Claiming Promises; 3 John 3; Isaiah
40:31
When we are to walk by means
of truth it is that we are to walk by means of the Word of God, by means of the
promises and principles that are provided for us in the Word of God. We have
summarised that by terminology called the faith-rest drill. The foundation of
the spiritual life is the filling of the Spirit. The Christian way of life is a
supernatural way of life that requires a supernatural means of execution. A
so-called Christian life that is built upon a way of life that is no different
from just a simple moral life is not the Christian life. The Scripture teaches
that we live our Christian life on the basis of the Holy Spirit.
The next level, and this gets
into the foundational mechanics of living the Christian life after we are
filled with the Spirit, is the faith-rest drill. That concept of drill comes out
of an athletic or military metaphor where something is done over and over and
over again. It is that repetition that builds a habit of thought and a habit of
response in life to what takes place when things don’t go the way we think they
should, or when we are suddenly faced with a crisis, or all of a sudden we are
overwhelmed with the circumstances of life. The faith-rest drill needs to be
utilised in minor events on a day-to-day basis as well as those major crises
that come our way. If we are not trusting God and developing that skill, that
habit pattern of utilising the faith-rest drill on every little detail that comes
along in life then when the big things come along we are not going to be
prepared but will fall apart and it will probably devastate our spiritual life.
The faith-rest drill becomes
the foundation for everything else. For example, the next stage is grace orientation.
Grace orientation as a problem-solving device, as a stress-buster, recognises
that everything we have in life is due to God’s grace, due to His unmerited
love and favour. The only way we know about God’s grace is through His Word, so
the faith-rest drill functions by believing promises that relate to grace. Then
the next stage is doctrinal orientation, and in doctrinal orientation we are
orienting our thinking to the revealed plan of God so that we no longer think
according to the structures of the human viewpoint culture around us called the
cosmic system but we have exchanged our thinking for divine viewpoint thinking.
This leads to the next stage which is a personal sense of our eternal destiny. We
have to exercise the faith-rest drill to believe in eternity, to believe that
we have an eternal destiny, and that God has a plan
and purpose and there will be accountability for the believer at the judgment
seat of Christ. As we grow past the adolescent stage of the personal sense of
eternal destiny we come to the next stage which is a personal love for God the
Father. This is part of the love triplex as well as impersonal love for all
mankind and occupation with Christ. All of those are predicated upon the
faith-rest drill. The Scriptures say again and again, “If you love me you will
keep my commandments.” Keeping God’s commandments is a function of the
faith-rest drill. Personal love for God is seen through the faith-rest drill,
impersonal love for all mankind, loving one another as Christ has loved us certainly
demands the faith-rest drill because we have to love people that aren’t
lovable, may not even be likeable, and may be very objectionable in fact. Occupation
with Christ, keeping our focus on Him, also entails the faith-rest drill, as does
sharing the happiness of Christ or perfect happiness. So the faith-rest drill
must be mastered before we are going to have real maturity in any of these
other areas.
There are three stages in the
faith-rest drill. The first stage is to claim a promise. The second stage is to
think through the doctrinal rationale embedded in that promise. Every promise
has a rationale, a series of steps or reasoning that goes on inside of a
promise. So it is taking the promise, thinking it through (meditation) and
pulling out from that promise the rationale that undergirds
and strengthens that promise. As we do that what will occur to us in our
thought processes are certain conclusions that must shape our thinking and must
become real in our mental attitude experience. The third step is to appropriate
those doctrinal conclusions. It is easy to say those are the three stages; it
is not easy to go through those stages sometimes. There are certain events and
certain crises and certain stages in our life when somehow we find it a little
easier to use the faith-rest drill on, and then there are other things that
seem to strike at the very core of our soul and our thinking and it is very
difficult for us to utilise the faith-rest drill, and again it becomes a
moment-by-moment, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour procedure that sometimes may
go on for weeks or months before we are able to reach that third stage of
making the conclusions from a promise real in our experience.
The first stage of the
faith-rest drill is to claim a promise. How do we do that? First of all we have
to have that promise stored in our soul. The key is that if it is not there in
our soul, in our mind, for us to grab it in a time of crisis then we don’t have
anything to do, all we are going to do is believe some abstract principle.
There are all kinds of abstract principles floating around that people think
have something to do with the Bible and they are not trusting a promise, they
are just grabbing some sort of self-help principle as an unbeliever can do. So
we have to have promises in our soul. To do this we have to make it a priority
in life to learn Scripture. We should set a personal goal of Bible memory.
Isaiah 40:31 NASB “Yet
those who wait for the LORD will gain new strength; They
will mount up {with} wings like eagles, They will run and not get tired, They
will walk and not become weary.”
As we look at this passage
there are several things that we should note. When we think about claiming a
passage we should be rehearsing the verse in our mind. Think through it two or
three times and note some observations. Note here first of all that the verse
begins with a contrast—“But,” translated “Yet” in the NASB. Whenever
we see a verse beginning with a contrast we need to look at the verse before it
to see what the contrast is based on. In the previous verse the emphasis is on
human strength and human ability: “Though youths grow weary and tired, And vigorous young men stumble badly.” No one is stronger or
more vibrant than a young man, yet even they grow weak. There are some
challenges they cannot overcome. Human strength can only go so far and is not
capable of resolving every problem in life. So there is a contrast between
human ability and the divine ability.
The second thing we note is
the verb—“those who wait on the Lord.”
This is an important word to look at, the Hebrew word qawah. Current Hebrew scholarship
doesn’t have anything to do with the previously held idea of weaving a rope but
it is an expectant or hopeful waiting, to wait with hope, to wait confidently. This
picks up the whole idea that we get in the New Testament from the Greek word elpis [e)lpij], which should be translated “confident expectation.”
This isn’t a hope that is just optimistic wishing, this is a hope that is confident
certainty. It is the idea of those who are confidently expecting God to be
involved in the process. So those who wait on the Lord are those who have their
hope or confidence in the Lord.
The third observation is that
they wait on Yahweh. They are not
just waiting. A lot of people say, well things will
work out. It is just a sort of hope that somehow, someway some impersonal force
or some cosmic deity or fate will bring things about and that of we just last
long enough things will work out. There is no personal transcendent and
imminent God who is infinitely involved in them planning of a person’s life
that they are trusting in, they are just trusting that somehow, some way things
will work out. That is an empty, meaningless faith; nothing more than some
psychological gimmick to try to pull one’s self up by his own
boot straps. That is not what the Scripture talks about where the hope, the
confidence is in a person, in the person of God. The name Yahweh to a Jew was always a reminder that God was a personal God
who had entered into a contract or covenant with
The fourth observation here
is the future tense. What is the result, the consequence of that confident
expectation? It is not simply that we will renew our strength. That has the
idea of getting new strength, that somehow we are running
that marathon of the trials and tribulations of life and have made it past the
10-mile mark and you suddenly get a second wind. That is renewing strength and
is not what this concept has in mind. The Hebrew verb here is chalath and it
has the idea of change or exchange, changing one thing for something else, or
exchanging one thing for something else. The idea is not that they get a burst
of new energy or get a second wind, it is that they
are exchanging their strength and power for God’s strength and power. It is His
power and ability, not our power and ability.
We can expand on this by
looking at a parallel usage of these words in Job chapter fourteen where Job is
reflecting on his own trials and testing. Job 14:1 NASB “Man, who is
born of woman, Is short-lived and full of turmoil… [7]
For there is hope for a tree, When it is cut down,
that it will sprout again, And its shoots will not fail.” He is in the middle
of whining a little bit in this passage. The word there for “hope” is qawah.
After focusing on man’s
inabilities and weaknesses there is a real note of despair and futility, and
that is not something any of us are unfamiliar with. But then he sounds a note
of confidence. Job
Reasons we go through suffering