The Authority of the Believer, Part 7
Here is where the series has been heading the whole time, and I want to write it carefully, because a lot of you have been waiting for this post whether you knew it or not.
You did everything right.
You learned the truth about the authority of the believer. You understood what Jesus won at Calvary. You stood in your place as a son or daughter in the heavenly places. You prayed. You commanded. You laid hands on the sick. You spoke the specific rhema that met the situation. You bound the enemy in the name. You stood on the promises. You did all of it the way the New Testament teaches.
And nothing happened.
The cancer took her anyway. The marriage did not come back. The prodigal never came home. The business failed. The body did not heal. The prayer went up, night after night, and the heavens were quiet, and the morning came, and nothing had changed.
If you have not lived through this yet, you will. If you have, you know what I am talking about.
So the honest question hanging over the whole series is this. If the authority of the believer is real, if all that we said for six posts is true, what do we do with the times when we did everything the Bible taught and the answer was still no?
This is the post for that.
The Saints Who Did Not Receive
Start with Hebrews 11, because the Holy Spirit did not write a bloodless Hall of Faith.
The chapter celebrates Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Joshua, Rahab and Gideon and David, people who by faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword. That list is glorious, and if the chapter stopped there, we could pretend faith always looks like victory.
But it does not stop there. Read what comes next.
“Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. Still others had trial of mockings and scourgings, yes, and of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth. And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.” — Hebrews 11:35-40 (NKJV)
Did not receive the promise.
Read that sentence twice. These are not failures of faith. These are people the Holy Spirit lists as having “obtained a good testimony through faith.” And what they got, in this life, was torture, chains, exile, caves. They died still believing. They did not get what they were promised in the way they were hoping for it.
Hebrews 11 refuses to let us read the previous chapter of the same book as a prosperity contract. Faith that tore down walls in Joshua’s day and faith that walked into a lion’s den under Darius is the same Spirit-given faith that sat in a Roman prison and sang. Faith is not measured by whether the deliverance came when we asked. Faith is measured by whether we kept trusting when it did not.
Paul’s Thorn
Paul did everything right.
If anyone has ever had the standing to command sickness out of his own body by delegated authority, it was the man who cast out demons with a word and raised Eutychus from the dead. Paul was not a weak believer. He was not an untaught one. He was one of the most apostolically equipped humans who has ever lived.
And he could not get rid of his own thorn.
“And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I be exalted above measure. Concerning this thing I pleaded with the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” — 2 Corinthians 12:7-9 (NKJV)
Three times he asked. The word for asked there is parakaleo (G3870), which means to call to oneself, to beseech, to implore. Paul pressed in. He did not casually mention it. He begged the Lord.
The answer was no.
Not no as in “you do not have enough faith, Paul.” Not no as in “you clearly have hidden sin, Paul.” Not no as in “you need to claim your healing more aggressively, Paul.” The answer was my grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.
The Father had a purpose in the thorn that was more important than the thorn’s removal. And Paul, having asked and gotten a clear answer, stopped asking. He did not begin a five-year prayer campaign to overturn the verdict. He received the answer. He adjusted his posture. He wrote one of the most enduring sentences in the New Testament about what the power of God actually looks like when the miracle does not come.
That matters for us. The authority of the believer is real. Paul, the apostle who had more of it operating through him than almost anybody in church history, also lived with a thing in his own body he could not make leave. The two realities sit in the same man without contradiction.
We hold both.
Gethsemane, One More Time
Go back to the garden where the Second Adam made the move that reversed Eden.
The cup Jesus was holding was not a cup He wanted. Luke says His sweat became like great drops of blood. Matthew says His soul was exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. He asked the Father three times if the cup could pass from Him.
The answer was no.
And Jesus’ response was the most trusting sentence ever spoken by a human mouth. Not My will, but Yours, be done.
Notice what He did not do. He did not declare the cup away by faith. He did not command the crucifixion to be cancelled in Jesus’ name. He did not rebuke the spirit of suffering and loose the spirit of victory. He prayed. He asked. He heard no. And He accepted the no as the will of the Father, trusting that the Father knew something He could see only by faith from His side of the hill.
If the sinless Son of God could ask for something, receive no as the answer, and trust the Father anyway, the idea that the mature believer’s life is a string of uninterrupted yeses is not a Christian idea.
It is a misunderstanding of who we are following.
The Already and the Not Yet
There is a theological term that matters here, because it names something Scripture teaches clearly and the modern church often forgets.
The kingdom of God is already present and not yet fully consummated.
This is the shape of the entire New Testament. Jesus announced that the kingdom had come near (Matthew 4:17). He demonstrated the kingdom in healings, exorcisms, the raising of the dead, the authoritative teaching, the breaking of chains. The kingdom came to earth in His person. It continues to come through His Church, by His Spirit, in every place the Gospel goes and every believer exercises the authority He delegated.
And yet the kingdom is not yet complete. The full healing of every disease, the full resurrection of every saint, the full wiping away of every tear, the full restoration of creation, waits for the day of the Lord. Romans 8 says it plainly.
“For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.” — Romans 8:22-23 (NKJV)
Firstfruits of the Spirit. Not the full harvest. Not yet. The believer lives in a time between the down payment and the closing. The kingdom has come in Christ and is breaking into our lives now in real and sometimes miraculous ways. And the kingdom has not yet fully come, and we still groan, and creation still groans, and the redemption of our body is still future.
Which means this.
When the miracle comes, we have tasted the firstfruits of what will one day be the universal reality.
When the miracle does not come, we are still waiting, with creation, for what the Father has not yet brought to full completion.
Neither outcome falsifies the truth. Both outcomes are what you would expect in an age when the kingdom has come but has not yet finished coming.
This is why Paul could pray for his sick friend Trophimus, not see him healed, leave him sick at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20), and keep walking in the authority he carried without any apparent crisis of faith. Paul understood what age he was living in. He knew the kingdom was present in power and also not yet fully consummated. He prayed. He commanded. He saw some people healed. He left Trophimus sick, without spiritual commentary, and moved on to the next thing.
Modern Christians often lack this category, and it breaks them in the middle when the miracle does not arrive.
What Sovereignty Is Doing
Deuteronomy 29:29 sits quietly at the edge of this whole conversation, and it has kept me sane a hundred times.
“The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” — Deuteronomy 29:29 (NKJV)
The revealed things belong to you. You have them. You operate in them. You act on them.
The secret things belong to the Lord. Not to you. Not yet. Maybe not ever in this life.
A lot of the pressure believers feel when a prayer is not answered is the pressure of thinking we are supposed to know why. We are not. The revealed things are ours. The secret things are His. Job did not get an answer. He got a voice out of a whirlwind. The voice did not explain the suffering. The voice asked Job questions he could not answer, about creation and Leviathan and the ordering of the cosmos, and the result was not information. The result was worship.
Job fell on his face and said, “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6).
He did not get an explanation. He got God. And apparently that was enough.
The mature believer makes peace with the fact that some of the most important questions we will ask will not be answered in this life. Not because God is hiding. Because He is God, and we are not, and some of His reasons are too large for this side of the veil.
How to Hold Both
So here is where we land, after seven posts.
The authority of the believer is real. Everything we have taught in this series is true. You are in Christ. You are seated with Him. You carry a name that outranks every other name. The weapons of your warfare pull down strongholds. You have jurisdiction over the power of the enemy. The Father loves you and hears you and moves on your behalf.
And the answer is sometimes still no.
The two realities are not at war. They sit together, in the same life, in the same God, in the same story. You stand in authority and you also bow in submission. You command what is yours to command and you petition what is His to give. You exercise faith with backbone and you also trust the Father with surrender. You pray for the miracle. You receive it when it comes. You keep loving Him when it does not.
This is the way the saints have walked for two thousand years. It is the way they will walk until the Bridegroom comes back.
You are not responsible for the outcome. You are responsible for the posture.
Pray. Command. Stand. Trust.
And when the answer does not look like the answer you wanted, refuse to take on the guilt the enemy will try to lay on you. He will whisper that you must have done something wrong. That your faith was too small. That there was hidden sin. That if you had only prayed harder, believed harder, been more spiritual, the miracle would have come. Most of that is a lie.
There are times when our own faithlessness or sin really does hinder the work of God, and we should search our hearts honestly. But there are also times when we did everything right and the answer was still no, and the reason belongs to the secret things of Deuteronomy 29:29, and we will find out on the other side, and not a day sooner.
What This Means for You
I want to close the whole series by speaking to you as a pastor.
If you are holding a loss right now, and the last seven posts have stirred up both hope and old wounds, let me say this. You are not alone. You are not disqualified. You are not a second-tier believer because the miracle did not come. You stand in the company of Paul and Job and the sons and daughters of Hebrews 11 who did not receive the promise in this life, and the Holy Spirit wrote them into the Hall of Faith anyway.
The cross is the proof that God is not absent from suffering. He is in it, with us, with scars we will see on the resurrection day. The resurrection is the proof that the story is not over. The empty tomb is the final word on what the Father will do with every grief we are still carrying.
So we pray. We command. We stand.
And when the answer is no, or not yet, or silence, we keep trusting the One whose authority was handed to Him precisely so He could make all things new.
Everything sad will someday come untrue. That is the promise. Not in our timeline. In His.
Until then, we live as what we are. Sons and daughters of the King, seated with Him in the heavenly places, carrying His name, doing His work, loving His people, and refusing to let either the excess of the one camp or the passivity of the other camp keep us from the full life He purchased for us at Calvary.
The authority of the believer is not the whole story. Jesus is. But the authority of the believer is part of how He is writing His story through us, in this age, until the age to come arrives and makes every question worth asking clear at last.
Stand in it.
See you in the next thing.
This concludes The Authority of the Believer. Grace and peace to you. If these posts have helped you, share them with someone still stuck in one of the ditches. And if you are holding a no right now, know that the Father knows, and Jesus knows, and the Spirit is praying with groanings too deep for words on your behalf.
Leave a Reply