God never sleeps nor slumbers. He perpetually desires to reach some objective by us. Driven by His desires we thus often find we walk in alien terrain – even hostile it seems now and then. We gingerly set one foot before the other not quite sure where we are taken. We have a hope, sometimes an almost imperceptible hope, but, nevertheless, a hope. Hebr 11:1 says that if there is hope there is also faith. Hope might seem faltering and weak and it can’t promise anything.
Hope is like a house with failing power supply. Sometimes the voltage delivered is sufficient to lighten up the entire house, at other times there is barely a glow. However, hope is a pointer to faith which is the evidence of what we hope for. Faith is a permanently lit house, but it is sometimes invisible to us. We only recognize it by how we walk and the direction of our walk. It is not dependent on circumstances and emotions, but circumstances and emotions throw a veil over faith so that we don’t see it, but nevertheless it governs our walk because faith is powered by the sap that flows into the branches.
Faith thrives in uncertainty, because otherwise it wouldn’t be faith. The reason for this is that faith belongs to the invisible realm where a thing exists before it becomes visible like when God said “let there be” before anything was created. Our high calling as sons is to speak things into existence. Jacob Boehme says a true Christian desires only what Christ desires. Do we believe this?
Our chief impediment to moving into our inheritance as boldly speaking sons is those renowned grave clothes of suspicion to our motives. Again, faith is the key to step out of this illusion of a self willing and desiring apart from Christ.
Under the faith umbrella we also find doubt. Doubt isn’t our enemy. It is faith’s sparring partner compelling us to make faith decisions against appearances and circumstances, and these faith decisions are in accordance with the direction of our walk.
Doubt is in a sense faith’s best friend and that’s why Norman Grubb says it is the steppingstone to faith. Doubt gives us a platform to press through. Faith is enhanced by doubt, as it were. We step upon the doubt-platform and press through blindly stating the opposite of what doubt claims so that doubt in fact gives power to our faith. And as we so well know; it is faith that pleases the Father.
As God calls us higher and even asks us to believe that He lives as one person with us we are confronted with emotions, appearances, acts, thoughts, circumstances which all contest such an idea and even insist on that such a notion that God lives as us is preposterous. The doubt that all these things combined whirl up is our launching pad to faith. And, as we so well know, faith says that God is right and every man (our thoughts and perceptions) is a liar. Faith covers doubt in its own cloud and causes every opposing voice to cease.
Now, this evidently is a ‘principle’ which we can “apply” in a wider sense, because all these mechanisms (emotions, appearances, circumstances) will be activated whenever we speak a word of faith or ask for things in prayer which belong to the department labeled ‘impossible’. Doubt isn’t rigid like beliefs (beliefs as we find them as fixed ideas about God, life, who we are etc). It is flexible, as it were, and has to bow knee to faith. Beliefs are rigid and cemented in thought patterns which only can be torn to pieces by an earthquake, like Peter experienced in the prison (the prison of his thoughts and beliefs).
The Mystery Revealed 