Isaiah 26:3 is an excellent scripture to focus on to understand faith as a weapon of warfare. The scripture is about abiding in the presence of the Lord. God wants to dwell with us at all times. He wants us to be conscious of him and keep our minds stayed on him.
When the bible talks about ‘whose mind is stayed on thee,’ it refers to a seizing or lay hold. It’s not speaking of a casual, every once in a while, thinking about the Lord. It is talking about a person whose attention is focused on the Lord.
Many scriptures talk about waiting upon the Lord, but when many people say they are waiting upon the Lord, they mean they have prayed, and then they have forgotten it, waiting for Christ to show up. But when the scripture talks about waiting upon the Lord, in Isaiah 40:31, it is not referring to passive waiting. The scripture talks about waiting as a good waiter waits on you. If your water glass is low, they come to refill it. If you need something, they are there.
This is what Isaiah 40:31 is talking about. It is having your attention and your focus on God. When we dwell in God, His peace rules us. And Isaiah 26:3 becomes true. That is faith and using it as a weapon of Warfare.
The devil fights us by feeding us lies and distortions about who we are and what we have. This is why the battle is won or lost in the mind. Faith quenches all the fiery darts of the evil one. That is why it is possible to use faith as a weapon of Warfare.
Here are 17 facts to know about faith as a weapon of Warfare.
1. Have Your Imagination Stayed On God
In Isaiah 26:3, the word ‘mind’ in Hebrew is the same word translated as ‘imagination’ elsewhere. The word imagination appears 39 times in the Old Testament, and 20+ of those times, this word is translated to imagination.
This means that a large part of keeping your mind stayed upon God is keeping your imagination stayed upon God. Most adults do not think that they use their imagination. They think that, unlike children, they have grown and no longer use their imagination. But your imagination is an essential part of your mind and how it works, and you can hardly think without using your imagination.
2. Imagination Is Not Fantasy
Do not confuse imagination with fantasy. Do not think imagination is going to Disney world and beginning to dream about being a princess and living in a castle. The dictionary definition of imagination is to picture something in your mind that you can’t see with your eyes. That thing is only present in your mind.
You use your imagination when you drive. You can clearly explain to someone how to get somewhere even though you are not physically seeing the places you describe to the other person. You can’t do much without your imagination.
Before you build, you must picture what you want and communicate it to an architect, who then draws it. This is why it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. You think in pictures, whether you know it or you do not.
3. You Conceive Things In Your Imagination
Gen 11 describes the tower of Babel. Verse 5 has the word imagine. In this verse in Genesis, the Lord implies that your imagination is where you conceive things. The Hebrew word used here is also the same as the one used in Isaiah 26:3.
The word means conception. This implies that your imagination is your spiritual womb. You cannot do anything you have not imagined, just like you cannot give birth to what you have not conceived. Your imagination is how you conceive things. And if you can’t conceive it, you can’t get it.
Many Christians allow their imagination to conceive things they never want to give birth to. They do this by focusing their imagination on unbelief and doubt.
4. Negative thinking And Unbelief Kills Our Dreams
lot of people have been taught how to think negatively and how to operate in unbelief. We look at our circumstances instead of listening to God and let the circumstances dictate what we will say and think. So we conceive failure and get it.
Yet, many people think they are prudent when they walk in unbelief.
You have to control your thoughts, and you have to dwell in the presence of God. You have to keep your mind stayed on God and not allow your mind to go places and conceive things you do not want to birth.
5. As A Man Thinks In His Heart, So Is He
Proverbs 23:7 says that as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. Many people do not understand this. It is not as you think in your head but in your heart.
At the heart level, the things that you are thinking about, the things that your imagination is stayed on, are what is happening in your life.
If that is true, focusing or staying your mind upon God and not allowing yourself to imagine failure or defeat is a super important part of receiving from God.
6. You Can Have A Tainted Imagination
Your imagination can get tainted. Say you have been sick for a long time. It comes to a point where you now picture yourself sick. You see yourself sick. You think sick, and you plan to be sick. For instance, if you have allergies and have grown up with them, you expect to be sick at certain times. You live with it and adjust. When you dream, you dream sick.
When those things happening in your life have invaded your soulish realm and you dream sick, poor, and such, which is terrible. When you get to such a state, you have failed to use faith as a weapon of warfare and allowed the devil access to your life.
In such a case getting the body healed is easy. What is difficult is to get the mind healed so that they begin to see themselves well, prosperous, happy, and other positives.
But people never see it that way. They pray and ask God to give them something different than how they see themselves. But it does not happen that way. As you think in your heart, so are you.
7. Use Faith As A Weapon Of Warfare
You have to start in your heart. You must see things in your imagination to be the way God says they are. Your imagination is the ability to form a mental picture of something you do not see physically. You see it in your heart and your mind.
You cannot give a person directions somewhere without mental pictures forming in your head. You can describe your house even though you are not there because you have a mental picture of it.
Your imagination helps you picture where you are going. It is something you use every minute of every day.
For this reason, you have to take care of your imagination. Otherwise, it will go wrong. You don’t have to plant weeds if you stop caring for your lawn. They will grow. It is the same with your imagination. Having an imagination that is aligned with what God’s word says is called faith. It is using your faith as a weapon of Warfare.
8. Cultivate A Positive Imagination When You Use Faith As A Weapon Of Warfare
Another strategy for using faith as a weapon of Warfare is to develop a positive imagination. You will begin to see failure. You will see yourself sick, weak, and desperate if you do not cultivate a positive imagination. It takes effort to keep your imagination focused on the Lord and see things come to pass.
Most of us Christians have an imagination that is unattended to. We picture failure and defeat. When we receive bad news, we begin planning for the bad event. That is a negative imagination; you are conceiving things when you engage it. On the other hand, you could take the word of God and read it to the situation. You could sit somewhere and picture yourself healthy, healed, provided for, rich, etc.
If you refuse to see failure or defeat and keep your mind stayed on the word of God, he will keep you in perfect peace, and it will be impossible for you to fail. For you to fail, you have already failed in having your mind stayed upon God.
9. Negative Things Can Come At You
We live in a fallen world. You can have sicknesses come upon you that you did not see coming. Things could happen to you that you did not anticipate. But the ultimate result, whether you overcome, depends on what you see. It depends upon your imagination.
If you see yourself as only human and you think you are just like the person who does not know God, you are not thinking about the authority that God has given and are ignoring the power of your words. You are deciding not to use faith as a weapon of Warfare.
If you think like a mere human being, you have limited yourself in your imagination to only physical results, to only what the doctors could produce, to only what the natural realm can produce. That imagination limits you and stops God from moving in your life. You can limit God moving in your life by your small thinking.
10. Believe The Impossible By Using Faith As A Weapon Of Warfare
If you look at things with your natural eyes, what God has put in your heart may appear impossible. But it becomes possible if you can keep imagining yourself accomplishing God’s vision for You.
Sometimes you feel God is calling you to stretch yourself and do something great for him. You may know it is God calling you, but there is resistance on your part because you would rather not risk failure. You would instead not try to stretch yourself and do something great. You would rather play it safe.
Remember, though, life is not a dress rehearsal. Every day the sun rises and sets, you have lost another 24 hours to do what God has called you to do. You either invest your day in what God has called you or have blown it.
11. God Never Made Any Insignificant Failures
We need to go for it. God is a big God. He never created anyone to be someone insignificant. But that needs to be defined, for God did not call everyone to be what everyone else is. But God called you to be miraculous. Your life should be miraculous. In your realm of influence, you should be shining like light, making a difference, and it ought to be that when you are gone from this earth, someone misses you.
You need to live on the edge. You need to go for it. God created us for big things. Some people limit God in their imagination because they do not want criticism for taking the limits of God.
12. Speak Out Your Vision And Activate Your Faith
When you stop limiting God in your imagination, you need to begin to see yourself doing all the things He has told you. One way to activate your imagination is through speaking. Say something like in the name of Jesus, I will do these things. Tell yourself such things. By saying so, you are writing those things in your imagination.
And just like that, your life may begin to change. Doors that you have knocked on for years may begin to open. People may start looking for you.
13. You Have Already Got It When You Believe
In the spiritual realm, God has already accomplished all you need to accomplish his vision for you. But your inability to envision it as completed may have stopped it from flowing into your physical life, and you don’t see God’s supply. But when you change your words and begin to change your thinking, the dam will break, and you will have a supernatural supply in everything.
In the spiritual realm, your imagination controls lots of things. You have got to see and imagine the items you want in your life. When you change your thinking and align it to the word of God, that is keeping your mind stayed on God and dwelling in Him.
14. God Is Love: Faith Works By Love
1 John 4:16 says dwelling in love is dwelling in God. And when you do so, it just does something spiritual. It releases God’s supernatural supply. You will begin to see God move in your life. He will keep you in perfect peace when your mind and imagination stay upon him.
You would have a supernatural flow. Learn to imagine big. God can do much through you if you allow Him and let Him get all the Glory.
Have a personal relationship with the Lord, dwell in Him, and reject the negatives that come to you. You could be as negative as any other person or decide against it.
When you have a big dream, you can focus on your limitations and be as depressed as anyone else. Otherwise, you can keep your mind stayed on God, and you’ll be fine.
15. Have A Wild, Positive Imagination
Let your imagination go wild in a positive way. Choose to look at what you do have, not what you do not have.
The glass is either half full of water or half empty.
When you are at an end, believe it is not over yet. Do not spend time shuffling through the grim statistics of others who have ever been in a situation similar to yours. Instead, follow God’s word and saturate yourself with what it says.
The Lord promised believers they would do greater works than the ones he did. Many have not seen the results of Christ, let alone more wondrous works than those.
16. Dream Bigger By Using Faith As A Weapon Of Warfare
To do the works of Christ, you need to see yourself doing them. See yourself healing the sick, opening deaf ears and blind eyes, and so forth. Speak it out and study it, and you will see Jesus-like results.
Meditate on the works of the Lord. And you will begin to see such results in your life.
See yourself prosperous. Do what God tells you, and do not see yourself starving and dying when you go where God is telling you to go.
You cannot be tempted by something you don’t think. Quit thinking of failure and defeat. When God tells you to do something, do it. Don’t look back. Press on.
If you are okay and comfortable where you are, and God leads you in a specific direction, think better things are coming, and do not begin to imagine failure and defeat.
17. See It As accomplished By Using Faith As A Weapon Of Warfare
Seeing it on the inside is very important. There’s a direct link between seeing something on the inside and seeing it happen. Do not just desire the things of God. Imagine yourself receiving from God by seeing it already accomplished on the inside. This is how you use faith as a weapon of Warfare. Remember, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Heb 11)