Zechariah 9:11-12(The Message)
“11 And you, because of my blood covenant with you, I’ll release your prisoners from their hopeless cells. 12 Come home, hope-filled prisoners! This very day I’m declaring a double bonus—everything you lost returned twice-over!”
This passage in Zechariah 9:11-12 teaches us that if we become prisoners of the hope that is in Christ, God will restore everything we’ve lost, and will give us a double portion. This is the promise of God’s uncommon favor. He shows us that He isn’t holding back His grace but demonstrates in His Word that He is a God of the exceedingly abundantly. He does more than what we can ask or think, and the condition of His favor is that we have faith in Him. He says of His people in Hebrews 10:38(NLT) “And my righteous ones will live by faith. But I will take no pleasure in anyone who turns away.” Through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, God has given us a victory that is uncompromising. Nothing in the world can stand up against it. When we believe in God’s love for us with all our hearts, we connect with the flow of His grace, favor, and power.
Hebrews 10:38 states that God has no pleasure in any person that turns away from having faith in Him. In Hebrews 11:6, He tells us that it is impossible to please Him without faith. We have no other choice but to include that faith is necessary to have the kind of relationship with God that He desires. You and I can't in any way set the ground rules for what He desires. He is perfect in all His ways. He always knows best, and there isn’t any detail of His plan for the entire universe that will not come to pass exactly as He wishes. He tells us that faith is what makes us righteous before Him. Faith is what pleases Him, and we must be eternally grateful for the privilege and responsibility to honor Him by trusting and believing His Word.
Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is the title deed to what you’ve prayed to receive before these desires actually show up in your circumstances. Faith is knowing God will provide even when your current condition and circumstances say something else. All of us should make it our business to have a mind and heart of faith continually, and Romans 10:17 tells us that the way to do this is to stay in God's Word, because faith comes from rightly believing what God says.
Believing something in our hearts and minds means that we trust it to the point of being fully persuaded that it is true. Jesus Christ taught us in Mark 11:23-24(NLT), “23 I tell you the truth, you can say to this mountain, ‘May you be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ and it will happen. But you must really believe it will happen and have no doubt in your heart. 24 I tell you, you can pray for anything, and if you believe that you’ve received it, it will be yours.” As God’s children, He expects that we will really believe what He says. We must believe that if God says something is going to come to pass, it’s going to do just that; it will happen! When we believe what God says and do not doubt it, we are operating in faith.
He has made us many promises in His Word, and He expects us to know what some of those promises are. Once we know His promises, we can then apply our faith and believing in what He has promised.
Jesus said that we can speak to a mountain and tell it to move, and it will move because of the authority and faith of our confession. By His own example in His Word, God teaches us about this creative ability that He’s given us. Genesis 1:3(NLT) declares, “Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” He spoke things into being. We are made in His very image and He’s given us this same creative ability. He tells us in Proverbs 18:21(KJV), “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Words are the outward expression of our thoughts. They come from our hearts and flow from our lips, and they can be deadly. They can also bring love, light, and life. This choice as to what we will speak into manifestation, life or death, is ever before us.
We’ve all been through tough times in life. It stings to work hard only to take one step forward and two steps backward, but we are not hopeless or helpless. The tools of our victory are ours to command. We must begin to examine what we’re speaking over our own lives. I learned many years ago to speak God’s promises over my life. To speak His promises out loud with conviction and believing is to ‘speak life’ over your own existence. It’s to say what God says about you. It’s believing and trusting His promises to come to pass in your life, and speaking, thinking, and feeling nothing to contradict His truth. It means that we don’t allow everyone else’s standard to be the standard for what we believe. We simply flat out trust what the Father tells us. He’s the Source of our blessings and He is unfathomably faithful to His Word.
Positive confessions are those that line up with God’s Word. For instance, Psalm 5:12(NLT) says, “For you bless the godly, O LORD; you surround them with your shield of love.” This is God’s promise. He will surround the Godly with His shield of love, and this is what we should confess continuously. As believers, we are surrounded by God’s favor, grace, and blessings. It goes ahead of us and it comes behind us, and we are never without His covering through our faith.
We need to open our mouths and declare God’s favor over our lives and focus on His goodness and love. Our faith in His willingness and ability to bless us pleases Him, but it is very important that we take the time to get to know who God is. I’ve witnessed many people miss what God has for them because they refuse to submit to His guidance and to study His Word. This causes them to believe the wrong things about God’s nature and love. They think He is punishing them when in truth they are punishing themselves by not knowing more about Him.
Jesus Christ said in John 10:10 that the devil is in the earth to steal, kill, and destroy, but Jesus Christ came to the earth to make a more than abundant life available to us. We must wake up and recognize that our failure to speak life over our existences, to make positive affirmations of God’s promises and do it every day, allows the devil to steal from us. Whatever we focus on we connect with, so let’s connect with God’s power and love by doing, thinking, feeling, and speaking His truth. It will lift us up continually and bring God’s restoration and abundance into our lives. ■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“Everything You Lost Returned”, written by Kim for https://rescuefromdomesticviolence.blogspot.com© 2022. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.
