3. THE BOLD CONFESSION CHANGES EVERYTHING
When you make the bold confession that you are a son of God, you are like a child who hears his name is John. He doesn’t know what that means. He simply believes his father and mother when they say, “Your name is John”. So he says, “My name is John” because he trusts the ones that told him so.
You too can trust your Heavenly Father. With that in mind, you can believe the Scripture also when it says, “Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises; that by these you might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust:” (2 Peter 1:4)
The Word of God is filled with promises for you and statements made about you by God. They are personal and refer directly to you as His son. So take the Word of God and make it your personal book. It contains a special impartation of truth to you and to every individual who reads it.
When you read the Word of God, and He reveals a certain truth to you, and the Holy Spirit quickens it to your heart, you should make your bold confession of it. The reason it is a bold confession is because at that point you don’t understand it. However, you believe it even though you don’t see any present evidence of it in your life. So you confess boldly that it is true!!
Since out of the heart are the issues of life and death, and the power of life and death is in the tongue, your Heavenly Father wants you to believe in your heart and to speak with your mouth those things which produce abundant life. Declare your faith in His promises and act upon them.
I’ve been told there are about thirty thousand promises of God, although I have never counted them. All of them contain statements that are true about you. As you search God’s Word for yourself, simply believe these promises even though your intellect may violently protest, “Oh no, that couldn’t be true.” Don’t listen to your intellect or you’ll make a wrong confession!!
A Wrong Confession
Years ago, when I would arise in the morning, I looked outside to check the weather. Perhaps it was raining, and I would not feel so well. I became discouraged. The weather was depressing, but I had to go to work.
“Oh, another miserable day!” I’d say. “Why do things have to be like this?”
I would get up and go to work and sure enough, it was a gloomy day — exactly like my negative confession. Everything went wrong. I would get rained on. I would open the car door and step out and water would run off the roof and pour all over me.
By the time I got to work, I was in a hateful mood, and it would continue throughout the day. I’d say,
“The devil has been after me and he’s tormented me all day. Isn’t this terrible!”
When I went to bed at night I wouldn’t be able to sleep because I was in such a terrible state of mind. It was then that my Heavenly Father gave me a three-part principle to follow in the bold confession of His Word.
I began to read the Bible with an open heart and to confess to the truth of the Word. One day in my reading, I found a Scripture concerning the day. Let’s read it:
“This is the day which the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118: 24) “What day is God talking about?” I asked myself. I thought, “This is the day,” might mean some special day, and I tried to find out.
Then it dawned on me. God was not talking about a specific day, but He had made every day of the week, and so we will rejoice and be glad in each one. “How can we do that?,” I asked, “when some days are bad ones, and on some days I have all kinds of trouble”. Lord, what can you mean by that?”
The Bold Confession Makes Every Day a Glad Day
God stopped me from asking Him what He meant by His Word and told me I was first to simply believe it, secondly, to confess it, and third, to act upon it. I was to confess to the truth of His Word in every circumstance of my life, and in everything that happened — every day !!
God showed me He is involved in every situation in your life and mine. He is in the middle of it somewhere, and every day is a good day bursting with opportunities to glorify the Lord. Every day there are new dimensions of Him to learn about and to grow in Jesus Christ.
So now when I get out of bed, I do not say, “This is a miserable day and the devil is really after me.” Today I look for God everywhere and I find Him everywhere.
Today I know that I am a son of God and that my steps are directed by Him. My personality has changed. My grumpiness has gone. The love and blessing and peace of the Lord Jesus Christ is manifest instead. Everything has changed since I made this bold confession of faith in God’s Word. Today I can claim all those thirty thousand promises as mine!
Will you begin now to claim them as yours? What an adventure lies ahead for you! What blessed discoveries you are now ready to make in your growing knowledge and relationship to Jesus.
Let us now look at some who practiced this principle.
