Mothers of Nations, are you enjoying and even being challenged by this series of blogs about faith? Are you recognizing yourself in some of the photos as you turn the pages in this Faith Album? Today let’s turn a few more pages to discover two other types of faith that the Word of God describes.

FULL OF FAITH

The first is demonstrated by the Bible character Stephen. He was chosen to serve in ministry because he was known as a man “full of faith.” 

In Stephen’s day, the number of disciples was rapidly multiplying. As a result, problems within the church were beginning to occur due to the number of people requesting help and assistance with their daily living needs. 

The Grecian (Hellenist) Jews complained about the Hebraic (Palestinian) Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. Those in charge of the distribution were the Palestinian Jews. Because of these complaints and conflicts between the two groups, the twelve disciples gathered to find ...

Last week we started a series of blog entries regarding various kinds of faith and talked specifically about “great faith.”  I encourage you to go back to our previous entry if you have not yet read it so that you do not miss even one page of our Faith Album! Today let’s look at three other types of faith:  Little Faith, Weak Faith, and Strong Faith.

LITTLE FAITH 

As we now turn the page in our album of faith, we find the next type depicted: “little faith.”  Little faith is the opposite of great faith, as it is a faith led and controlled by circumstances and our senses. Little faith gives in quickly to fear. The word “little” implies the meaning of small, stunted, microscopic, miniature, or pocket-sized. 

Little faith is restricted by limitations. It does not hold when circumstances change. Peter the disciple thought he had tremendous faith until he faced danger, and then all his faith was gone. Brave enough to try walking on water, Peter stepped out of the boat to meet Jesus. He ev...

Many of us like to pull out our old family photo albums and reminisce as we look at all the pictures. Each snapshot brings back a memory, a time of special joy, or a moment in family history. As a Christmas gift several years ago, my sister gave me a photo album filled with our family pictures from over a fifty-year span. As we paged through the book, it was such a blessing to recall those days gone by -- the people, the times, and the feelings we shared.

Sometimes we look at a picture only to be reminded of how we used to wear our hair or how thin we were back then! The photo album really tells our life story, where we came from, what we did, and who we influenced. One thing is for certain. There is always recognizable change, development, and growth from one stage to another as demonstrated by the documentation of the photos. 

Faith is something we can measure as well. We all received a measure of faith from God when we came to the knowledge of the Lord. Ephesians 2:8 says that fai...

Through the years the Holy Spirit taught me how to pray both simple prayers and complicated prayers. I learned how to pray for deliverance and how to cast out demons. Praying for a wounded spirit became easy for me to do. Travailing prayer was just something I learned to yield to. Praying with boldness grew in my life as I became more confident in Him. The prayer of agreement was forever settled in my heart. 

But if you can believe this, the hard part for me in learning to pray came when God asked me to go to evangelical ministers’ gatherings and learn to pray with other ministers. Having never prayed in tongues, some of these ministers were very uncomfortable praying with me as a “tongue talker.”  I was uncomfortable as well! But little by little I learned to accept their ways of prayer and learned how to work and cooperate within their methods. I must admit that it was not easy to deny my prayer language once I had learned to pray in the Spirit.

God began to show me how to present ...

I learned early on in my role as a mother that prayer becomes a major part of our lives when our children are suffering. After our daughter was raped in high school, she went on a wild spree of rebellion and problems. My husband and I spent night after night on our knees praying. We begged the Lord for help, cried out, and agonized in prayer. We tried declaring Scriptures, speaking in faith that she would return to the Lord. We prayed words of deliverance. But circumstances just got worse!

At times things got so bad that I wanted to pray for God to take her home so that she would not lose her salvation. I prayed to close her womb so she would not get pregnant. I prayed to stop her, arrest her, rebuke her, catch her, and deliver her. I prayed everything and anything I could think of to get her out of this horrible time of our lives. 

We tried everything we knew to do in prayer. Then one day the Lord said to me, “Tell her you are not going to pray any longer. Tell her she is free to se...

Matthew 18: 19 tells us, “If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven.”  This Scripture is often called the “prayer of agreement.” 

Now I had heard teaching about the prayer of agreement from several people and I even listened to sermons on the subject. I understood the principle, but I had not had any actual experience with this form of prayer until 1986 when we were in Hawaii on a vacation.

One afternoon an announcement came over the loudspeaker at our hotel and we heard from other people at the resort that we all needed to evacuate and head up into the hills to higher ground because a tsunami was coming. Interestingly, we did not even know what a tsunami was, but someone in a merchandise shop told us that it was a huge tidal wave!

Not having any idea what this all meant, we went back to our hotel, got our car, and started driving to higher ground. As we were passing cars parked along the ro...

Some people may start learning about prayer by watching or observing others pray. Over the years, I had many mentors in prayer. Each person deposited some aspect of prayer into my life, either by what they prayed, how they prayed, where they prayed, why they prayed, or even by how long or how short they prayed.

I learned that prayer was an opportunity to talk to God personally. Prayer time was a time to converse with my Maker and yield to His heart. Mothers of Nations, there is no reason for anxiousness when every moment of our life we can yield to Him and talk to Him through prayer.

When asked what prayer is, people can list several examples such as a time of seeking, a time to help others, a time of fellowship, a time of cleansing, a time to adore the Lord, or a time to make petitions known. For me, prayer is all of that and more! It is a time to connect with His heart in the throne room of the Father. Each time we pray, we divinely hook up with Jesus Who is already in intercession...

Praying for a wounded heart came easy for me to learn for some reason. God would give me a picture of a container, and as I prayed, I could see the Holy Spirit going down into the container until He reached the bottom. Then as He came up, everything in the container was taken out with Him. All the bad memories, all the pain, all the hurt, and all the anger just took hold of the Holy Spirit and left with that prayer. 

Sometimes the Holy Spirit would lead me to pray healing of the heart for a certain incident in a person’s life. Other times He would give me a word to speak that would trigger a memory and bring release. Proverbs 18: 14 (NKJV) reminds us, “The spirit of a man will sustain him in sickness, But who can bear a broken spirit?”  I learned that prayer is like soothing oil being poured over an open wound in the heart, bringing healing.

Our heart is capable of many things. It can be drawn to people or things. It can be hard, unyielding, soft or pliable. Our heart can lust, hate,...

As prayer became a lifestyle for me, people would come asking me to pray for them. Once you start praying for other people, you never know what might happen! One time a lady came to our house and wanted prayer for her marriage. We talked a while, and then I started to pray. All of a sudden she fell on the floor, rolled back and forth, and said, “I don’t know where I am!”

Well, no one had ever fallen over when I prayed, nor had I ever seen someone go somewhere in the spirit and say they were lost! Staring at her and not knowing what was happening, I remembered a book I had read about demons and deliverance where a minister had said, “Demon, name yourself.” 

So I did just that and shouted out, “Demon, name yourself!”  Was I ever surprised at what happened next. A deep, loud, slow voice came out of that woman saying, “Medium.”  Following the format I had read in that book about deliverance prayer, I responded, “Demon of Medium, you leave her now!” 

And that is just what happened. Talk ...

Mothers of Nations, once you enroll in the “School of the Holy Spirit,” it seems as though He teaches one thing over and over until you learn it well, and then you move on to the next lesson. As I shared about last week, travail was just a part of the entire world of prayer that I was discovering. Next came lessons on fasting and prayer. Psalm 35: 13 says, “I will humble myself with fastings.”  James 4: 10 reminds us, “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord and He will lift you up.” 

I recall that my first big step in learning about prayer and fasting was a three-day fast on liquids. Eventually I tried longer fasts and more difficult ones. Along the way I started studying fasting in Scripture. I learned that fasting is essential during times of crisis, times of need, or times of warfare and deliverance. Esther went on a fast when her country and people were facing a major danger of annihilation. Daniel fasted and received insight and revelation in time of need. Ezra sought God for r...