Have you ever read a promise in the Bible and wondered how it could ever come to pass in your life?

Have you ever read, “by [His] stripes ye were healed” when your body was wracked with sickness and pain? Or heard someone preach that God will meet “all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus” when your bank balance was zero and your unpaid bills were piled high?

Healed sounds great, you thought. Needs met sounds great. But I don’t know how to get there from here. It looks impossible!

Everyone who has ever lived by faith has felt like that at one time or another.

Everyone.

Even Abraham, who was one of the greatest God-believing, impossible-promise-receiving, scriptural heroes who ever lived. The first time he heard God’s promises to him, he had no idea how they would ever come to pass.

He’d grown up in a totally heathen culture—surrounded all his life by people who worshipped the moon. So when God said, “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing” (Genesis 12:2), Abraham had no clue how to connect with that blessing and cooperate in its fulfillment.

He must have been especially puzzled about how God was going to make of him a “great nation.” After all, Abraham’s wife was—and always had been—barren. What’s more, they’d both grown too old for baby making.

How do you get from being a childless old man with a barren old wife to being a great nation? he must have wondered. It’s impossible!

#1 – Learn to Live the Life of Faith
Over the years, God answered that question for Abraham. He taught him how to think in a way that would connect him with THE BLESSING. He taught him how to talk and live the life of faith so well the Scriptures call him the faith father of us all.

Granted, Abraham’s faith made him look, sound and act different than everyone else. But it sure produced results.

It opened the door for THE BLESSING to do the same thing in his life it was originally designed to do for Adam and Eve when God spoke it over them. It empowered him to “Be fruitful, and multiply…and have dominion” (Genesis 1:28). As Abraham’s faith connected with THE BLESSING, that blessing produced such supernatural abundance in his life it created around him a kind of Garden of Eden wherever he went.

That’s how THE BLESSING works. It worked that way for Adam and Eve until they cut themselves off from it by yielding to sin. It worked that way for Abraham when God passed it down to him. It worked that way for Jesus during His earthly ministry, and it will work that way for us.

According to the Bible, as born-again believers we have inherited THE BLESSING of Abraham through Jesus. God didn’t give it to us as just an afterthought. He had us in mind from the start. When He blessed Abraham, He did it so that through the plan of redemption, we could receive that blessing too. Galatians 3:8-9 says it this way: “The scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.”

Praise God, the former heathens described in those verses are believers like you and me! We are the people who have been made righteous by the blood of Jesus and blessed with faithful Abraham.

That means if we can find out what Abraham did, if we can learn what God taught him about how to connect with THE BLESSING, we can enjoy the benefits of it as surely as he did.

#2 – Believe That You Are Whatever God Calls You
Galatians 3:13-14 confirms that. It says: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”

The last phrase of that passage leaves no doubt about it: We receive THE BLESSING, which is the promise of the Spirit, the same way Abraham did—through faith.

“But Brother Copeland,” you might say, “I don’t know what Abraham knew about faith. God hasn’t taught me the things He taught him.”

Sure He has. He put them down for you in black and white. Right there in your Bible, He recorded every faith lesson Abraham ever learned. Read Romans 4 and you’ll see those lessons for yourself. You’ll find out exactly how to “walk in the steps of that faith of our father Abraham” (verse 12).

You’ll see, for example, that God called Abraham “a father of many nations,” and He didn’t start calling him that after Isaac was born. God called Abraham the father of many nations when there were no sons in sight.

When God calls you something, that’s what you are. You may not look like it, you may not feel like it, but God’s Word is the truth no matter what you can see or how you feel.

That’s how it was in Abraham’s life and that’s how it is in ours. If God calls us overcomers (and He does in 1 John 5:4) that’s what we are. We aren’t going to become overcomers one of these days. We already are because God said so. If we’ve made Jesus the Lord of our lives we are born of God, and He said, “Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.”

Abraham understood that principle. That’s why Romans 4:17 says when God called him a father of many nations, Abraham stood “before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.” Abraham not only stood before God and believed Him, he acted like God by calling those things which are not as though they were.

Since Abraham is the father of our faith, we should do the same thing. After all, the Bible says we have been born again in God’s image (Colossians 3:10). It tells us to “be imitators of God as dear children” (Ephesians 5:1, New King James Version).

God always operates that way. He speaks things into being. So He taught Abraham to do it, too. He showed him how to connect with THE BLESSING by calling himself blessed.

If we want to follow in his footsteps and enjoy THE BLESSING like he did, that’s the first thing we must do.