Triumph 5: The Faith Of The Word Of God part 1

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The Faith of the Word of God part 1

A Summary Study Guide

 Shingi Mudyirwa

Before faith can be defined, it must be made receivable —

for the deep things of God are spiritually discerned.

— the governing insight of Part One

This is a condensed companion to the guide on The Faith of the Word of God, Part One. It distils the teaching’s thesis, its method, and its biblical architecture, and — because the longer guide is a critical study and not merely an exposition — the principal scholarly questions the teaching raises. Scripture is cited briefly in the KJV. The aim is a map the advanced student can hold in view while working through the full guide. One feature of Part One must be kept in mind throughout: by the preacher’s own design it does not yet define faith — it lays the foundation on which Part Two will define it.

1. Introduction and Thesis Overview

The teaching belongs to the Triumph series, whose governing text is 1 John 5:4: faith is “the victory that overcomes the world.” From this the preacher reasons that if triumph is the goal and faith is its instrument, the believer must possess an exact knowledge of what faith is.

Yet Part One withholds the definition. Its real subject is the prior question: by what faculty are such truths known at all? The answer — and the thesis of the whole — is that the things of God are apprehended not by natural reasoning but by a Spirit-given capacity the preacher calls spiritual intelligence. Read this way, the apparent digression on “spiritual intelligence” is in fact the centre of gravity, and the recurring Greek vocabulary is its load-bearing structure.

This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.   — 1 John 5:4 (KJV)

2. Methodology and Hermeneutics

Three interpretive commitments drive the teaching, and the full guide adds a fourth, critical, layer.

• “What the word says.” Scripture, not the consensus of teachers, is the final court of appeal. The preacher recounts being redirected by the Spirit from the library of faith teachers back to the biblical text — a healthy sola Scriptura and ad fontes
• Original-language philology. Meaning is fixed by appeal to the Greek — logos, rhēma, pneumatikos, sunesis, sophia, epignōsis, anakrinō — to recover what the inspired wording precisely says.
• A pneumatic epistemology. Drawing on 1 Corinthians 2 and the apostolic prayers, the teaching holds that spiritual things are spiritually discerned: this knowledge comes by the Spirit’s unveiling, not by natural research.
• Critical accountability (the guide’s addition). Each claim is tested through four lenses — rhetorical, exegetical, lexical, and systematic — holding charity and scrutiny together.

3. The Mystery of the Word

The recapitulation advances a high, orthodox doctrine of the Word built on the Johannine prologue: the Word is God (John 1:1), is spirit, life and light, created all things, and became flesh (John 1:14). Its showpiece is Luke 4:16–22, where the incarnate Word reads the written word in the synagogue — a single moment in which the preacher discerns a fourfold manifestation of the one Word.

Form of the Word in Luke4	What was present
The Spirit upon him	“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” — the Word who is also Spirit (John 6:63).
The Word made flesh	Jesus himself — the eternal Logos incarnate (John 1:14).
The written word	The scroll of Isaiah he opens and reads aloud.
The spoken voice	The “gracious words” the hearers hear proceeding from his mouth.

The christology is squarely within Nicene orthodoxy and Johannine scholarship. The fourfold schema is best read as a rich homiletical meditation rather than a strict ontological identity among the Word’s several modes (see §5).

4. The Priority of Faith

So far as Part One develops it, the doctrine of faith rests on four pillars: faith is the victory (1 John 5:4); faith is foundational — an elementary principle of the doctrine of Christ (Heb 6:1); faith is indispensable — “without faith it is impossible to please him” (Heb 11:6); and faith is twinned with righteousness as one of the two master-themes of the gospel, since the righteousness of God is revealed “from faith to faith” (Rom 1:16–17).

The exegetical backbone is sound. The contested element is the framing of the project as the recovery of the single, “absolute” definition of faith yielding “100% results,” which inherits a distinctive premise of the Word of Faith tradition (Kenyon, Hagin) and must be reconciled with the New Testament’s own counter-data (see §5).

5. The Core: Spiritual Intelligence

The heart of Part One is its pneumatic epistemology. Spiritual realities, the preacher argues, require a Spirit-enabled faculty — an “anointed mind” grounded in 1 Corinthians 2:16 (“we have the mind of Christ”). The supporting texts are well chosen, and the central intuition is affirmed by major Pauline scholarship (Fee, Thiselton): the psychikos (natural) person cannot receive the things of the Spirit, which are “spiritually discerned.”

The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God … for they are spiritually discerned.   — 1 Corinthians 2:14 (KJV)

From 1 Corinthians 2:14–3:3 the teaching derives three kinds of person, a reading genuinely present in the text:

Type (Greek)	Condition	Receives the things of the Spirit?
Natural  (psychikos)	Unregenerate; governed by the unaided soul.	No — they are “foolishness” to him.
Carnal  (sarkikos)	Regenerate but immature; still ruled by fleshly thinking.	Not yet — has the capacity but not the maturity.
Spiritual  (pneumatikos)	Mind illumined by the Spirit; custodian of spiritual wisdom.	Yes — “discerns all things” (anakrinō).

Two further strands complete the core. Revelation knowledge (Gal 1:11–12) distinguishes truth received by the Spirit’s unveiling from truth acquired by human means. And the prayers of the spirit — praying the apostolic intercessions (Eph 1; 3; Col 1:9; Phil 1) back over one’s own life — supply the epistemology with an actual practice, and are among the most readily commendable elements of Part One.

6. Critical Scholarly Engagement

What makes the full guide a study rather than a transcript is that it submits the teaching to scholarship. Five questions deserve the advanced student’s attention:

• The logos / rhēma distinction. The verse-level observation at Heb 11:3 (rhēma = spoken word) is defensible; but a rigid, universal split between “spoken” and “written” word is not sustainable, since the terms overlap heavily in use (Carson, Exegetical Fallacies).
• The “100% results” model of faith. It must be reconciled with the very chapter the teaching prizes — the faithful of Heb 11:35–38 who were not delivered — and with Paul’s unhealed thorn (2 Cor 12:7–9), lest faith become a technique that makes God’s action contingent on human performance.
• The capital-S argument at 1 Cor 2:10. Reading “the Spirit searcheth all things” as the human spirit cannot rest on English capitalization, which the Greek autographs do not have; the underlying intuition (the regenerate spirit as a locus of knowing, Rom 8:16) is sounder than the argument given for it.
• Discernment and empirical claims. When “spiritual discernment” pronounces on checkable matters of fact, it needs the New Testament’s own safeguards — prophecy weighed (1 Cor 14:29), spirits tested (1 John 4:1), the Bereans’ checking (Acts 17:11) — lest it become unfalsifiable.
• Tripartite anthropology. If a three-part division of spirit/soul/body is assumed, it should be argued rather than presupposed, given the strength of holistic readings of Paul.

On its own premises the teaching is internally coherent; its weaker moments are over-specifications of a true thesis rather than departures from it. Naming these debates is not to settle them but to let the student hold conviction and scrutiny together.

7. Pastoral and Practical Reflections

Practically, the teaching offers a genuine formation: the disciplined praying of Paul’s own prayers for wisdom, knowledge, and understanding, and a timely call to discernment in an age of engineered deception. Three cautions keep the practice healthy: spiritual knowing should be tested by the Spirit-inspired text it honours, not set above it; it should be weighed in community rather than held as private certainty; and, on questions of fact, it should be checked against ordinary evidence. So disciplined, “what the word says” becomes a method, not a slogan — and a guard against spiritual elitism.

8. Conclusion

Part One is, by design, the antechamber. It argues that faith cannot be rightly defined until the hearer can receive a spiritual definition spiritually. The full guide does two things at once: it systematises the teaching faithfully — the mystery of the Word, the priority of faith, the epistemology of the Spirit — and it equips the student to test it. The reader is thereby made ready to receive Part Two critically: to ask whether its promised definition of faith honours the full range of pistis, integrates the suffering faithful as well as the triumphant, and rests on the Greek text rather than on English typography. To study Part One well is to be ready to test Part Two faithfully — which is precisely what doctoral-level study requires.

Glossary of Key Terms

Term	Sense in this teaching
logos	Word, message, discourse; in John, the personal divine Word who is God (John 1:1).
rhēma	The specific spoken word/utterance; foregrounded at Heb 11:3.
pistis	Faith — trust, faithfulness, and the faith that receives; defined in Part Two.
pneumatikos	Spiritual; the Spirit-led person who discerns spiritual things (1 Cor 2:15).
psychikos / sarkikos	The natural (unspiritual) and the carnal (regenerate but immature) person.
sunesis	Understanding, insight — rendered “spiritual intelligence” (Col 1:9; Eph 3:4).
sophia	Wisdom — the hidden wisdom of God versus the wisdom of this world (1 Cor 2:6–7).
gnōsis / epignōsis	Knowledge / full, precise knowledge — the goal of being “filled” (Col 1:9).
anakrinō	To examine, discern, sift; the spiritual person “discerns all things” (1 Cor 2:15).
apokalupsis	Unveiling, revelation; the means by which spiritual knowledge is delivered (Gal 1:12).
mystērion	A secret once hidden, now revealed by God — not an unknowable riddle (Col 1:26).

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