What If You Could? - Find Faith In The Face Of FearSample

God can overcome the smallest and greatest challenges in your life. He does that through your heart and through your God-given abilities. In 1 Samuel 16:7, the Lord spoke to Samuel about David when he was still a shepherd, saying, “ ‘Do not consider his appearance or his height. … The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (NIV). He was saying that He knows what is inside a person and how to use that for His glory. God knew who David was, who he would become, and how he would serve the Lord. He used those things to make a shepherd a great man of God. David fought lions and bears before he faced his battle with Goliath. He fought them and developed his faith in God.

As a young man, he came to understand that even when people fail, God does not fail. God remained the same every time David called upon Him. King David’s faith was built on knowing that he could always call on God and that God would answer. He constantly and consistently asked God for His will, especially when it came to significant political or military matters. Many people know of David’s slingshot and the one-on-one encounter with the Philistine giant Goliath. But he dealt with other battles of the mind and body as well. David’s faith allowed him to believe God’s promises and that God would determine the method and the timing to fulfill them. If you trust God and allow Him to do things His way, you can be certain that His way will fulfill His promises. 

By now you might be asking, What is faith? The Bible contains a clear definition in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (NRSV). Simply put, the biblical definition of faith is trusting in something you cannot explicitly prove. So how much faith do we need? God does not require much of you—just that you believe in Him completely. Believe that you are His and that you are better with Him than apart from Him. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In other words, the fundamental fact of existence is this trust in God, this faith, the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our assurance of what we can’t see in the natural world.