Leon Fontaine - Living a Miraculous Life
Hey, it's so good to have you with me today. Man, I'm on a topic today that I know it's gonna help you so deeply. So many Christians have tried operating in faith, getting miracles, believing God for miracles, and the best they've ever gotten sporadic. People can often tell me of when they had a major miracle and oh, they just are excited. But almost none of them can tell why it happened then and it didn't happen in other times they were believing God. It's like the process of believing this beautiful easy God-inspired process of preparing yourself to receive miracles in every area and consistently is not something that most people understand. They will build their own doctrines around a certain story because they phoned 14 other churches around the world and have them pray and they got the miracle that time. They feel like it's the calling of churches.
So they'll phone 30 churches and get all those 30 churches prayer teams praying. But nowhere in the Word does it say the more people you have praying, the more probable of getting the miracle. It doesn't even go there. It's just another church thing that people have developed and there's a ton of doctrines out there. Someone could say, "Well, you know, I started attending church and its church attendance that got me". Well, church attendance if it's a life-giving church will definitely feed your faith but the act of attending church didn't get that miracle. And there's just so many things I could cover.
So today, I wanna show you in the Word and help you to begin to establish your heart and get going in this miraculous process allowing Holy Spirit to work with you. All right, in 1 John 3:19 and on. This is what it says, it's a fascinating verse. It says, "This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in His presence. If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from Him anything we ask". What? "Because we keep His commands and do what pleases Him. And this is His command". Right away you say, "Oh, the Ten Commandments"! No, no. That's the old covenant. "And this is His command: to believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as He commanded us".
Now, this goes on and on. This command is in the New Testament and it's different than the legalism and the laws of the Old Testament. It's showing us that as you focus on Jesus and learn about what He did at the cross. How that He bore your sins. He died in your place. He took the curse of the law that was yours. And now He's exchanged His righteousness, His grace, for your sin, your curse, your failure, your weakness. He has exchanged. You get His strength, His love, His joy, His peace. So when we look to Jesus, we begin to establish our hearts. Now, this is interesting because it very clearly says. Now, I always thought it went like this. If your heart doesn't condemn you, you have confidence before God. You receive anything you ask. If your heart does condemn you, then you can't receive anything. But that's not what it says. It says if our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts. And He knows everything.
So, it's simply saying, if your hearts condemning you right now and you live in condemnation and guilt, fear. God's greater than all that. He's just saying incredible change can come your way if you'll do what I'm talking about. You can have great change right now. If you've got a heart, an emotional lifestyle of just fear and, you know, and guilt and condemnation. All you can ever think about is you never measure up and you never add up. Your heart is condemning you. When you have condemnation and guilt and fear, and all these years of junk piled up in there. You can't have confidence towards God. So we need to recognize the power of the miracle is in our heart being confident and our heart being established. So that it is at peace, if your heart doesn't condemn you.
Now, what does it mean to condemn? Well, I like using in place on words to help people remember. It's like can damn. You know, it's like damning yourself to punishment, damning yourself to bad situation just like expecting negative things and knowing you deserve it. You were bad, horrible things are coming into your life. Can damnation, condemning. Can damnation I call, and it is destructive. So when you focus on Jesus that is when you begin to realize that you are a new creation. And that this new creation has been forgiven for every sin in your past, your present, and your future. And that now you have His righteousness. You are righteous with God because of Jesus, and His grace, His favor, is on your life. So we need to recognize this and it says we need, this is how we know.
I'm gonna go back to the first part of verse 19. This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest. You've gotta set your heart at rest in His presence. So that when you come into God's presence, you know, if you've wronged somebody. Maybe you stolen from them. Maybe you've done something to them. You wrote a blog about them and you walked into their presence. All of sudden, you sit down at the table and you realized they're at the same table that friends have invited together. And there they are! Your heart is not gonna be at rest in a presence of a friend that you have wronged, lied about, stolen from, hurt. Now you're in their presence and I'm telling you, your heart will be just motoring up, condemning. You're gonna feel guilty. You might get angry and leave. You might put on a big show and act proud and arrogant, but you can't be at rest.
So when you feel that you've wronged God, and we all feel that way. You've gotta recognized that our hearts must be at rest in His presence. The only way to do that is to receive His forgiveness and to become born again. Then to begin to recognize that your right standing with God. Which is what righteousness means, is that your right standing with God is because of Jesus. He gifts righteousness to you. And so this righteousness is a faith righteousness as oppose to a works righteousness. So I need God to do a miracle in my life and so I must believe I'm righteous. Or I have to go clean up my life to a good enough place to get a miracle. But there is no good enough place. Satan will always harass me with things I think about even if I'm not doing anything wrong. And if I haven't done anything wrong, He will condemn me because I didn't do enough things right.
You know, the Bible talks about him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin. And, you know, if you're thinking in your heart, you've done it already. There's so many ways for the enemy to condemn you and make you feel you don't measure up. So you have to abandon works righteousness. Don't try to believe you deserve a miracle, a healing, or a blessing from God because you have been so good. Because you simply step right back in to the old covenant and you'll never do it. You must believe that you are righteous, even though your life isn't perfect you believe. This is called a faith righteousness. This is a righteousness that has been gifted to you but is of no value to you until you believe in it.
A ton of Christianity believes that they are saved, born again and that they're going to heaven when they die. But there's nothing that they've learned to believe God for the miraculous down here. Healing, prosperity, and career and finances and family and relationships. And so because they live in a guilt and in a condemnation, the enemy knows how to continually attack them. He attacks them with, you haven't done enough. Or he attacks them with, this is what you did back here, and you hurt people, and you can't expect God and so he just attacks in all these different ways. Faith believes that you are righteous. In fact, I'm gonna encourage you to declare that. Read Romans 5:17-20 and just confess every day. I am righteous because Jesus gifted it to me. I am the righteousness of God in Christ. He's given me the gift of righteousness and I believe it. I'm righteous in Jesus' name. He also says that He gives us grace which is God's favor.
So if any area that you want a miracle, receive it as a favor. Faith doesn't believe for the specific miracle. Faith believes that the grace which is His favor gives it to me. Healing, prosperity, blessing, joy, peace, everything you can find a promise for in the Bible. You get it as a favor. That's right! Jesus qualifies you for it. He gives you the gift of righteousness, so you could receive it. You know, in the Old Testament, I've taught of this here before on the program. That anywhere where God's presence would go, people had to be righteous. And they had to become, you know, covered by the blood of bulls and goats, do all these things right. Then, it was reckoned onto them as being righteous. Then wherever there's righteousness, God's presence would go, and they would always win. They'd always prosper. No enemy could ever upset them or take. That even Moses said, "Don't send me anywhere unless Your presence is with me and goes before me".
And when you look at this, you begin to realize that His presence is crucial. When we got born again and you became a new creation. You became a new creation with a righteousness that's not from your behavior but from Jesus gifting it to you. And you have God's favor on your life, not because you're so good but because it's a gift to you. And what's interesting is people who begin to realize this, they literally begin to live their lives with more victory, with more morality, with more joy and peace, than the people that have sin preached at them every day because sin being preached at you or the law, "Clean it up. Get it together". That seems to exasperate sin. You know, whenever we used to fight fires when I was a paramedic. We have a little of a teaching on fires. You never would throw water on a grease fire, because the water doesn't put out a grease fire. You'd throw water on that grease that's on fire and it would literally just exploded everywhere.
And when you preach against sin to a believer, you literally, it's like throwing water on a grease fire. It just spreads and gets worse and bigger because they get more condemn. They have to feel more damnation. They feel more like a loser. The enemy has a heyday with them. They eventually just go, "Oh, I may as well. I can't stop but I've tried". And they don't understand righteousness. They don't understand God's grace. That righteousness is a faith righteousness. You have to believe it, speak it every day, and believe that God's grace is on your life. What is this grace? His favor. If I say to you I'm gonna do a favor. It doesn't mean that it's something you have to earn or pay back. It's completely a favor to you.
Now, this is really important that we understand the power of the heart. And that when your heart is at peace. That is when you are going -, The Bible says that whatever you believe you get. I think it's a powerful scripture. Again, 1 John chapter 3, it said, "Dear friends, if our hearts don't condemn us, we have confidence before God and we receive from Him anything". How can we miss this? How can we just make faith be this kind of a feeling or an emotion? Faith is not a feeling or emotion. Believing is a process that brings us to faith. Which means we are convinced, completely convinced its mine. And believing is simply taking the Word of God and speaking it. Taking the Word of God and seeing your miracle done, finished.
What would you act like? What would your life look like when this miracle is done and see it ahead of time? See the prosperity. See the healing. See what it would do to your marriage, your home, your, you playing sports. Whatever it is you've gotta see the end from the beginning. That's the language of the heart, and here is where very few people do that. And so make sure that as you begin to get God's truth into your world. That your heart is at peace because of Jesus. That you can go, because you're forgiven. Your sins are washed away as far as the east is from the west. And that old person is dead, and any favor you need is there. God's in love with you. He's smiling at you.
You need to get a picture of Jesus on your wall, of Him smiling at you. You wake up every day and just declare, "Jesus loves me. He cares about me. He's on the inside of me. My life can be wonderful. It can be good". Now, let's continue with a little bit of time left and let's go to Proverbs 4:20-23. Which is a portion of scripture that again shows us this powerful, beautiful way of establishing our hearts in peace. Where your hearts at rest. Where your heart does not condemn you. And therefore, you can have anything you believe God for. Here's what it says, "My son, attend to my words, incline thine ear unto my sayings. Let them not depart from your eyes, keep them in the middle of your heart. For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh. Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life".
All right, the verse I just read you in 1 John says it, if your heart is at peace with God, then you have confidence. You can have anything you want. Here, it's telling us how to get our heart at peace. Now, let's go through it quickly and easily. It's beautiful. It's so simple but it's powerful and profound. My son, attend to my words. Now, when you attend to the garden in the back of your house, you don't just walk by and look at it. You were there pulling the weeds out, watering it. Making sure that garden's being looked after. We need to attend to God's Word this way. You should have the Bible somewhere. Whether it's on your iPad or in a book. Wherever you like to read, wherever you sit down, have something that you can read. That it reveals God's Word to you and attend to those words every day. I spend time every day just in His Word, listening to great preachers, reading good teachers, into God's Word. So that I am attending to His Word.
Now, here's how to attend to it. It says, don't let it depart from your eyes. So reading God's Word. Even if you, "I don't understand it anyway". Get into a practice of reading one promise and maybe go back get those promise book and open it up and read one promise every day over and over. Speak it out loud. But you need to be reading it with your eyes. Then it says, keep them, oh, incline your ear unto my sayings. I should have put first. So as you confess God's Word, you're hearing it. You speaking the promises of God. You're hearing it. Your spirit's hearing it. The angels are hearing it. Your heart's hearing it. And you're planting God's promises in your heart. Then it says, "Don't let them depart from your eyes. Keep them in the midst of your heart". How do you keep God's Word in the midst of your heart? It's your focus, your attention, your awareness. If every day you become unaware of God and you don't think about Him until Sunday church time, then you're not on the right track.
You need to spend time just mining the Word of God, marinating in God's Word. Grab 10 or 15 minutes. Start with 5. When you wake up in the morning, go somewhere. Speak His promises. Begin to thank Him. I am righteous because Jesus gifted me His righteousness. I have God's favor, His grace is on my life because of Jesus. And as you begin to speak this way every day, you begin to hear it with your ears. You begin to see the Word with your eyes. And this constant awareness keeps it in the midst of your heart. Now, the language of the heart is not words. It's pictures. And so how you see yourself is in your heart. And the heart is kind of the seat of your identity. If you see yourself as a loser. If you see yourself as a sick person. If you see yourself as an unhappy married. If you see yourself as a defeated single. If you see yourself as poor. If you see yourself as friendless. You see that inside. That's the picture. That's who you see yourself as.
So as you speak God's Word, you begin to see yourself as healed, as prosperous, as happy, as great friendships, and people love you, care about you. As you begin to do this, your heart begins to change how you see yourself, how you see God, how you see Jesus, how you see the devil. As he's got no power to stop you. As you see God, He's in love with you and smiling at you. How do you see Jesus? Everything He did was to be a substitute. So you can have an amazing life, a wonderful life. A life filled with His favor and His joy on your marriage, your kids, your family. And when you begin to let your heart be aware of the problems and you begin to look at the problems, talk the problems, marinating the problems, then you're sitting up late at night and you're just thinking of how unhappy you are at your job, how unhappy you are with your life, with God, your church, your wife, yourself. You begin to focus on the problems and the exterior. You will be defeated there. That is not the arena where you win.
It says in Romans 8 that to be carnally minded is death. When you're out here, looking at all the behaviors and all the results in the external world. You're gonna be defeated. Because where you control and where you attract the blessing and where you are able is in the heart. Keep your heart with all diligence. Be very, attend to God's Word. Get it in your heart. Because your heart releases the issues of life, the forces of life. A force of poverty, a force of prosperity, a force of love for God, and those around you. And a force of anger and unforgiveness and dissatisfied. Mad at your spouse, mad at God, mad at your life, your parents, what you can and can't do. Keep your heart with all diligence for out of it is growing your life. Any boundary you can't get past, is a boundary that's in the heart. Which is why you can't get past it out in the physical world. Change it in your internal world. See yourself with the miracle you desire as done.
Jesus said, what's of this you desire when you pray, in Mark 11, believe you have already received it. So then, as you see with the eyes of faith in your prayer time, see the answer, see how it affects you, see how you feel laughing, excited. See that, feel that, hear that, as you meditate. And then you will find your heart gets establish in the truth and your life begins to change on every front. Father, I pray blessing and revelation upon each person listening. Holy Spirit teach them, guide them into the freedom of believing and their heart being established in grace. I pray this in Jesus' name, amen. God bless you. Tell your friends about this show. Let them know, you gotta get involve and gonna be hearing. It's gonna help you get the miracles every day in your life. We love you. We pray that you'll continue to watch and become a partner with us. Give towards this ministry, so together we can touch this world, the whole planet.