As we each struggle in this world with our own issues, we often meet others who seem to have more faith than we do. The common thoughts are that God must like them more than He likes us, or that strong faith is given only to the really good Christians. But the truth is that faith is a choice we have and a path that some of us accept.

We can’t always choose the battles we’re going to fight BUT we can choose how we’re going to fight them. The confusion comes when we try to analyse the battle and plan a strategy that will make us the winner in it. But before we even get to that phase of the battle, we need to know what we’re fighting.

We have only one enemy. Regardless of what the battle is and how intense it is, there is only one enemy that we fight – and that is the devil. The Bible says in John 10:10 that he has come to steal from us, kill us and destroy us.  That is his sole purpose – his reason for being – and he won’t stop until he’s given his last breath in trying to destroy each one of us.

At the same time, we have only ONE defence and that is Jesus Christ.  The Bible says in John 16:33, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world”.  There is no other defence for us that can possibly give us the victory in our battles, except the One who has already defeated the devil.

During His earthly ministry, Jesus said many times that all we need to get the victory over our problems is faith. What is this faith? It’s believing that Jesus set us free from the devil’s control when He died on the cross. It’s believing that we were made whole and healed from every sickness possible, on the cross. And it’s believing that there is power in His name – that we would be saved. Saved from eternal death and a future with the devil and saved from our worldly battles. We just have to have faith and believe.

When we are facing worldly problems, we have to understand that every single one of them is initiated by the devil for the purpose of stealing our joy, killing our hope in Jesus and destroying us. Regardless of what the battle is – sickness, financial issues, problems with our children, our job, our neighbors, our home – it’s all brought on by the devil to hurt us.

And there is only one person who has ever beat the devil and that’s Jesus. He broke the chains of hell and death when he descended from the cross, and then when He rose from the dead He gave us His spirit so that we too can win every battle we have with the devil. This faith is the essence of believing God for the victory and the more we know about God, the bigger our faith gets.

We aren’t born with faith; it’s a gift that God gives us when we first begin to learn about Him. We can’t come to Him without it so He gives each of us a tiny seed, just enough for us to believe that He IS God. Once we get that in our hearts, He wants us to know more and more so He gave us His Bible so that we can learn about Him, and the more we learn, the more that little seed of faith grows into a healthy root.

So when we are brought into a battle and it’s massive and overwhelming, the world is ready to jump in with an answer that it has manufactured to help us during these “trying times”. We tend to look at the individuals – the doctors, the medicines and the therapies – as independent and helpful answers but they all belong to the world. And the world is the devil’s domain. He controls the world, and so we have to realize that anything the world has to offer can’t possibly be good for us.

All the money that goes into cancer research and yet no cure has come out of it yet. Chemo helps to destroy the cancer but it also destroys the good cells in the body, as well. And there aren’t that many people that survive it and regain perfect health. Why? Because the devil doesn’t want us healed. He wants us to believe that even Jesus can’t heal cancer.

Faith is a Choice. We can choose to follow the world down it’s dark, lost path and have faith in what it has to offer us OR we can turn to Jesus who is the light in this world and have faith in Him.

Faith is a Choice. We can choose to follow Jesus and have life or we can choose to follow the world and have death.

“And if it seems evil to you to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” …Joshuah 24:15