Immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and took hold of him, and said to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Matthew 14:31

John wrote in his first epistle that perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment (1 John 4:18).  John explained that it is when we abide in love that we abide in God.

Nearly all of the gospel, and hence life, revolves around fear in some way in another.  From the first time in the garden, when Adam and Eve knew they were naked, covered themselves, and hid from the presence of Almighty God.  To the first murder, when Cain offered an unacceptable sacrifice, God warned him, and  slew Abel out of jealousy.

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And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’  Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give.

Matthew 10:7-8

The late Derek Prince pointed out that there is no authentic call to evangelism without the power of healing and deliverance.  There is no legitimate preaching of the Gospel without its appropriate demonstration.

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Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

James 1:27

Paul wrote that the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love (Galatians 5:6).  True religion is a good thing, as opposed to the thing commonly called the “religious spirit”, aka, the demonic force of blindness, deafness, and mere rules.  True religion expresses faith through an attitude of love.  The word “expresses” here means it does something.  As James wrote elsewhere, faith without works is dead (James 2:26).  Religion does something, it is both forward and reserved, but always after some goal.

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Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Matthew 7:24

[H]e is like a man building a house, who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock; and when a flood occurred, the torrent burst against that house and could not shake it, because it had been well built.

Luke 6:48

Growing up, spending a lot of time in Matthew, I sort of got the impression from Matthew 7:24, that listening to and following Jesus was kind of like considering real estate on the beach.  You have sandy portions and you have rocky portions.  In some places, there are only dunes, and in other places, namely, upon Jesus, there is a rock sticking out, and it is at this place that one should build their house, rather than upon the sand.  The “choice”, if you will, was simply to follow the instructions or to live a different way, which, of course, would be wrong, and result in failure.

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Now, Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1

Substance is “hypo-stasis” in the Greek.  Hypo meaning “beneath”, and stasis meaning “the state, status, or structure of a thing”.  That is, the underlying, inherent nature of an object, its foundation, its unseen, non-physical yet spiritual essence.  Whether it is an apple, a thought, or a person, to have faith in or for something is to have it for real, whether or not you see it manifested in the natural.  For example, if you say, “I believe such and such will happen”, that is hope.  If you have the substance of the thing hoped for, the very reality of that thing, though yet unseen, that is what Faith is.

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