You Can Believe Anything You Want - So Choose God

I’m excited to get into something today that nobody likes to talk about — but everybody needs to hear. We’ve been walking through how Abraham walked by faith. We’ve covered the promise. We’ve covered the importance of knowing the One who made it.

Today we’re getting to the part that makes or breaks everything: faith, at its core, is a choice.

Knowing the Promise-Maker changes everything about how you live.

Let me illustrate it this way. Jeff — my producer — has been with us for years. He’s a man of honor and integrity. But he wasn’t always someone I knew.

If the first day we met, Jeff had walked up and said, “Kurt, I want to buy you a precision rifle,” I would have smiled, thanked him politely, and thought absolutely nothing of it. I would not have gone home and told my wife. I would not have spent the evening looking up rifle companies. Nothing in my life would have changed — even though a man of complete integrity had just made me a real promise.

Now? If Jeff said that today, I’d be texting my wife before we finished taping. I’d be on the phone with friends who were snipers. I’d be up half the night compiling recommendations. My whole evening would change because of what he said.

What changed? Not Jeff. He was the same man of honor on day one. What changed was my knowledge of him. And that knowledge is what turned a promise into something I actually acted on.

This is exactly what it means when Romans 4:17 says Abraham believed in the presence of Him whom he believed. He didn’t just collect the promise and file it away. He got to know the God who gave it. And that relationship is what made the promise real enough to live by.

You can quote the Word and still walk away in fear.

Here’s where it gets honest. You can pray a perfect prayer, quote the right Scriptures, say “Amen” — which literally means so be it — and then hang up and immediately spiral into “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

You used the Word. But did you trust the One who gave it? Because if you did, why are you still afraid? Knowing the promise is not the same as trusting the Promise-Maker.

This is why people pray and then worry in the same breath. They have the formula right, but they don’t have a relationship with the One behind it. And that’s tough to fix with more Scripture — it’s fixed with time. Time in His presence. Time getting to know Him for who He actually is.

Spend time in the Word until you see God as He really is.

Don’t let religion paint a picture of a God you have to beg, bawl, and go on a hunger strike to convince. That’s not Him. When a centurion came to Jesus about his sick servant, Jesus didn’t say 

“I’ll think about it.” He said:

“I will come and heal him.”

— Matthew 8:7 (NKJV)

That’s who He is. That’s how He responds. Get into the Word and let it show you who God actually is — not the hard-to-please, withholding version religion invented, but the one who says “I will come.”

Then talk to Him. Spend time with Him. When you fast, actually use that time to fellowship with Him. See Him doing in the Word what you need Him to do in your life — and start believing that He’ll do it for you too.

At some point, you have to choose to believe.

Here’s what I need you to understand. The people who walk in strong faith aren’t a different breed. They didn’t wake up one day with some special conviction dropped from Heaven. They made a choice. And they kept making it.

Think about a tactical breach — going through a door with another operative. Known or unknown, at some point you look at that person and make a decision: I believe this person will pull their weight. Or you don’t. That’s a choice. Faith works the same way.

At 2:00 in the morning, when your body is hurting and the Word says you’re healed — you will have to choose who is lying. Your body, or Jesus. When the bank account says one thing and the Word says another, you will have to choose what you believe. Nobody can make that choice for you.

I’ve stood there with tears in my eyes, with everything seeming to have fallen apart, and said out loud: “I choose to believe. I can believe anything I want — and I choose to believe God and His Word. That’s my choice.”

That’s what walking by faith looks like at 2:00 in the morning. Not a feeling. Not a spiritual high. A deliberate, awake, clear-eyed choice to believe the God who cannot lie over the circumstances that are screaming at you.

The choice is yours — and you can make it right now.

You have the evidence. You have the Word. You have a God who set up the whole system just so you could receive from Him. He is not withholding. He is not waiting for you to perform. He is already convinced He wants to help you.

The only question is whether you will choose to believe Him.

After thirty years of making that choice — sometimes with tears, sometimes with shaking hands — I can tell you this: you will see the salvation of the Lord. But you have to choose.

Fight To Win. Start today.