There are two sides to the nature of reality in the Christian experience:
1. The Divine Expectation of Faith
2. The Human Limitation of Unbelief
While one opens you up to a world of possibilities in Christ, the other imposes limitations on your practical circumstances. The first makes you victorious and the second makes you religious with little or no practical change in your experience.
If you have come into Christ, the Scripture is clear that you are no more the same person you used to be. As simple as this is, it is the most ignored and despised aspect of the New Life. This ignorance may not be theoretical, but the whole theatre of human experience is dominated by the response of faith or the drawbacks of unbelief. Your experience is a valid proof of what you truly believe regardless of what you confess.
Just like in Mathematics, once you get the first principle (of formula) wrong, your calculations are condemned to fail. If you have a contradiction in your Christian experience, it shows that there is a knowledge gap that is interfering with your experience of comprehensive victory in Christ. Now, take note of this statement: your experience is meant to rise to the standard of God\’s Word and not the Word of God coming down to the level of your experience.
You are definitely in one of these two possibilities. Once you refuse to rise to the standard of God\’s Word, by simply believing what it says, regardless of other people\’s discouraging experiences, you will always come short of the glory (standard height of perfection) of God.
Increasing your spiritual activities will not improve your experience simply because you are working with the wrong \”formula\”. Do all you know how to do, go from church to church, camp meeting to camp meeting, and in fact, you can try out a strange regimen of fasting, it will only frustrate you further, as many are already frustrated today.
The only way this may work is if, in any of your adventure, you were confronted with this simple but costly reality. Some people have concluded that they cannot be delivered or set free from certain spiritual bondage because of this error. Some people believe that they cannot be free from certain emotional struggles and this has made the Christian experience a mere religious preoccupation that has no real value in critical, practical areas of life.
This has led many to believe more in psychological theories and psychotherapist treatment. While I don\’t dispute the usefulness of some of these, as it is futile to dispute the relevance of medicine because of the reality of divine healing, it is irresponsible to deny the power of God to deliver completely on the grounds of your error in judgment.
Let me repeat: if you have a contradiction in your Christian experience, you need to revisit the premise, primary ideology or first principle your \”faith\” is based on. A wrong formula will never produce the right answer in a thousand attempts, so a wrong premise of faith will only multiply your frustrations and eventually lead to the death of your faith. Subsequent prescriptions of faith are useless when the faith itself is based on a wrong premise. Pray more, fast more, give more etc are good but they remain futile (or at least under-perform) where faith has been misplaced.