The war is on, and you’re in hand-to-hand combat. Your back is against the wall. The fight brings you up, down, and back around again. The situation looks impossible, it roars at you threatening to take the final blow. You feel the pressure to bend to hopelessness. The pressure to doubt God. In one moment you hear the Word of God and you feel faith come, but then another voice bombards you to tear it down. You feel the weight of what’s at stake. Fear tries to swallow you up. Then anger, hopelessness, and despair attempt to flood you out. The battle will be won or lost in your mind and the temptation is strong to make you quit by getting you to agree that the situation is impossible.

The word of God is your weapon, and faith makes it fire. Reload, fire. Reload, fire. Today is not the day to quit. Never surrender. Never agree with Satan’s lies. Don’t worry if people will think you are crazy. Remember you hold the truth in your heart and the dunamis power of God is on the inside of you. You are equipped to face the impossible.

The Bible says that persecution comes for the word’s sake and that we are to fight the good fight of faith. We have to prepare ourselves and understand it isn’t always easy, that with advancement comes opposition. We have to condition ourselves to believe God. The reason so many of us give up in the face of what looks impossible is because we have conditioned ourselves to believe what the natural outcomes are instead of what God says. A fighter trains. A fighter conditions himself to endure and to stay on his feet. A fighter pushes himself to withstand levels of opposition others can’t and stay in the fight. A fighter knows that to win, you have to outlast your opponent. All along the way, we draw on the power of God in us to do it.

Satan, your opponent, will tell you anything to get you to doubt God. That’s what he did to Eve when he came to her trying to plant seeds of doubt in her mind saying, “hath God said?” (Genesis 3:1) God said you’re healed, but the doctor says there is no hope. You have been in a situation for what seems like forever and Satan says it will never change, but God says you are delivered. You are barely paying your bills and Satan says you are a failure, but God says everything you put your hand to will prosper. Who is telling the truth?

The reality is, the truth is up to you. Your truth will be dependent on who’s word you choose to agree with. It really is that simple. What isn’t always simple is how you come to a place of believing God with ease and staying in faith is like tug-of-war with the devil sometimes. That is where the real fight is. Every time you face something that looks like it isn’t lining up with the word of God, Satan is going to come and tell you lies about it. The Bible says you are transformed by the renewing of your mind. (Romans 12:2)

To win the battle, you have to come to the place where you begin to believe God by default. And then you keep believing him.

How do you get to this place?

1. Have faith in who God is and in his love for you.

You aren’t going to believe God will honor his word until you have a true picture of who God is. However, it isn’t enough to just know who he is, you have to know how much he loves you. You have to know he will show up for you every time you call! Your faith will sore when you begin to meditate on how mighty he is, on all the miracles he has done before. And every time you feel doubt or fear, you remind yourself, “God loves me and he will never fail me. I have direct access to his throne room and his ear is always turned to hear me.”

And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us: And if we know that he hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him. (1 John 5:14-15)

2. Fight the fight of faith.

The fight of faith is just that, a fight. It is a battle in your mind to renew your mind to believe what God says and not what all the outside circumstances you see say to you. When Jesus came walking on the water and approached the disciples in the boat, Peter told Jesus, “Lord if that is you, bid me to come.” And when the Lord said come, Peter stepped out of the boat and began walking on the water! He was literally defying natural laws and experiencing a miracle. However, when Peter began to look at the boisterous wind, he began to sink. What does this mean for us? It means for faith to work to change the circumstances, we have to keep our eyes on Jesus. Like I said in point one, we have to have faith in who God is and in his love for us (that is what we keep meditating on to keep our eyes on God). And then we have to fight.

The fight itself is not us making the circumstance change, the fight is us believing against all natural odds and laws that they will change according to whatever God said about that circumstance. Basically the fight is to keep our eyes on our faith in who God is, what his Word says, and in his love for us.

So here is the thing, once you get the right understanding (truth of God’s word) which gives you the right belief, then it is a matter of endurance. It is a matter of subjecting everything to what God says. You condition your mind to follow your decision to believe God. Your thoughts and feelings no longer dominate you, you dominate them. By that, I mean each time you think something contrary to the victory, each time you feel something contrary to the victory, you take control over the thoughts and feelings that are lying to you. You don’t give yourself permission to focus on or stay in a place of doubt and unbelief.

There will come a point where you break through. Where what you are declaring out of your mouth as far as God’s word is concerned no longer seems like you are trying to convince yourself of it. That is the moment when faith comes alive with supernatural power, when you have conditioned yourself to God’s word of truth over and over until you are no longer hoping it will happen, you know it will happen. You know God’s word cannot fail. You know God loves you and will back you up according to his word. You know the circumstances have no choice but to bend to his power. You don’t have to know how, but you know that they will. You have faith his word is going to materialize even in the face of  overwhelming contrary circumstances. The more you practice and commit to believing God and condition yourself to (meditate on) his word, the easier it becomes. Eventually the negative reports you hear will cause an automatic response of faith, and that is when you begin to believe God by default!

Now, what happens if you stepped out in faith and didn’t see it come to pass? That is the hardest place to find yourself when you are a faith person. This is where the real attack comes from Satan, because it is here that he tempts you not just to back off your faith for a certain thing, but to turn around and quit all together. There are many reasons why we don’t see a promise come to pass, but let’s get it straight right here and now, it is not because God is a liar. It is not God’s fault. If you let Satan get you with that lie, it is going to be an uphill battle to come out of it. Refuse to believe that.

It is time to press in harder, not to shrink back. It is time to seek God for strength, correction, and his counsel. We are human, which means it is possible for us to miss it. Learning to be led by God in us is a process. It is time to get in the ring again. He is the one who teaches our hands to war. If you sit back and blame God that you seemed to lose the last battle, you will never learn to win the next one. There is way too much at stake for all that. Reload, fire. Reload, fire.

Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war: and my fingers to fight. Psalm 144:1