you are pretending, because thanksgiving is the language faith speaks while it waits. And here is what happened. By the fourth day, the glory appointments had stopped feeling like an obligation. They had become the strongest part of our day. Helen would play a hymn on the piano at noon and I would stand beside her and sing badly and for those 15 minutes the cancer was simply not the largest thing in the house. 

The fourth practice is the attention fast. This is the one most people skip and it is the one that matters most. I took the library books back, all seven of them. I didn't burn them. They weren't evil, but they had become my study, my katano, and I could not afford to keep feeding my attention on them at midnight. Every question I had, I wrote down and saved for the surgeon at the fact appointment.

Then we decided what we would say when people asked us how we were doing.

Because in a small town, people ask a dozen times a day. And every time we answered with a long description of the

problem, we were back in the left column. So we chose one sentence. We're following the doctors and trusting God.

That was it. Kind, honest, complete. And it kept our mouths from rehearsing the problem 12 times a day. You may need an attention fast. It might be the late night searching, the waiting room conversations, the friend who always wants to talk about the worst case. Love those people, but guard your attention because whatever you give your attention to will grow. 

The fifth practice is the instrument partner. Gary told me that even experienced pilots flying in clouds work best with a second set of eyes.

Someone who reads the same instruments and calls out what they see. Abraham had Sarah. Her laugh in Genesis 18 was not the end of her story. Hebrews 11:11 says that through faith Sarah herself received strength to conceive because she judged Him faithful who had promised. By the end she was reading the same instruments he was. So I called Amos every evening for 9 days. He was 83 and some nights he could barely hear me

on the phone, but he would listen to me talk for a minute and then he would say, "What are the instruments saying,

pastor?" And I would read him the right column and he would say, "Then that's where we're flying. You need an

instrument partner. One person who will not let you lurch back into the left column. one person who will read you the

promise when your eyes are too tired to read it yourself.

Ecclesiastes 4:10 says that if one falls, the other will lift him up. But woe to him that is alone when he fall.

Now, let me be honest about something because I don't want you to think these practices made those nine days easy.

They didn't.

On the sixth day, I woke up at 4 in the morning with my heart pounding, and before I had even opened my eyes, my

mind had gone straight to the left column. I could feel the old habit pulling me like a current. I wanted to get up, drive to the library, and check out those books all over again. I wanted to know the odds. I wanted something I could see. That is when I learned that the practices are not magic. They are muscles and muscles are built on the days you don't feel like using them. So I lay there in the dark and I didn't fight the fear with arguments.

 I just spoke the three names. By his stripes I am healed. My God supplies all my need. I am the righteousness of God in Christ.

 I said them once and nothing changed. I said them again and nothing changed. The third time my heart began to slow down. Not because the words were a spell, because my attention had finally turned. You are going to have mornings like that. Mornings when the promise feels like paper and the problem feels like iron. On those mornings, do not wait to feel strong before you practice. Practice and let the strength come behind it. Abraham did not grow strong in faith and then give glory.

Romans 4:20 says he was strong in faith giving glory. The glory and the strength grew together the way a man's legs get stronger while he climbs. And if you miss a day, if you slip back into the left column and spend an entire evening reading statistics, don't you dare condemn yourself.

Remember Abraham's 13 years after Hagar.

God did not throw him away. He came back and changed his name. Just get up the next morning and answer to your name again.

Those were the five practices.

The fact appointment, answering to your new name, the glory appointment, the attention fast, the instrument partner.

None of them is complicated. None of them requires a special anointing. And together they are simply what Romans 4:19-21 looks like when an ordinary couple tries to live it in a small house in Ohio.

On the morning of the surgery, we arrived at the hospital at 6. And sitting in the waiting room in a gray suit with a Bible on his knee was the last person I expected to see. Harold Puit. Harold stood up when we walked in.

He shook my hand. Then he did something I had never seen him do in 14 years. He hugged Helen. 

"I told the board I would wait and see," he said to me quietly. "I decided I'd rather wait here." Then he opened his Bible, and I saw that it was open to Romans 4. There were pencil

marks all down the margin. "I've been reading it every night since that breakfast," he said. "I still have questions, but I couldn't get verse 21 out of my head." 

They took Helen back at 7:15 and then the waiting room started to fill.

Clara Bennett came at 8, still in her uniform from the dry cleaner, holding a coffee cake wrapped in foil. Tommy had

made her bring something. Tucked into the foil was a new index card in crayon.

It said in a 9-year-old's careful letters, "Mrs. Helen is fully persuaded."

Gary Linquist came at 10:00. He had cancelled two flying lessons. He didn't say much. He just sat in the corner with his eyes closed and his lips moving.

Amos couldn't come. He was 83 and the stairs at the hospital were too much for him. But at noon, a nurse came out and handed me a folded piece of paper. Someone had dropped at the front desk. It was Amos' handwriting, two words, fully persuaded.

And at noon, right on schedule, the six of us in that waiting room, did our glory appointment. Harold Puit, the man who had called it denial, prayed first, and he did not describe the problem. He thanked God that He was able. I want to

tell you about those two words now because they are the fourth thing Abraham did and they are the summit of

Romans 4. Romans 4:21. And being fully persuaded that what he had promised he was able also to perform texting. Okay.

The Greek word for fully persuaded is pleopero.

It means to be brought to full measure, to be filled all the way up. It is the picture of a vessel filled to the brim with no room left for anything else.

Some scholars connect the idea to a ship carried along under full sail with every inch of canvas filled with wind. That is what Abraham's faith had become. not partly convinced, not convinced on good days, but filled so completely with the certainty of God's ability that there was no room left in him for the opposite. And notice what he was persuaded of. Not that the circumstances would change by a certain date, not that he understood how God would do it. He was persuaded of one thing, that God was able to do what God had said. That is where faith rests, not on the outcome, but on the One who promised. I realized sitting in that waiting room that this was the difference between my faith in Clara's kitchen and my faith in that hospital. In Clara's kitchen, I had been persuaded that the method worked. In the

hospital, I had to be persuaded that God was able. Those are not the same thing.

A method can fail you. The God of Romans 4 cannot fail you. At 4:15 in the afternoon, the surgeon came through the double doors. Her name was Dr. Ellen Marsh. She was still in her scrubs and she pulled off her cap as she walked toward us. I stood up. Every person in that room stood up with me. She told us the tumor was out. She said it was smaller than the films had suggested. She said the margins looked clean and that the lymph nodes she'd checked looked good, though we would need the final pathology to be sure. She said, "You caught this early." I think she's going to do very well. 

4 days later, the pathology confirmed it.

The cancer had not spread. Helen would need several weeks of radiation. She would not need chemotherapy. I have told that story hundreds of times. And every time someone says, "Well, that was the surgery. That was medicine." And my answer is always the same. Yes, it was. God used a surgeon named Ellen Marsh, and I thank God for her every time I think of that day. I would never tell you otherwise.

But here is what the surgery didn't do. The surgery didn't change me. When I walked into that hospital 9 days earlier, I was a man reading survival statistics at midnight. When I walked out, I was a man who knew that God is able. And I would have been that man no matter what Dr. Marsh said at 4:15.

That is what fully persuaded means.

Your faith does not hang on the report. The report hangs on your faith. Helen went home three days later. She finished her radiation before Thanksgiving, and on the first Sunday of December, she played the organ for the Christmas recital she had planned from her hospital bed. On the Sunday after the pathology came back, Harold Puit asked if he could say

something before the sermon. He walked to the front of the church and he did not use the pulpit. He just stood on the

floor in front of the first row. "Most of you know I opposed what the pastor has been teaching." He said, "Some of you

know why my sister died because a man told her faith meant throwing away her medicine. I will never believe that. And I want every one of you to hear the pastor never taught it." Then he held up his Bible open to Romans 4. "But I told

the board I would wait and see. And I found out that faith doesn't wait and see. Abraham didn't see first. He

believed first. I sat in that waiting room and I believed first. And I will tell you the truth. I have never felt closer to God than I did at noon that day, thanking him for something I couldn't see." Harold taught a Sunday school class on Romans 4 for the next 11 years. Clara Bennett never missed a Wednesday prayer meeting again. And her son Tommy, the boy with the crayon index card, grew up and became a pastor himself. He leads a church in Indiana now. He told me once that the first sermon he ever preached was on Romans

4:21 and that he still keeps his mother's index card in the front of his Bible. Amos Whitfield went home to be with the Lord in the spring of 1991. He was 85. His daughter told me he died with his Bible open in his lap. I don't have to tell you which chapter. And Helen lived another 26 years. She went

to be with the Lord in 2015 at 67 of something that had nothing to do with that lump. I sat beside her the night she went, and the last thing she said to me was, "Fully persuaded."

Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You're thinking, "That's a beautiful story, pastor." But that's your story. What does it have to do with the size of my problem? That is the right question. And the answer is the reason Romans 4 was written. Because the last thing this chapter shows you is not

about Abraham at all. It is about the nature of reality itself. And once you see it, nothing you face will ever look the same. 

Go back with me to Genesis 15 to the night God took Abram outside his tent. It was before the name change, before Ishmael, before any of it. Abram was discouraged, and God said, "Look now toward heaven and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them, and then so shall thy seed be." I want you to imagine that sky, no electric light anywhere on earth, no glow from any city, just the desert and the dark. On a

night like that, a man with good eyes can see a few thousand stars. That's all. A few thousand points of light scattered from one horizon to the other.

It is breathtaking.

But you could count them if you had enough nights. Abram stood under that sky and believed that his family would be as many as the stars he could see.

Here is what Abram did not know. The light he could see was only the nearest brightest edge of our own galaxy.

Astronomers now estimate that the Milky Way alone holds somewhere between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. And the Milky Way is one galaxy. When telescopes look out into the deep sky, they find more galaxies beyond galaxies beyond galaxies. Hundreds of billions of them by current estimates, each one holding billions of stars of its own. The stars Abram could see were a rounding error.

God told him to count the stars. And the stars God was pointing to were far beyond anything his eyes could ever

reach. The promise was bigger than his sight. It was always bigger than his sight. Even the sky he was looking at

was hiding most of what was really there.

I want you to sit with that because it is the most important thing about Romans 4 and it is the thing I didn't understand until years after Helen's surgery. 

What you can see is not the whole of reality. It is not even most of it. Your eyes see a thin slice of what exists. Your inner ear lies to you in a cloud. Your body tells you what it feels, and it is often wrong. Your senses are wonderful, God-given instruments for walking through a physical world, but they were never designed to tell you what is ultimately true. They were designed to report what is visible, and the visible is only the surface.

Hebrews 11:3 says, "Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." Read that slowly. 

The things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.

Everything you can see was made out of something you can't see. And the Bible tells you what that something is. The word of God. God spoke and there was light. God spoke and there were stars.

All hundreds of billions of galaxies of them.

Romans 4:17 says, "He calleth those things which be not as though they were." That is not just how God dealt with Abraham. That is how God made everything. He speaks to nothing and nothing obeys. He calls what does not

exist and it begins to exist. So when God says something that contradicts what you can see, which one is more real?

That is the question underneath every chapter of this message. And Romans 4 answers it. The word God speaks is not a description of reality that might or might not come true. It is the material reality is made of. It came first.

Everything you see came after.

You may have come to this teaching asking, "Is it dangerous to believe God against the facts?" Harold asked that

question. I asked it, too. But Romans 4 is not ultimately an answer to that question. It shows you how little we understand reality in the first place.

We think the visible world is the solid thing and God's word is the thin hopeful thing floating on top. Romans 4 shows you that it is the other way around.

God's word is the foundation.

The visible world is what grows out of it.

And now look at the last three verses of the chapter again because this is where it lands on you.

Romans 4:23-25. Now it was not written for his sake alone that it was imputed to him, but for us also to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered for our offenses, and was raised again for our justification.

The same God who called Isaac into a dead womb raised Jesus from a dead tomb.

And the same God who wrote righteousness into Abraham's ledger before he could see any proof has written righteousness into yours. That is logazomi. 

Again, the accounting word. God has made an entry

in his books concerning you. If you have believed on the one who raised Jesus from the dead, God has counted you

righteous. Not because you feel righteous, not because you have earned it, because he said so. It is already written. It is already done. And here is the awe of it. Most of us live our whole lives trying to bring our visible condition up to the level of what we hope God will someday say about us.

Romans 4 says, "God has already said it.

He has already called you righteous. He has already called you His child. He has already called you healed by the stripes

of His Son. He calls those things which be not as though they were. And He has done it over you. You are not waiting for God to speak. You are waiting for your senses to catch up with what He has already spoken. 

Let me say that again because I believe someone reading and listening needs it more than anything else today.

You are not waiting for God to speak.

You are waiting for your senses to catch up with what He has already spoken.

Abraham waited 25 years for his senses to catch up.

I waited 9 days.

You may wait a week or a season or longer, but the entry is already in the ledger. The instruments are already reading true.

The word that framed the worlds is already standing over your situation.

Think of it this way. Every star Abram could not see was already there, burning the night God made him the promise. The light simply had not reached his eyes.

The reality existed long before his senses could detect it. That is what the promises of God are like. Their reality exists now. Their light is on its way. 

I think about Amos sometimes sitting in that switchman's shack in Seattle in the 1930s listening to a crackling radio.

The preacher was speaking into a microphone miles away. He never knew Amos was there. He never knew his name. He couldn't see the shack or the coal stove or the young man with four children and a job that might vanish on Friday. The preacher died in 1948.

And 41 years later in a small church in Marian, Ohio, the words he spoke into that microphone walked into my office in the hands of an old man and changed my life and Helens and Claras and Heralds and a 9-year-old boys who would grow up to preach. That is what words do. They travel. They outlive the one who speaks them. 

A man speaks in Seattle in 1935 and a pastor is rescued in Ohio in 1989.

Apostle Paul writes a letter to Rome around the year 57 and you are reading and hearing it tonight nearly 2,000 years later and it is still doing exactly what it was written to do.

And if the words of a radio preacher and the words of an apostle can travel that far, think about the word of God

himself. The word that framed the worlds. The word that has been traveling out across the universe since the first day of creation. The word He spoke over Abraham under the stars. The word He has spoken over you. It has not stopped traveling. It has not lost its strength.

It is on its way to the place where you are standing right now. When I think about that now, I am no longer a man who is afraid of the cloud. I am a man who stands under the night sky and is astonished.

Astonished that the God who spoke 100 billion galaxies into being has spoken my name. Astonished that the same word that holds the stars in place holds my life in place. Astonished that I spent 14 years studying the surface of reality and calling it the whole thing.

And I believe that if you see this today, really see it, you will never again be able to look at your diagnosis, your debt, or your disappointment and think it is the most real thing in the room because it isn't. It never was.

 I want to go back to where we started. A Tuesday night in March of 1989, an 83year-old switchman standing in my office tapping a yellowed book with one crooked finger. Pastor, you've preached on Abraham for 14 years. You have never once done what he did. That sentence was true of me that night. By the end of that year, it wasn't. 

And I want to ask you as gently and as directly as I know how, is it true of you? You have heard about Abraham your whole life. You may have taught his story. You may have sung songs about him in Sunday school. Father Abraham had many sons.

But have you ever done what he did? I told you at the beginning that the enemy could never cut Romans 4 out of your Bible. So he taught you to read it as history. Now you know why. Because the moment you read it as instructions, you discover four things that no circumstance on earth can defeat. He considered not. He refused to make his problem the object of his study. He staggered not. He stopped switching sides between two reports. He gave glory to God. He thanked God before there was anything to see. And he was fully persuaded, filled to the brim with the certainty that the God who calls things that are not as though they were is able to do what He said. 

Four things, not four techniques, four ways of seeing reality the way God sees it.

Now I want to be very clear about one thing before we pray because I would rather lose your agreement than lose

your trust. Nothing I have told you today means you should stop your treatment, skip your appointments, or ignore what your doctor tells you. I drove my wife to every one of hers.

Harold's sister lost her life because someone confused foolishness with faith. Real faith is not the refusal of help.

It is the refusal to let any report outrank the word of God. So whatever you are facing right now, your diagnosis,

your debt, your marriage, your child, your fear, I want to invite you to do what Abraham did. Not someday, tonight.

Take a piece of paper, a receipt, an envelope, the back of a parking stub.

Draw a line down the middle. On the left, write the facts honestly. On the right, write what God has said, and then

make the decision I made in that Buick at 11:40 at night. Decide which column gets the last word.

And now I want you to do something with me. If you are able, I want you to say this out loud, not in your head, speak out loud. Because Romans 10:10 says that with the heart man believes and with the mouth confession is made. Your ears need to hear your own voice agreeing with God.

Say it with me.

Father, I thank you that Romans 4 was not written for Abraham's sake alone. It was written for me. Today I choose to consider not. I will not make my problem the object of my study. I will look at the facts honestly and then I will turn my eyes to your word. Today I choose to stagger not. I will not keep switching sides. I have made my decision and I am staying on the side of your promise. Today I give you glory not for what I see but for who you are. I thank you before the answer comes because I know you are able. And today I am fully persuaded. What you have promised you are able also to perform. You call those things which be not as though they were. And you have spoken over my life. By the stripes of Jesus, I am healed. My God supplies all my need.

I am the righteousness of God in Christ. You have counted it to me and it is written in your book. From this day forward, I fly by the instruments in Jesus' name. Amen. "

If you prayed that with me, I want you to know something.

Something just happened in the spirit.

Whether your senses noticed it or not, you stopped being a spectator on the platform. You climbed onto the train.

 Until then, consider not, stagger not, give glory, and stay fully persuaded.

God bless you.