Power With Believing: Volume I

BY: WILLIAM HONEYCUTT

VOLUME I

Published 2018

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to dedicate this book to my beautiful wife.  I would like to thank her for her patience and kindness to me in all the times that I sat at the computer working when I needed to be doing other things.

This is my first book to write and I would like to recognize my wife for being the one who encouraged me to write this book.  One day I was working on a Bible study in my office and I printed out one of the lessons which I had finished getting ready.  Once I had it printed out, I took it to my wife and ask her to read over the lesson and give me her opinion.  Once she had read over the lesson, she told me that I should put this in book form. Well, that was a lot of encouragement for me because my wife is a very avid reader.  She reads many, many assorted styles and types of books. She is always reading something.  Since she is such an avid reader, I listened to what she said to me because she would not say that unless she felt it was worthy to be said.  I really appreciate her for her honesty because it gave me the encouragement that I needed to be able to write a book. 

She helped me with ideas as we discussed things in our home and she was very valuable because of her vast knowledge from being an avid reader.  I thank her for her time and considerations of allowing me to have the free time to write.  I most of all thank God for allowing her to be my wife and a part of my life.  She is a wonderful and generous kind woman. 

I would also like to thank all the people who have been a part of my Christian experience.  I would especially like to thank Johnny and Pat Nix who were a very important part of my Christian experience.  Johnny and Pat taught me everything that I knew in the beginning.  I especially thank them for their kindness and generosity. 

I would also like to thank two pastor friends of mine of whom I have a lot of respect for.  They have been a great asset to me in reading my material and giving me advise on their thoughts about things.  Thank you so very much for your kindness brother Michael and Pastor Pugh, and for your time and considerations.  You have been a wonderful source for helping me in my first book endeavor. 

I would like to thank all the great leaders that I have had the privilege of sitting under to be able to learn the knowledge that I have gained.  Because of all these great leaders and friends in my life, I have gained much knowledge about the Word of God.  It has been a privilege to know each person involved in the process.  Thank all of you very much for your love for God and kindness of being a part of my life.

Most of all I would like to give God all the glory for everything that I have learned.  I would like to thank God very much for putting all these wonderful people in my life that have been a part of my life, because without Him they would not have been their anyway.  He is the reason I have been able to write this book for Him, and I give Him all the glory for His patience with my impatience.  He has been my guide and leader and director in all the things that I have proposed and all the ideas I have referred to in this book.  I thank Him for allowing me to write this book and I hope you will get from it something that will benefit you as you read through the pages to gain some knowledge in ways you have not thought of before you read my book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION       

PART ONE

BELIEVING:  HOW BELIEVING AFFECTS OUR WALK WITH   GOD

1.  The Power With Believing      

2.  What is Available by Believing

3.  How We Believe Becomes What We Receive   

4.  Believe With Confidence Or Fear 

PART TWO

GOD’S WORD:  THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCURACY

5.  The Bible is the Word of God 

6.  Man Cannot live by Bread Alone  

7.  Correctly Understanding God’s Word     

8.  How the Bible Interprets Itself  

PART THREE

SCRIPTURE:  EXAMPLES OF HOW TO LOOK AT THE WORD         OF GOD

9.  How Should We Treat Temptation In Our lives     

10.  The Armor of God Being Applied     

11.  The Temple of God       

12.  Jesus Took Stripes for Our Healing 

INTRODUCTION

POWER WITH BELIEVING

Because this book will be based upon Christian concepts, a person will have to know Jesus to understand and reap the rewards that will be talked about in the book.  You will have to be saved to understand the spiritual meanings of the things I will be discussing.  If you are a Christian, you will learn how to reap the rewards of the great and magnificent promises that are in God’s Word.  If you learn how to apply these principles of the Word of God in your life, they will become magnified in your life greater than they already are, and you will and can grow to a greater experience with God through Jesus Christ.

If you are not a Christian, it may help you to understand what the Christian life is supposed to be like, and also how to attain the things that God tells us we can have by living according to the Word of God.  You will gain an understanding of what many of the precepts of the Word of God are. You may not fully understand the true meaning of what is written in the book because we have to be a Christian to understand spiritual things.  You will learn what it takes for a person to become a Christian and you will see many avenues that will help you to understand what a true Christians life is supposed to be like.  It will help you to learn how to study the Word of God so that you can gain the knowledge to attain the promises, which are recorded in the Word of God. 

I will be basing my study on John 10:10-11 10. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy, I am come that they might have life and have it more than abundantly. 11. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth life for the sheep. If we want to live a life that is more than abundant, we must live according to the Word of God or we will live the less than abundant life. We wonder sometimes why the Christian lives a less abundant life than does the person who is an unbeliever and wonder how the unbeliever prospers more than we do as Christians.

Here, we can look at this verse and believe what God said or we can take the next course of living of what we think God says and live the less than abundant life.

I will try to point out the most important things that we need to know as Christians, and hopefully this will help to guide you in an understanding of how we can live more than abundantly.  We just need to understand God’s Word in order to be able to get the most out of it. We can be prosperous as a Christian.  We must understand the Will and the Law of God’s Word lo live the more than abundant life.

We need to acquire the passion, the eagerness, the zeal and the concern so that others may know that God’s Word is also the Will of God.  When we have these traits in our lives, then we show the world around us that Jesus is the answer to all the problems in their lives.  We should always be excited about what God is doing in our lives.  When we have the zeal and eagerness and passion and concern in our lives, others will want to get on board and find out who Jesus is.  They will be more excited about wanting to know why we seem to be so different from the rest of the world.  This is very important because that is what we should be doing according to God’s Word.

Therefore, when we are living the life that is more than abundant according to God’s Word, others will likely look at us more seriously. They will have a desire to want to know what we are doing to have the abundance we seem always to have in our lives. When we have these traits existing in our lives, even when everything seems to be going on in our lives, and nothing seems to ever get us down, and it always seems to work out for the best for us, others wonder why. Others wants to know how that we seem to never let anything bother us and get on our nerves and cause us to have any worry about the situations that are going on in our lives. That is when we have the opportunities to be the witnesses that God has told us that we are supposed to be in the first place.  When we are living the Word in our lives, others will see Jesus living in us. When they see Jesus living in us, they will begin to ask a few little questions here and there and they will be more interested in finding out why that you seem to be living such an abundant life.

PART ONE

BELIEVING

HOW OUR BELIEVING

EFFECTS OUR WALK WITH GOD

CHAPTER 1

THE POWER WITH BELIEVING

Let us look at the power with believing from the standpoint that God’s Word is the revealed Word of God from the beginning to the end.  We must first realize that God’s Word is the reference that He gives us to have something to live by.  Therefore, we have something that will guide us toward the more than abundant life.

If we believe that God’s Word is the revealed Word, then we must know that God’s Word came through holy men of God as God breathed it and spoke it into their spirit.  They could write down what he spoke to them, through their spirit, and this is what gives us a guide to live by.  Therefore, we must believe that the Bible came from God.  If we do not believe this, then we may as well not go any further. This is how we can live the most prosperous life. The most prosperous Christian life is by our believing in Jesus Christ and appropriating the Word of God in our lives.

People have hewed out cisterns for themselves. Jeremiah 2:13 "¹³For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water Therefore, to whom is God talking?  He must be talking to His people.  He said, my people," therefore; he must be talking to those that call themselves His people.  Would He be talking to those that are not trying to live a life pleasing to Him?  I do not think He would be.  Since the classification is, He was talking to His people, that is to whom He was talking!

He told his people that you have hewed out cisterns, broken cisterns that could hold no water.  This is one of the evils committed.  They turned their backs on Him and then they hewed out cisterns.  In other words, they decided that they knew more than God did. Therefore, they decided that they could work this out for themselves.

The people tried to find better ways to serve God than the ways that He had taught them to follow.  Therefore, they made ways that did not work as well as what God had taught them to live by, was at least what they thought. 

Today, in our society, we are trying to serve God without taking the whole Word of God and using all the truths that He has given us to live by.  We are trying to make our cisterns that will work better for us than what God has given us. This is one of the reasons why Christians do not seem to be living any better than what they are living.  They have turned away from God, and gone their own way, and used their own ideas to make them fit the situation that they were facing.

God said my people have committed two evils.  They turned their backs on me, the fountain of living waters, to do it their way.  Sometimes, the people of the world seem to fair better than the Christians, because we do not seem to want to trust what God has given us.  I will explain this in much more detail as I go throughout the process.

God, being the fountain of living waters, is the unlimited supply that we have to live by when we choose to follow Him.  Why should we want to follow anything else when we have a fountain that will never run dry?  I do not believe that God ever runs out of time, luck, favor, or anything else for that matter.  He says He is the everlasting fountain of living waters. 

Let us look at another scripture from Jeremiah 17:13 "¹³O Lord, the hope of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters." Here again, people have turned their backs on God and went their own way.  Well, turning your back on God means that you are doing it your own way and that is not a good thing.  He tells us that if we forsake Him that we will be ashamed.  Why would we want to forsake God to do it our own way when He is the fountain of living waters?  The unlimited supply of everything that we will ever need in our lifetime is in Him the fountain of living waters.  WOW!!! 

Jesus gives us water from the well, which will never run dry!  Why would we want anything less than what Jesus has offered us? John 4:14 "¹⁴But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." If this well of water that Jesus gives us is the well of water springing up into everlasting life, why should we want anything else other than that which He has to offer us in the first place?  He says that this well is the well of water from which we would never thirst again.  If I would never thirst again, why would I want anything else?  That is the absolute!  I would never need anything else. 

Why should we not be astoundingly happy and contented that we do not have to look to anything else other than God for all our need?  Look at Philippians 4:19 "¹⁹But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus." So, why would we want to hew out cisterns that will eventually lose their strength, and not choose God whose supply never ends?  He says He will supply all our need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.  If we believe that, then we do not need to look to any other supply besides Jesus himself.  That is good enough for me.

If we intend to accomplish the promises that God has for our lives, then we must believe that God said what He meant, and that He meant what He said and exactly the way He said it.  If we will just take Gods Word at face value, it will be much easier to understand.  This way we do not need to figure out what God meant by what He said.  Everybody is trying to figure out what God said by the way He said it, and you cannot find the life that you are looking for without taking God’s Word and believing that what He said He meant.  We need to trust what God has said and quit trying to figure out what He said.  Most of the time we do not agree with what it says, which is why we try to figure out why that what it says in the Word cannot mean what it says.  I had better figure out what God means here, then; I will know what I am supposed to believe.  Good thinking, but it does not work when it comes to getting what God has promised us.  If we would just take God’s Word at face value, we could live that life that He has promised us to the fullest.

He is the fountain of living waters.  He is the one that created, made, and formed us from the dust of the earth.  If He could have made a human body so complicated as ours, then why could He not have all the answers that we would ever need for anything?  Why would we have to go anywhere else but to His word to find all the keys to living for Him? We need only to depend on God for all our need and He even gives us some of our greed.

I had always wanted a double-breasted suit and I could not afford one.  My wife and I went into a retail store one day and we were just looking around at different things in the store.  We found some double-breasted suits in the retail store.  Well, to our surprise they were on sale.  I could not believe that they had double breasted-suits on a sale that I could afford to buy.  Well, actually they had them at a price of which I could buy two of them and that is exactly what I did.  When we left the store, I told my wife, it is great because God has given me something that I had wanted for a long time.  I thought they were so sharp looking and I had had a desire for a double-breasted-suit and God took care of that desire.  All we need to do is let God be our guide and believe that He meant what He said and that He will do what He said just as He said He would do.  What would it be like if we just trusted Him?  Whom else can you trust to do what you need when times are hard?  Your best friend may not be there for you, but God will always be there.

In Hosea 4:6 "⁶My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children." God’s people were missing out, because they did not have the knowledge they needed.  Again, God is talking to His people.  God would be talking about the people that were trying to serve him.  They have forgotten God’s Word.  They are not studying to learn God’s Word; therefore, they will not know how to live for God.  The life that God has promised them, according to His Word, is a little out of their ability to reach because of their unbelief concerning the knowledge of God.

How can we not be shattered for a lack of knowledge?  Let us look at II Timothy 2:15 "¹⁵Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." We must study God’s Word to learn the truth of it. Therefore, we attain the knowledge that we need to have when we need something that will make a distinction in our life.  If we do not study God’s Word, then we cannot know what His promises are.  We cannot rightly divide the Word of God if we do not study it. He tells us here, that we must study, that we will not be ashamed when we need to know something about what He has to offer us. That is how that we be not ignorant to the word of God, by studying it.

If we study, then we will know that believing is a major part of our Christian life.  We cannot have a Savior if we do not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.  We have to also believe that he died on the cross, and that he rose up from the grave, and that he ascended to Heaven, and is sitting at the right hand of the Father making intercession for us.  If we do not believe these things, then how can we be a Christian and have the life that God has promised us?  We cannot.  You must believe to receive.  If you do not believe, how can you receive?  You cannot.

Let us look at Luke 17:6 "⁶And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you." This is what Jesus told the disciples after they ask him to increase their faith in verse five of that chapter.  He told them, if you just have the faith of the grain of a mustard seed, these things could happen.  That is powerful.  If you just have the faith of the grain of a mustard seed, great miracles will happen in your life.

Mark gives us a description of the mustard seed.  Let us look at Mark 4:31-32 "³¹It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth:³²But when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of it."

The mustard seed, being the smallest seed of all the seed of the earth, grows the largest tree of them all.  WOW!!!  God said if we just have, the faith of the grain of a mustard seed that we could even say to the sycamine (we know as a sycamore) tree be plucked up by the roots and planted in the sea and that it will be done.  That is not much faith, which God has required of us.  Why can we not just take God at His word, rather than trying to figure out why he said that we could be healed, and could have all our need met? 

If we can believe that Jesus is the Son of God, then we should be able to believe anything else that God says.  I was not there when Jesus was born.  I was not there when they tried Jesus in the courts or while they were prosecuting him.  I was not there when Jesus hung on the cross, and I was not there when he shed his blood for us. I was not there when they put him in the grave, and I was not there when Jesus came out of the grave, and I was not there when Jesus ascended to Heaven. WERE YOU?  Probably not, without a doubt you nor I were there when these things happened.  So, how do we believe this?  God gave us the Bible and we must believe the Bible.  So, is the Bible that God gave us, not all that we need to understand what He meant?  Why can we not just believe what it says?  That should be all we need to understand what God has given us to live by.

The main reason most of us cannot believe everything God said is available to us is that we do not study the Word to find out.  We think that the preacher can tell us everything and that we do not have to work at it.  Well, the preacher can tell us a lot; but the preacher cannot teach you everything that you need to know.  That is why God told us in II Timothy 2:15 to study to show ourselves approved unto Him.  If we study, then we can know and be able to carry out the promises that God has promised us.  I wish the preacher and the Sunday school teachers could teach us everything that we need to know about God’s Word.  That would be nice and then we would not have to work at it at all.  God knew they could not.  That is why He told us to study His Word, then we can learn the things we need to know about His Word.

The Word of God is so marvelous, so rich, so astonishing, and so unchanging that when Jesus Christ came, He came that we can have life and that we can have life more than abundant.  In order to have this life, we must believe that God is an honest God. We must not doubt what He said about what He will do.  Remember in Luke that it says that the faith of the grain of a mustard seed without a doubt, would get us the action that we need to get the things we are seeking from God.  If we expect God to do what He said that He would do, we cannot doubt that God meant what He said.  He says here, that if we have the faith of the grain of a mustard seed without doubt, that action will take place.  All we need to do is just believe His Word, and let it reap the benefits for us as we lean on Him.

Look at an example of believing in Matthew 9:20-22 "²⁰And, behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment:²¹For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.²²But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour."  Her faith was that if I can just touch his garment, I would become whole.  I do not have to touch Jesus himself the woman believed, but if I can just touch his garment, I will become whole.  She got close enough that she could touch the hem of his garment, she did, and when she did, she received her healing. 

Jesus did not even have to touch her.  He did not have to lay hands on her, because her faith was that if she could just touch his garment she would be whole.  This is a prime example of just trusting that Jesus meant what he said.  Why can we not just believe him and let his power work in our lives just as he said it would.  The woman with the issue of blood believed Jesus and she received her healing.  Why did she receive her healing?  Because she believed that he meant what he said, she received God’s promise.  God did not allow His son to die on the cross of Calvary that His promises would be void.

Jesus gave His life on the cross that we could have life and that we could have it more than abundantly.  He took forty stripes less one that we could have healing.  He let them put the crown of thorns on his head and the reed in his hand, and he hung on the cross, died, and did not have to do any of those things.  He willfully gave his life that we could get everything that God said we could just by trusting him.  All it takes is the faith of the grain of a mustard seed.  A very little bit of faith can move rivers and mountains.  If it only takes a little bit of faith to move mountains, think about what could happen if you had a