When I was 18 years old, I packed up my bags and moved cross country to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend Bible school. I had spent two years saving up all the money I could, while working two jobs, just to make sure I would have enough money to pay for my bills and tuition for my first year out there. As the year went on, I was doing really well with paying my bills and paying for my tuition. I had a great job as a manager at Wal-Mart, and I made pretty good money for an 18 year old kid. Then the transmission went in my car, and I had a large expense that I was not prepared for. My cushion that I had was gone. Being able to pay for tuition for the entire year was gone. 

That semester in school I was in a class called Foundations of Faith. Faith for finances was a fairly new concept to me having grown up in the Catholic, but this was something that we were covering in this class: believing that God would provide for your needs. So I took the principles that I had learned in class, and I put them to work. I began to believe God for the money that I needed to pay off my tuition balance. However, I did not see immediate results. So I continued to believe that God would provide for me. I thanked Him for taking care of my balance, and I left it at that. 

As the next semester approached, and the tuition payment deadline loomed over my head, I began to panic. What am I going to do? How am I going to pay this? I don’t want to drop out, but if I can’t pay, that is what I am going to have to do. So as the deadline came, I went to the payment window to see if I could work out some sort of payment arrangement. To my surprise, when I gave them my name, they told me that my account was paid in full! I was overwhelmed with emotion. I knew that my Faith moved God. By putting my faith into action, I was able to release the power of God, and my account was paid in full. The awesome part was I never told a single person of my financial stress, not even my parents. The money came in through an anonymous donation the day before my deadline. 

When you believe in God for a miracle, and have faith that He will provide, you allow Him to move on your behalf. For some of you, the subject of Faith will be a new concept; it was a new concept to me many years ago, but when I truly got a hold of this, and I started to live a life of faith, I was transformed. We all will stumble upon problems in this life: financial, emotional, situational... We all could benefit from the power of faith to believe for and receive solutions to these problems. It is simply a matter of allowing faith to work for you. But before you are able to turn your faith loose and move God on your behalf, you must understand what faith is. Faith is the currency of God. It is what He uses to work on our behalf, so in this book we are going to learn what faith is, we will learn how faith comes, we will lean what the obstacles are to our faith, and we will learn how to turn our faith loose. 

 Jesus tells us in the book of Mark to “Have Faith in God”, and when we put our faith in God, and not ourselves then we can truly expect results. So what exactly is faith? Well in short to answer that question, you must understand that there are three different types of faith. The First type of faith is the Gift of Faith. 

 In 1 Corinthians 12: 7-11 we see this gift mentioned. It reads:

 7 Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. 8 To one there is given through the Spirit a message of wisdom, to another a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, 10 to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. 11 All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he distributes them to each one, just as he determines. 

 When Paul is talking about the gift of faith here, he is referring to the God given ability to believe for things that are not promised in the word of God. A great example of this is God giving someone the gift of faith to raise someone from the dead. There was a minister in the late 1800’s early 1900’s who operated in the Gift of Faith. His name was Smith Wigglesworth. Smith Wigglesworth was asked by a friend of his to conduct the funeral services for his brother. Smith went to the home where the wake was being held, and the Holy Spirit told him to raise the man from the dead. Knowing that this was the Holy Spirit speaking to him, Smith went to the casket, lifted the body up and put it up against the wall. He shouted to the body, "Wake up," and he let go. The body slid down the wall. He picked the body up again and shouted "Wake up.” Again, the body slid down the wall. Finally, for a third time, he picked the body up and shouted "In the name of Jesus I command you to wake up," and he did, and the two of them walked out of that room to the astonishment of everyone there. Now I want to say that not everyone can walk into a funeral home and start shouting at bodies to come back to life. But there may be people who operate in the gift of faith and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit who are called upon to perform this type of miracle, or one of many other types of miracle. 

 A second and perhaps more immediately relevant type of faith is what is called personal faith. My favorite scripture to illustrate what personal faith is can be found in the book of Mark. It’s Mark chapter 5, and it reads: 

 24 So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. 25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26 She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. 30 At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” 31 "You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ” 32 But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (NIV) 

There is so much that we can learn from this little bit of scripture. First of all, it was the woman’s personal faith that caused her to take action. Imagine being sick for twelve years and the medical bills adding up to so much that you lose everything that you own trying to get better, but at the end of the day you are still just as sick as you were. She was desperate; she needed a miracle. Remember, this is way before antibiotics, and with as much as she was bleeding, I would imagine that she was prone to infections. I am sure she was sick all the time on top of her bleeding issue. But then she heard of a man named Jesus, and the miracles that he performed, and she knew that she had to go see Him, that He would be able to finally cure her. Twelve long years she waited, and now finally she would be healed! However there was one major problem. You see in Jewish law a woman who is on her menstrual cycle is considered unclean, so people would avoid her for a week until she was considered clean again. Now here is this woman who has been on her cycle for twelve years, and it almost killed her. Not only is she very sick, but she is unclean and by law cannot go out in public. So what was she to do? She finally decided that she was going to defy Jewish law and go out and meet Jesus. She opens her front door to find a huge crowd moving down the street. There could have been thousands of them packed around Jesus, all wanting to meet Him and get their miracle. So she decided to step out of her house. She begins pushing her way through the crowd. I am sure that in her weak state it was a struggle for her to make her way through the crowd, but I know she was determined. She was going to meet Jesus, and he was going to heal her. As she moved closer, more and more people started to gather, making it more difficult, but she had to get to him. This was the answer to her twelve long years of suffering. Jesus had to heal her. Pushing her way through the crowd, she may have stumbled a time or two. People were probably staring at her knowing that she was not supposed to be there. All the while Jesus was getting further and further away from her. She was starting to get discouraged, but then her faith raised up in her. She said, “all I have to do is touch his clothes, even just a thread on his clothes and I will be healed.” Knowing now more than ever she started to push her way through, closer and closer until finally she stretched out and fell down to the ground as her hand touched His robe. In that instant, her faith released the miracle that she had been waiting for. Jesus immediately felt power leave his body and knew that a miracle just happened. Jesus turned to her and informed her that it was because of her faith that she was healed. It was her faith hooking up with the supernatural power of heaven that caused that power to flow that day bringing her the healing that she had not been able to obtain any other way. It is when you turn your personal faith loose that you begin to speak the language of Heaven, when you are believing for healing, when you are believing for finances, when you are at wits end and you have nothing else. You have your faith, and instead of looking at your circumstances, you do as the woman with the issue of blood did, you seek out heaven and release your faith so that heaven can respond and begin pouring out the blessings. It is our faith that makes this all possible, and without our faith, we are lost. When we put our faith behind our prayers that is when we get results. 

In 2014 my family and I were getting ready to head out the door for our Wednesday night small group. We were running just a tad late, and it was raining outside. I had just gotten home from work, and I wanted to grab a sandwich from Burger King before we went to church, so I told my wife that we should drive separately. So I got in my car, and she loaded the kids in the van. We were driving down the road when I felt the front end of my car dip down and make the most horrendous noise you could imagine. I hit a pot hole that was four feet wide and at least two feet deep. As I turned on to on to another road, I started to feel that ever recognizable feeling. I had a flat tire. I called my wife to let her know just to go to church and teach for the night, while I took care of the flat. When she picked up, I told her that she never would guess what happened to me, and she said what? I told her that the new, 3 day old tire that I just got on Sunday is now flat. She started to laugh, and I asked her what was so funny. She said, “I have you beat. I have two flat tires!” Lovely, so we took care of things and still made it to church thanks to the awesome people in our small group. However, the story doesn’t end there. My tire had a special insurance on it so it was replaced for free, my wife’s did not. Not only did she blow out the tires, but she broke both of the wheels. As you can imagine the dollar signs started to add up in my head. 

The following weekend I was started a load of laundry. As it progressed through the spin cycles, I hear what sounded like an airplane taking flight. Well it was our washing machine. The drum broke loose and hit the side of the machine so hard that it almost broke the side. Needless to say, we needed a new washing machine. Again the dollar signs start adding up. After I resolved that we would need to not only replace the tires on the van and get a new washing machine, another crazy thing happened to us. Let me interject this statement here, this story is 100% true. Everything that I am telling you is accurate and not exaggerated in any way. I just want to let you know that is not a tall tale. The day after the washer incident, I was cooking lunch for everyone. I walked over to the sink to wash my hands and turned back to the stove to see that the top of the stove was on fire. Not only was the top of the stove on fire but the front of the stove was on fire. Thank God I keep a fire extinguisher in the kitchen, because of it, I was able to put it out before it spread, but again the stove was destroyed. I don’t believe that this happened to us to teach us a lesson. I don’t believe that we were being tested, but what I do believe is that if my wife and I did not know how to trust God and speak in faith that we would have gone crazy by now. Because you see that we as Christians have a language that we can speak that is the language of heaven. That language is Faith. When we speak it, our Faith moves God.