How many times have you heard someone say, “I sure do wish God would do something for me”? The rest of the statement hangs unspoken in the air: “but He probably won’t.”

That’s not faith. That’s unbelief. But it works the same way faith works—only backward. Fear is actually faith going the wrong way. Fear is faith in the negative dimension. It’s faith in failure, danger or harm. When someone is meditating on negative thoughts or “worrying,” as we call it, he or she is developing inner pictures. Not pictures of hope, but pictures of despair.

Just as fear is the flip side of faith, despair is the flip side of hope. It’s an inner image of failure, sickness, poverty or whatever else the devil wants to inject into you. Despair is actually hope in the negative, and fear, like faith, brings it to pass.

Do you see how powerful this process is that controls the course of your life? These inner images, whether they be of hope or despair, become the blueprint for your faith or fear, and ultimately control your destiny.

What you must do is dig into the Word and begin building your hope. Start developing God’s pictures within you. As long as you have an image of your own defeat on the inside of you, you’re destined to be defeated on the outside as well. But change that inner image with the Word of God and no demon in hell will be able to hold you down.

Jesus came to change the inner man. “If ye continue in my word,” He told us, “then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:31-32).

Get that truth working on the inside of you. Put it in there until hope begins to paint new pictures in your heart. Then hang on to those pictures relentlessly. Don’t ever let them go. Eventually, inevitably, faith will make those pictures as real on the outside as they are on the inside.

“For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he….” It’s the pictures inside you that determine your destiny. Paint some new pictures. God’s Word is full of them. The question is—are you?

Speak the Word

As I think in my heart, so am I. (Proverbs 23:7)