Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.—EPHESIANS 1:15-17
Talking about faith is one thing; it is another matter completely to put our faith to work. Working faith protects us from destruction and also empowers us to offensively bring ruin and desolation to the powers of darkness that threaten us, our families, our cities, and our planet. Before we can activate this faith correctly, we must understand who our faith is actually in.
A.W. Tozer commented, “Faith depends upon the character of God just as a building rests upon its foundation.”17 Why is the knowledge of God’s character so important? It is because our faith will only go as far as our revelation of who God is. We will not exercise faith for anything beyond who we believe God to be. Who He is gives us a clear picture of what He will and will not do.
Without knowing who God is, our faith is without a solid foundation. It is through a lifestyle of encounter with God that we discover who He is, what He is like, and what we are scripturally licensed to believe Him for. If we do not know what He is really like, or worse, if we base our faith on lies or false ideas about His nature, we will easily come into agreement with the enemy’s agenda to wreak havoc upon our lives. God Himself stated, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hos. 4:6).
When God prophetically states that His people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge, He was not referring to a deficit of intellectual information, nor was He saying, “My people are being destroyed because they are not putting correct faith principles into practice.” Christianity is not about knowing and applying a list of principles for life enhancement; it is about a dynamic experiential relationship with a Living Person.18 From out of this relationship everything else flows. The New Living Translation of Hosea 4:6 translates God’s words this way: “My people are being destroyed because they don’t know Me.”
Author and prophetic voice Dallas Willard makes a startling statement about the importance of the knowledge of God. He wrote, “Failure to know what God is really like and what His law requires destroys the soul, ruins society, and leaves people to eternal ruin.”19 This is exactly what we will explore in the following chapters.
Our faith will only go as far as our revelation of who God is.
I want to help you build your faith upon a solid foundation so you never play into the enemy’s hand again, believing his lies, and missing out on God’s promises coming to pass in your life. After all, to know God is to love Him, and to love Him is to long to be like Him. When we are walking out a lifestyle of breakthrough faith, we are truly imitating the Father. This is where we will begin.