Faith

Guard What You Let Take Root

/ Terrence Burton / Leave a comment

You do not plant a seed by holding it tightly in your fist and staring at it, waiting for it to sprout. You bury it, cover it with soil, and let it grow out of your sight. Faith works the same way. We often want to keep our desires in plain view, gripping them tightly out of anxiety, when God is asking us to release them into belief and let them grow quietly underground.

Your Words Are Containers of Faith

Romans 10:17 says that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Every time someone speaks to you, they are handing you a piece of what they believe. Words carry faith the way a cup carries water. That means you get to decide what you drink. When someone hands you fear, doubt, or a limiting word about your future, you are not required to receive it just because they said it with confidence.

This week, pay attention to what you are planting in your own soil, and just as carefully, pay attention to what other people are trying to plant there too. Not every seed deserves room to grow.

-Terrence Burton

What If Prayer Sounds More Like a Command?

/ Terrence Burton / Leave a comment

Most of us learned to pray by asking. Father, would you please touch this body. Father, would you please heal this heart. There is nothing wrong with asking, but when you study how Jesus prayed for the sick, something shifts. He rarely asked the Father to do something in the moment. He spoke directly to the need standing in front of him.

James Called It Prayer

James chapter five gives believers a clear picture of healing prayer. Is any among you sick? Let them call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith shall save the sick. That same chapter points to Elijah as the example of effectual, fervent prayer. Yet look closely at what Elijah actually said. He told the king it would not rain again until he said so. That declaration, that decree, is what James calls prayer.

Jesus Spoke to the Need, Not Just the Father

At Lazarus’s tomb, Jesus thanked the Father before anything happened. Father, I thank you that you have heard me, and I know that you always hear me. Then he turned and spoke directly to a dead man. Lazarus, come forth. He was not negotiating with heaven in that moment. He had already settled that with the Father in private. In public, he simply released the word. The same pattern shows up when he told a paralyzed man his sins were forgiven before anyone even asked about forgiveness at all.

Words, Desire, and Belief Have to Agree

None of this works as a formula. It works because desire, belief, and the words we speak are lined up together. If your mouth says one thing while your heart doubts, you have swapped an ingredient, and you will not get the same result. Faith is really another word for faithful, steady and consistent, not wavering back and forth. When we finally believe that God always hears us, we stop begging and start declaring, because we already know he has moved.

Maybe this week is the week you stop only asking and start believing what you already have permission to say.

-Terrence Burton

Your Words Are Carrying Something

/ Terrence Burton / Leave a comment

You do not hold a seed in your hand and stare at it, expecting it to grow. You bury it. That single picture explains more about faith than most sermons ever will.

Faith Comes By Hearing

Romans ten reminds us that faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Words are containers. They carry faith from one person to another, whether that faith is good or bad. Every time someone hands you a doubtful report, they are also handing you what they believe. You are allowed to refuse the package. Saying quietly, that is not for me, is not arrogance. It is stewardship of what you allow to take root.

Guard What Gets Planted

Negative words repeated often enough begin to act like seeds. Left unchallenged, they grow into doubt and fear the same way a good word, believed and watered with patience and peace, grows into the very thing it promised. Renewing the mind, as Romans twelve describes it, is ongoing work. It means keeping your thinking clean and current, not just filling it with good information once and walking away.

Abraham Believed Past the Impossible

Abraham stood at the edge of the hardest instruction he ever received and believed that God was able to raise his son from the dead, even before there was any resurrection to point to as proof. That kind of faith did not come from nowhere. It came from years of a private relationship with God, the same secret place Jesus later told his disciples to enter and shut the door behind them.

Whatever you have been hearing lately, ask yourself whose faith you are carrying. Then plant something worth growing.

-Terrence Burton

The Speed of Your Faith: What’s Really Slowing You Down

/ Terrence Burton / Leave a comment

Have you ever felt like your prayers were moving through molasses? You believe. You wait. You keep pressing forward. Yet the answer seems to crawl instead of run. Scripture actually gives us a reason for that, and it has less to do with how hard we are praying and more to do with what we are carrying and how clearly we are seeing.

Clarity Creates Speed

In Habakkuk 2:2, God tells the prophet to write the vision, and make it plain, so that the one who reads it can run. Notice the connection. A clear vision produces a runner. A cloudy vision produces someone who creeps along, hesitant and unsure. Think about driving through fog. You slow down not because something is wrong with your car, but because you cannot see. The moment the fog lifts, you naturally speed up. The same is true spiritually. When our vision of what we are believing God for is blurry, we hesitate. When it becomes clear, our pace changes.

Lay Aside the Weight

Hebrews 12:1 tells us to lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and to run with patience the race set before us. Notice that weight and sin are named separately. Not everything that slows you down is sinful. Something as ordinary as unresolved worry or an old habit of overthinking can still act like a weight, even though it is not a moral failure. The instruction is the same either way. Set it down so you can move.

Run With Patience

Here is the part that surprises people. Patience in this verse does not mean sitting still. It means running consistently. You are not called to wait around for something to happen to you. You are called to keep moving in faith, undistracted, toward what God has already shown you.

So take an honest look today. Is your vision clear? Is there a weight you have been carrying that has nothing to do with sin, yet still slows your steps? Set it down, sharpen your focus, and run.

-Terrence Burton

Pray About the Small Stuff Too: Why Nothing Is Too Little for God

/ Terrence Burton / Leave a comment

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to sort our prayers into two piles. Big requests we bring to God with confidence, and small requests we quietly decide are not worth His time. Scripture never actually teaches that distinction, and it is worth examining why we made it up.

It Was Never About the Size of the Request

Philippians 4:6 tells us to be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, let your requests be made known unto God. Everything means everything. A jammed cable box, a lost parking space, a small daily frustration, these things matter to God not because the object itself is significant, but because you are significant. First Peter 5:7 says to cast all your care upon Him, because He cares for you. The verse does not say He cares about the thing. It says He cares about you. When something concerns you, it becomes something He is concerned about too.

Let Your Faith Rest, Not Worry

There is a difference between praying from a place of confident belief and praying from a place of anxious pleading. One trusts that the answer is already in motion. The other keeps checking to see if God is really listening. He is listening, in the big matters and the ones you have quietly decided are too small to mention.

Bring it all to Him today, the significant and the seemingly insignificant. Nothing that matters to you is beneath His attention.

-Terrence Burton