Several years ago I was staying at a friend’s house in Michigan. Early in the morning the telephone began to ring, but no one was getting up to answer it. I waited and waited for someone to get up and answer the phone, until I had counted 34 telephone rings. Finally I thought to myself, “I’ll get up and answer the phone if no one else will.”
I put my clothes on in the darkness of the early morning, walked downstairs and around to the kitchen. I picked up the receiver and said, “Hello,” but the telephone just kept on ringing and ringing and ringing.
Baffled and curious, I looked to my right side and saw a huge birdcage that was covered with a tablecloth. When I peeked under that cloth, I realized it was the parrot making those noises!
He was ringing, ringing, ringing, and ringing, and he sounded just like a real telephone! Yet, just because that bird could make sounds like a telephone, it did not mean that he was a telephone!
Our Profession Of Faith
There are many believers like this parrot, repeating and repeating what the Word of God or somebody else says, but with no depth of faith or understanding behind their words.
They say the right things and do the right things, but everything they say and do is done in a mechanical way. This is not the “profession” that the Holy Spirit is referring to in Hebrews 10:23.
A mechanical profession doesn’t come from the heart, and therefore, it doesn’t bring forth any fruit. You see, real faith, real confession, and real profession must come from your heart before it comes out of your mouth.
It must be a heart/mouth combination in order for it to produce a harvest of blessings in your life. Confession is real—we have already seen what Jesus said about confession—but in order for it to work in your life, it must be a heart/mouth combination.
I remember back in the early days when we first began to move in the power of God and we were just learning how to walk in faith. I went to a meeting where people gave tremendous testimonies of how they were healed. One brother said that after he had thrown his contacts away he could see perfectly.
With almost no thought—and no faith—I said to myself, “Well, I’m going to do what he did.” At that moment I removed my glasses, threw them down on the ground, and stomped them into a thousand pieces.
I walked out of the meeting stumbling, my eyesight unchanged, and as I drove home I suddenly realized that I was a lethal weapon on the road!
I was not really moving in faith; I was merely copying what somebody else had done. I believe this is one of the reasons why so many Christians have been “burned” when they attempted to move in the power of confession.
The problem, however, isn’t really the power of faith or the validity of faith-filled confessions. The problem is them. Because their confession isn’t from their heart, and they haven’t really embraced the truth of what they’re saying, their confession is only mechanical—not much different than a parrot who repeats what it has heard someone else say.
The way to avoid mechanical, parrot-like, mindless confessions is to first make certain that you have chosen to believe what God says, that you have committed your mind and heart and all your strength to believing the Word of God—no matter how crazy it may sound to your natural mind—and then meditate on it.
Ask the Holy Spirit to make God’s Word so real to you that if anyone would even imply that what He said was not true, you would think them to be absolutely out of their mind! His Word to you must become more real and more rock solid than the natural things around you.
There are times when you can read a verse of scripture or receive a word from the Lord, and you instantly have a powerful revelation of what He is saying.
However, most of the time, because the natural mind cannot fathom the things of the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:14), you are going to have to pick up your Bible and do some prayerful and serious study and meditation before you can really understand and confess from your heart what God is saying.
Excerpt permission granted by Albury Publishing
Rick and Denise met while they were each on an individual quest to wholeheartedly follow God's plan for their lives. Rick was a college student, growing in his teaching ministry. Denise was a talented vocalist. She chose not to pursue a course that held the prospect of performing with the Metropolitan Opera so that she could instead pursue a relationship with Rick and fulfill her heart's desire to enter full-time ministry.
Rick and Denise's friendship has led to lifelong love and a powerful partnership in building the Kingdom of God. After a decade of ministry, first as pastor and then as itinerant ministers, Rick and Denise Renner embarked on an adventure of a lifetime. In January 1991, the Renners and their sons Paul, Philip, and Joel left behind all they knew to relocate their family to serve the region that only weeks earlier had become the former Soviet Union.
Rick and Denise remember kneeling together as a family and kissing the ground when they arrived at the airport in Latvia on that cold January day. At that moment, they all committed their lives to the will of God and to the people of their new homeland. The following year, Rick moved forward to launch and establish the first of its kind, and eventually the largest, a Christian television network in that region of the world.
Over the years, Rick and Denise pioneered three churches, a Bible school, and a ministerial association that serves thousands of Russian-speaking pastors throughout the former USSR as well as parts of the Middle East. As Rick began training and mentoring leaders in the early days, Denise also developed a women's ministry that is actively involved in changing the lives of women and their families today. Specifically, they minister to the needs of orphans, women prisoners, the homeless, and drug-and-alcohol addicts.
Rick, Denise, and their children began as a small circle of five, willing to go beyond their comfort zone to reach the uttermost parts of the world. Today that circle includes their sons' wives, six grandchildren, and a large ministry staff that helps the Renners extend their reach as they exalt Jesus Christ as the Hope of all nations.