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Faith is not the product of reason.

Do you remember in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus told His men to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees? They could not understand what He meant and He asked, "Why do you reason among yourselves?" They missed what He was saying by trying to figure it out mentally. They were reasoning.

Men say, "We are reasonable men. We are logical men, and what you are saying does not make sense. It is not logical." Believers are not to be led by logic.

We are not even to be led by good sense. I have had my sense changed around to where it is good, but what the world calls good sense is not good at all. It is bad sense corrupted by Satan, the god of this world.

If you want to find out what God thinks, you just take what the world thinks and turn it around exactly backward. The world says, Seeing is believing. God says, Believing is seeing. Logic is the product of reasoning by the avenues of hearing, tasting, seeing, feeling, smelling.

Reasoning is based on the failure of the earth through Satan. Faith is the product of God's Word revealed by His Spirit and is based on the success of the Father in heaven.

The ministry of Jesus was never governed by logic or reason. Jairus fell at the feet of Jesus and said, "My little daughter lieth at the point of death...come and lay thy hands on her...and she shall live." Reason would have said, "I'm sorry. I wish that there were something I could do."

Reason operates under the handicap of having no answer to critical needs. The request of this man was unreasonable, but Jesus answered him not a word and started toward his house.

On the way to Jairus' house He met another unreasonable personality—the little woman with the issue of blood. She had been to many physicians, but continued to grow worse. The doctors had reasoned that she was sick, but their logic had no cure to stop the flow of blood.

Understand that I am not knocking doctors. The doctor is a man's best friend if the man does not know how to use his faith. Without them most of the Christians would have died! They have not known how to use their faith. The doctors are fighting the same destroyer that I am. They are operating in the realm of the physical; we are operating in the realm of the spirit. They treat diseases; we go to the root of the problem and deal with the enemy who causes disease.

This little woman said, "If I but touch the hem of His garment, I shall be whole." There is no logic in that, is there? It just doesn't make good sense. Reason would have answered, "Hey lady, what is the matter with you? There is a little girl dying down here. I have to go see her. Let go of my clothes."

If Jesus had been ruled by common sense as most of the Church has been in the past, He would have said, "Folks, let's back off here a minute. We haven't had the morning devotion. We haven't sung 246 or 391. Nobody has taken up the offering yet. Turn loose of my clothes, lady, for goodness sake. We can't fool with you now. After all, you have already been to the doctor and he said there was no hope. What can I do for you? Go on." Common sense will keep you bound when it is time to act in faith on God's Word!

Look at Jesus. He was not led by logic. He was not led by the mind. He stopped and asked, "Who touched me?" Power had gone out of Jesus to heal and dry up the issue of blood, not reasoning power but spiritual power. He said, "Daughter, your faith has made you whole." Her faith caused the power of God to flow in to her body and make her whole. That healing was not the product of reason but the product of faith.

Common-sense religion will tell you not to get your hopes up. God heals some people, but it might not be His will to heal you. That sounds reasonable, but it never gets results. You will always be the one that it is not His will to heal.

The reason that this approach to healing will not work is because it is contrary to what the Word of God says. We are talking about being led by the Spirit, not by the common-sense world, not by the logical world.

The Holy Spirit will turn you in the opposite direction from the way the world is going but, thank God, He will lead you in the direction that God is going. All you have to do is be like old Jairus. He didn't care what anybody thought. In fact, when the man came and told him, "Your little daughter is dead," he did not say a word. He had already said what he had to say: "Lay your hands on my daughter, and she will live."

Jesus turned and said to him, "Jairus, just believe." Jairus refused to be moved by what he heard—his sense of hearing. There is someone giving him the news that his daughter is dead, but in his heart there is the presence of some power, a power stronger than the bad report. Something in his heart was saying, "I don't care what they say. This is so. I know it is so. I just know what I know! I refuse to give up." That something in his heart was faith!

What was controlling the ministry of Jesus? Faith. The force of faith was controlling His ministry, and it was not entirely the force of His own faith. His own faith responded to the faith of the people. (It still does.) In Nazareth He could do no mighty works because of unbelief. The people refused to believe.

But on the other hand, the little woman's faith stopped Him in His tracks. Jairus' faith moved Him, and Jesus used His faith to raise his little girl. What was the result of Jairus' faith? He received his daughter back again from the dead. Unreasonable! Illogical! But that is victory of the highest order.

When you need more than just common-sense results, faith is the only way you will get it.

The Bible does not say let us come reason together, men. It does say, "Come, let us reason together saith the Lord." Reasoning with God is different from reasoning with men. God says, "Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding." When men reason together, they do so on a basis of fear. Reasoning outside of minds, men's emotions, and men's feelings is determined by fear because the world we live in is operating on the force of fear.

The Lord spoke to me while I was preparing this message and said, "The definition of reasoning outside the Word is worry." When you begin to reason outside of God's Word, you automatically begin to worry. "What if that happens? What are we going to do if the Holy Ghost does break out in our denomination and men start talking in tongues right in the middle of church? What am I going to do?" The big I. That is selfishness. The basic root of selfishness is fear.

Faith is not the product of reason; it is the product of the reborn human spirit. It is not the product of the mind but the product of the heart. Faith is a power force. It is a tangible force. It is a conductive force. It will move things. Faith will change things. Faith will change the human body. It will change the human mind. It will change the human heart. Faith will change circumstances.

Let's look at fear, the negative side of the coin. Fear is not a mental force. Fear is a spiritual force, and I will tell you where it came from.

God created a man called Adam, and He gave this man faith. Adam was called the son of God because he was born of God. God created his physical body from the dust of the earth, but the body had no life in it. It was just meat and bones. Then God breathed in to Adam the breath or spirit of life.

God's spirit was breathed into Adam. This man's life was spawned from the inside of God. He was a magnificent, powerful creature. With his faith he had dominion over the forces of nature. He had dominion over everything that walked, crawled, swam, and moved.

This same man committed high treason, bowed his knee to a spiritual outlaw, and gave unto him his authority to rule the earth. Adam gave the vast authority that God had given him into the hands of Satan, and when he did, spiritual death moved into his spirit. The life of God departed and the life of his new god overcame him. Everything about him was perverted. The faith force that was born into Adam when God breathed His life into him was perverted and turned into the force that we know and recognize as fear. Fear ruled Adam from that moment, and the first words from his mouth were, I was afraid.

The force of fear is a tangible force. Will fear change the human body? Jesus said that men's hearts would fail them because of the fear of what is coming on the earth. It will change the color of a man's hair. It will change the color of a man's skin. Fear will change his physical body. It will make him sick. Fear will make him conform to the world. It will control his mind. Fear will kill his body.

Fear activates Satan the way faith activates God. Why does the world not accept the logic that if fear, a spiritual force, will make a man sick then faith, the opposite spiritual force, will make him well? If the force of fear can imprison a man, then the force of faith can make him free.

Why do men have confidence in fear and not in faith? They are reasoning outside the Word of God. They are reasoning inside the world's order. On the other hand, we are reasoning in the world of the spirit by the Word of God.

Excerpt permission granted by
Eagle Mountain International Church, Inc.
aka:  Kenneth Copeland Ministries

Author Biography

Kenneth Copeland
Web site: Kenneth Copeland Ministries
 
For the last 50 years Kenneth and Gloria Copeland have been passionately teaching Christians all over the world how to apply the principles of faith found in God’s WORD to their lives.
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