By Ivan & Isabel Allum ~ 2008-03-25
Recently the LORD spoke to me and said, “There is another problem with My children. They do not believe me. Many want me to fulfill their prophecies, but the problem is that they like the prophecies they receive but do not really believe them. I do not fulfill prophecies because people like them, I only fulfill them when people believe them”. Then He said, “Everyone has the concept of what it is to believe but they do not have the reality of it. Again, that is because most of them are living out of concepts only”. I was really surprised to hear that so I began to pay attention and, sadly, realized that it was true.
Let’s talk a bit more about concepts in the Kingdom. In the world we have concepts about everything. I have a full concept of what it is like to travel to the moon. I have read the experiences of astronauts and I have seen documentaries and movies about it. Therefore, I can explain to anyone what it is like to travel there with great understanding and precision. Yet, I do not have the personal experience and that makes a big difference. God is looking for people who believe Him, not out of concept but in reality. The kind of believing He wants is like when a woman receives a marriage proposal. She believes and begins preparing for the wedding. She does not wait to see if it is true. She believes and acts on it, or when someone invites you over for dinner on Friday night you believe them and prepare to go to their house that night. By the same token, when I invite someone to come to my house for dinner on Friday night and they say, “Yes,” I believe them and start preparing for it. Then on Friday I make the dinner and expect them to show up. I do not wait to see if they show up before I start cooking.
God is looking for people like Abraham, who believed God and did something about it. He was willing to risk it all because he believed what God told him, even if it did not make sense. Many people think that to believe God we must first understand what He says. Not at all. Understanding is not a requirement to believing. Faith does not come from the head, it comes from the heart. Faith is the result of a decision, not the other way around. Many people are confused as to how faith works. They expect to first have the manifestation of faith and then they will act. They think that they have to produce it. It does not work that way. We cannot produce faith. For faith to come first we choose to believe and as a result, faith arises in our hearts because the Holy Spirit empowers our decision to believe God. I do not understand many of the things God says, but I believe every single thing He says and He has never let me down. Ivan and I have experienced this first hand. We will share one story with you to illustrate how faith works.
Hebrews 11:1 says that, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. (The NLT says, “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see”). Here we see that there is something we first believe in, or hope for. Something has been said or offered to us first. We believe it and, as a result, faith comes to our hearts. Scripture says that faith comes by hearing the word of God (Romans 10:17). First we hear then faith comes.
I remember when the LORD told us to get married. That was a complete work of choice, faith, and obedience. Ivan and I never dated. We were an arranged marriage. Arranged by God that is. We were not even attracted to each other when we got engaged. Our engagement was an absolute act of obedience to what the LORD had spoken to us and to the commitment we had made to obey Him. It is an amazing but long story. However, I will summarize it for the illustration and will share the long version in another book.
Ivan and I first met three years before God brought us together. We saw each other briefly a year later, but we never really connected with each other or became friends. We were not attracted to each other at all and would have never ever, in a million years, have considered each other for a relationship. We would have never thought of going on a date as we both actually greatly disliked some aspects of the other. Then one day almost two years later, the LORD spoke to me very clearly, through a dream, and said, “I want you to marry Ivan because I have called your lives and your destinies together. If you marry Ivan I will use you together to build my Kingdom throughout the nations of the world. I want you to do this for me, not for you. If you do this for me, I will give you a supernatural gift of love from heaven that will join you both forever.”
I knew God had spoken, so I had a choice to make. Marrying Ivan was not something I would have ever thought of doing, but for the Father and his Kingdom I was willing to do anything in the world. I had not heard from Ivan in almost two years and did not know really what had happened to him. For all I knew, he was already married or in a relationship. However, God had spoken and I had to respond. I said, “Yes Lord, here I am. I will do it. For you I will do anything. Today I choose to marry Ivan and serve you with him for the rest of my life. I will build Your Kingdom with him and go anywhere You want me to go. Please do all that is necessary to make it happen.” At that moment, I was ‘engaged’ to marry Ivan, but my promise of marriage was to the LORD. I have to admit that it is the flakiest thing I have ever done in life. I did talk to two people’ as I greatly believe in accountability.
Anyway, I decided to believe. Once I made the decision to believe God, the Holy Spirit responded and gave me the confidence that what I expected would come to pass, and that gave me the assurance of the things God had promised to do, which I could not see or imagine at the moment. In other words, faith arose within me as a result of my decision to believe God. Then, as a result of this, hope became expectation. This is an important key. For instance, a woman hopes to have a child one day, but once pregnant she stops hoping and starts expecting her child to be born. Hope turns into expectation. The same is true for us. We hope, but the moment God gives us the promise we do not need to hope anymore; we now begin to expect the fulfillment of that promise.
Now, like Abraham I acted on it. After responding to the LORD I started aligning my life according to the direction I was now going. I began to prepare for what the LORD said would happen. God also started to work and, through a series of amazing heavenly ordained circumstances, He arranged for Ivan to come to Costa Rica. Suddenly, Ivan was coming to arrange a mission trip for his church and was going to stay for two weeks, and since I knew some English, he asked me to translate for him.
Two weeks before Ivan was due to arrive, I was out of town helping someone and the phone rang. It was my former boss. He was now working for a different company and had a job for me. It was the job of my dreams, and literally the job I went to college for, plus it was with a new American company in my country, that paid really well, I would have been set for life if I took the position. It was very difficult to get a job there because no one ever left and my former boss told me that he wanted me for this position and he had already hired me. He did not know if I was working or not at the time, but was sure that I would accept his offer as it was literally a once in a life time opportunity. Everything was set and he wanted me to start on Monday morning. He said that all I had to do was call the Human Resources office and officially accept the job, but this was just a formality. It was now 4:45 p.m. on Friday afternoon and the office would close in fifteen minutes.
Was I willing to keep my eyes on the promise and not be distracted by the chariot of fire that came? I had no time to think as it was almost 5:00 p.m. Did I really believe God? If I believed God, then I did not need that job because I was going to marry Ivan and leave with him. Again, I still did not know if Ivan was married or not, and I did not have any attraction towards him nor feelings about marrying him. All I had was the confidence of what God had spoken and of the things that were to come. Then, of course, the enemy stepped in and said, “But what if you are wrong about this Ivan thing. You have nothing to back up what you think God told you. All you have is just a dream. However, you have this job in your hand, your dream job and it is here now”. I heard that, considered both options for a minute, and then the faith that had been released within me as a result of my decision to believe God arose, and I remembered my promise to the LORD. I decided that indeed if I believed God then I would not need that job because soon I would leave the country as Ivan’s wife and would go to build God’s Kingdom with him, so I picked up the phone, called the office and turned the job down. I aligned my life accordingly and prepared for what was ahead.
Ivan arrived in Costa Rica not knowing God’s plans for him yet. He had no idea he was going to marry me. On his second day there the LORD came and spoke to him audibly and said, “Ivan I brought you here because I want you to marry Isabel”. This was a big surprise to him but he believed God and said, “Yes Lord here I am. I will marry her”. The next morning the LORD sent an angel to confirm the message and to give him the time for the proposal. I actually saw the angel. In the natural this was crazy. First, proposing to a woman he barely knew, and who was not even his friend, plus he was not attracted to me. He had just turned 22 years old and had nothing. He was doing a pastoral internship at the church and his income was $50 a week. He had no other natural resources to marry a woman from another land, take her, and support her. Yet, he did not consider the circumstances that surrounded him but focused his heart on the fact that God had spoken, and, as such, He would make the impossible possible. As Ivan chose to believe God, the confidence of what the LORD said would happen arose in him (faith was released by the Spirit). So that day, within an hour from the angel’s visit, Ivan proposed and I said yes. We both had complete confidence in what the LORD had said. However, it was like a business transaction and we could have shaken hands on it because there was no emotion or attraction whatsoever between us. It was 100% obedience to what the LORD had spoken to both of us.
As we did it, we fixed our eyes on what the Lord had said would happen, what He promised to do with and through our marriage. He promised that we would serve Him and build His Kingdom and that became the reason for our obedience. He also promised to give us a supernatural gift of love that would join us forever. Therefore, even though we were not attracted to each other, we had confidence that God would fulfill his promise. And He did! Right after we “shook hands” on the engagement, Ivan left with my pastor for a three day mission trip to the mountains, which had been pre-arranged. During those three days the LORD released the gift of love He promised. When Ivan came back from the mountains we looked at each other and we loved each other with such a deep and strong love, that it was as if we had been together forever and ever. It was the most supernatural thing ever. That was back in 1987, and that love has continued to grow between us throughout the years.
Then, just as promised, God began to use us together to serve Him, and to build His Kingdom locally and throughout the nations of the world. We live to make Him famous and this has taken us to amazing experiences. His faithfulness has been greater than we expected. It has now been 20 years since we ‘shook hands’ on that engagement and we have never ever regretted it. We both can say honestly and truly that if time went back, we would do it all over again. We believed God and, as a result, He gave us the confidence that what He said would come to pass, and today we are living the things He promised, which, back then, seemed impossible and we could not imagine. He has been true to His word and has gone the extra mile for us. Obedience is indeed better than sacrifice.
Many people criticized us and said that what we were doing was not from God because it was ‘outside the box’. People cursed our marriage and said that it would fail. It did not make sense to the minds of men. Scripture tells us that the things of God are craziness to the world. We need to be ‘silly’ in the eyes of the world, in order to believe the outrageous things the LORD tells us. Most of the time, they are so impossible that, like Sarah, we must just laugh (Genesis 18:12).
Hebrews 11: 32-34 says “What more shall I say? I have not time to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who by faith conquered kingdoms, did what was righteous, obtained the promises; they closed the mouths of lions, put out raging fires, escaped the devouring sword; out of weakness they were made powerful, became strong in battle, and turned back foreign invaders” (NIV).
Scripture says that by faith great and mighty things are achieved. By faith the heavens open and God is revealed into our lives. We too can say that by faith we have seen miracles and power happen in our lives. By faith I married a stranger and left my home and my country, to come to serve the LORD believing the promises God made. By faith, Ivan, being a young man with no possibilities or resources, took a wife from another land, brought her to his country, and started a new life believing the promises God made him. By faith, we received the fulfillment of every one of those promises. By faith, we left profitable jobs trusting the promises of God to build his Kingdom. By faith, we planted churches and started ministries against all odds, and with only God standing with us. By faith, we have bought buildings, houses, financed Kingdom projects, sent people to overseas missions, raised others into ministry, paid people’s debts, have given cars away, fed multitudes, have had miracles of multiplication of food like the feeding of the 5,000 in our house, have seen angels, helped angels, have been helped by angels, have walked through the supernatural promises of God, and much more. These are just a few of the things we have done by faith and we can truly say that God has been faithful to everything He has ever said. He has been more than good to His word. Through this all, we can also say that we know Him better each day.
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