Believing for God’s Very Best

Hosea 4:6 (KJV)

⁶ My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

1 – The chief reason we aren’t receiving God’s very best is because we are willing to settle for far less.

• We have been influenced more by the world than by God’s Word and “dumbed down” to accept far less than what God has provided. As long as you can live with less than God’s best, you will.
• You have to get sick and tired of being sick and tired before you will aggressively pursue God’s best. You have to have a holy dissatisfaction with mediocrity before you can experience all that God has for you. It doesn’t happen accidentally or automatically. If you don’t pursue it, you won’t get it.
• Everything in our fallen world naturally goes from good to bad. Things don’t get better without effort. We have to seek to find, knock to get the door opened, and ask before we receive (Matt. 7:7). We must raise our sights and aim higher. Most people are shooting at nothing and hitting it every time. (Andrew Womack)

2- Ask, and It Will Be Given

Matthew 7:7 (ESV)

⁷ “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

3- The key is, we have to seek with ALL our hearts.

That’s the missing element. We have to reach a point where we won’t live with anything less than God’s best.

4. Why don’t we receive when we ask?

James 4:3Amplified Bible (AMP)

³ You ask [God for something] and do not receive it, because you ask ^[a]with wrong motives [out of selfishness or with an unrighteous agenda], so that [when you get what you want] you may spend it on your [hedonistic] desires.

5- God has far more for all of us than we are experiencing.

Jeremiah 29:11-13Amplified Bible (AMP)

11 For I know the plans and thoughts that I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for peace and well-being and not for disaster to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call on Me and you will come and pray to Me, and I will hear [your voice] and I will listen to you. 13 Then [with a deep longing] you will seek Me and require Me [as a vital necessity] and [you will] find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.

Nobody learns how to receive God’s best overnight. It’s a process, but we need to begin moving in that direction. I haven’t arrived there either, but I have left and am on my way.

Andrew Wommack said: A man came forward for prayer in one of my meetings. He told me he had a terrible pain in his neck and couldn’t sleep as a result. He continued, “I’ve got a back problem, my sciatic nerve causes pain down my entire leg and into my foot, I also have neuropathy…” and on and on he continued.

Then he said, “But if God could just heal the pain in my neck, I could live with the rest.” I looked at him and said, “Well, I understand. If we asked God to heal all of those things at once, the lights in heaven might dim. I’m not sure God could pull that off.”

The guy just looked at me for a minute, and then he replied, “That was pretty stupid, wasn’t it?” I agreed and then went on to tell him that he didn’t have to settle for less than complete healing—God’s best. “It’s that attitude that is keeping you from receiving your healing,”

6- Christians ought to be walking in supernatural healing. They ought to be walking in financial prosperity.

Most, however, are just as sick and broke as their unsaved neighbors. You will never receive God’s best until you become completely dissatisfied with second best—mediocrity.

One of these days, we are all going to stand before God. And when we do, we will know all things even as we are known (1 Cor. 13:12). In an instant, we are going to know what we could have had while on this earth. We will understand that the same power that raised Christ from the dead was resident within us all along (Eph. 1:18-20).

We will discover that we didn’t have to be sick, that we didn’t have to live broke, and that we didn’t have to be depressed and discouraged. We will realize that love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance were living inside us the whole time (Gal. 5:22-23).

We don’t have to limp into heaven, crying, “Praise God, we made it.” We can live a life of victory now. Jesus died to deliver us from this present evil world (Gal. 1:4), not just the one to come.

Moses lived under an inferior covenant compared to ours (2 Cor. 3:7-11). Jesus said John the Baptist was greater than Moses, yet the least New Testament saint is greater than John (Matt. 11:11). Therefore, if Moses was still strong at 120 with good eyesight (Deut. 34:7), why would we settle for less?

Unless you’re willing to stand and fight the fight of faith, you will be overcome by this world. If you don’t stir yourself up, you will settle to the bottom. The world isn’t going to encourage you toward God’s best, and most Christians aren’t either.

Sadly, religion is one of the strongest weapons Satan has to discourage people from believing for something more. Many churches believe that God doesn’t perform miracles today or, worse, that God is the one who wills for our lives to be in such a mess to break us. He sovereignly controls everything. That is not true.

We also have to recognize that it’s all about receiving what God has already done and not about getting God to do something He has yet to do. We don’t need God to heal us; by His stripes, we were healed (1 Pet. 2:24). That miraculous healing power is already IN us. We don’t need God to move; we need to believe what He has already done and learn how to receive.

Let me encourage you to begin receiving God’s best.