From Faith to Faith, Strength to Strength, Glory to Glory #6 — Tilling Up the Fallow Ground

Faith to faith strength to strength is the path this sixth message lays out: God’s Word brings faith, trials test that Word and build His strength in us, and the Holy Spirit changes us from glory to glory. In a portion of the series he calls tilling up the fallow ground, the pastor teaches that redemption has a legal side, finished at the cross, and a practical side, where we keep believing, keep following and repent of whatever blocks growth.

This message follows From Faith to Faith, Strength to Strength, Glory to Glory, Part 2 — Making the Valley of Baca a Well. Below you will find the full video, a structured summary, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a timestamped outline, and practical steps for breaking up your own fallow ground this week.

Sermon at a Glance

This message was preached at NTC Ministries and posted on May 9, 2023. It runs about 55 minutes and ends with the congregation standing to ask God to forgive the little things that have blocked their relationship with Him. The pastor is not named in the recording.

Tilling up fallow ground means turning over soil that has not been worked in years and pulling out the junk so a planting brings a good harvest. First, he reviews the three stages of faith to faith strength to strength and glory to glory.

Faith to Faith: Receiving the Word

Faith to faith, the pastor says, means being given totally over to God’s Word. Faith often begins with a specific word. A few weeks earlier he gave a prophecy about family restoration, and Greg told him afterward that his estranged daughter had just called out of the blue and was reconciling with him. Then a process has to take place.

He explains two sides of redemption. The legal side is the finished work of the cross: everything that pertains to life and godliness has already been given. The practical side is what we must do to let it come into our lives: continue in the faith and not decide after a year that it must not be happening. We are to fight the good fight of faith and lay hold of eternal life (1 Timothy 6:12).

Romans 1:16–17 says the gospel is the power of God to salvation, and in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, for the just shall live by faith. God’s saying it settles it, he says, but on the practical side you still have to believe it. People who do not believe God heals rarely see healing, and he urges giving where people believe it will be given back, pressed down and running over (Luke 6:38).

He sums it up with a phrase he has preached as a whole series: God is to you who you believe He is. God is more than we can imagine, but He stays out there somewhere until we believe it. The parable of the talents shows this (Matthew 25:14–30). The servant who said his master reaped where he did not sow was calling him a thief, and he received what he believed. The servants who saw a God of multiplication multiplied and were given authority.

Faith comes by hearing the Word of God (Romans 10:17), but as soon as we hear it, Satan comes to steal it. That is why faith to faith must lead to strength to strength.

Strength to Strength Through the Valley of Baca

Strength to strength, he teaches, is holding on to the word you were given, partly by gathering with other believers. Local balsam trees have shallow roots; cut down a stand and leave one, and it falls within a month or two. So we must not forsake assembling together, and should do it all the more as the day approaches (Hebrews 10:25).

Psalm 84:4–7 blesses the one whose strength is in God, who passes through the Valley of Baca and makes it a spring, so that the rain fills the pools and “they go from strength to strength.” Baca, he explains, means a valley of weeping: a dry, barren, difficult place of testing. Those who stick with it turn it into a watered place, and that is how believers go from faith to faith and strength to strength.

God is not the one doing hard things to you. He tempts no one with evil (James 1:13–14); it is what is in our own lives that Satan uses. When trials come, James says to count it all joy, because the testing of your faith produces patience (James 1:2–3). It is the Word in you being tested, so go back and hold on to it: by His stripes I am healed (Isaiah 53:5), and a thousand may fall at my side but it will not come near me (Psalm 91:7).

This is where we find greater strength, but not our own. When I am weak, Paul says, then I am strong (2 Corinthians 12:10). We come to the bottom of our strength and rely on God. 1 Peter 1:6–8 says the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, is tested by fire. Your faith is tested, he stresses, not you.

Jesus is the model. In Gethsemane, heavy and sweating drops of blood, He asked the Father to let the cup pass, yet not His will. An angel strengthened Him, and then He prayed more earnestly (Luke 22:42–44). He used that strength to draw closer to the Father, not to walk away relieved.

Gethsemane, the pastor notes, means olive press, and crushed olives yield oil for light. We may feel crushed, but Psalm 66:12 says God brought His people through fire and water and out to rich fulfillment, which he reads in the Amplified as a place of much breathing room. Trouble comes in the kingdom, so hold on.

Glory to Glory: Clothed Again

Glory to glory, he says, is finding the power and strength of God in the middle of a trial, so that when the same trouble comes again you keep walking, clothed with the glory of God. It is where faith to faith strength to strength has been heading all along.

Adam was clothed with God’s glory when he was created. When he disobeyed, it was stripped from him, and when God came to walk with him, Adam hid because he was naked. God asked, “Who told you that you were naked?” (Genesis 3:9–11). The pastor pictures Adam as a prison guard who listened to the inmate, Satan, and was stripped of the glory, and fear came in.

So when strength comes in a hard time, use it to pray more earnestly, and glory draws close. God keeps in perfect peace the one whose mind is stayed on Him (Isaiah 26:3). 2 Corinthians 3:18 says that beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, we are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory by the Spirit of the Lord.

That transformation, he says, is the caterpillar becoming a butterfly in its cocoon season. Romans 12:2 uses the same word: do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The table pulls the three stages together as he teaches them.

The Glory Jesus Gave Us

The pastor addresses a teaching he has heard often: that God will never share His glory with anyone. It comes from Isaiah 42:8, where the Lord says He will not give His glory to another. That is true in a world under the curse, he says, but believers are redeemed from the curse and are a new species of being.

In His high priestly prayer, Jesus asked the Father to glorify Him with the glory He had before the world was (John 17:4–5). Then He prayed for all who would believe through the apostles’ word, which includes us, and said, “And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one” (John 17:20–23). Through this process you come to know God loves you as He loves Jesus.

Why was this hidden before? Colossians 1:26–27 calls it the mystery hidden from ages and now revealed: Christ in you, the hope of glory. God could not give His glory to people bound in corruption, but in a new creation with eternal life it can rest righteously for eternity.

Isaiah 43:5–7 says God will gather His sons and daughters from the ends of the earth, “everyone who is called by My name, whom I have created for My glory.” Jesus, the second Adam, came to win that glory back for those who are new creations in Him (2 Corinthians 5:17).

He also warns against looking for this world to be restored. Like rust bubbling through a car’s paint, its corruption is showing through and will one day be burned up. Our hope is doing what God asks, which holds evil at bay.

The glory is legally ours, but there is still a practical side. When Pam received an inheritance, it was legally hers, yet the probate court required steps before it reached their account. Likewise, people who claim grace while living in known sin are not under grace but deception. Jesus said we are His friends if we do what He commands (John 15:14), and that the Father and He will make Their home with the one who keeps His word (John 14:23).

Your Tongue and Your Glory

We are spirit, soul and body, the pastor explains. The born-again spirit is united with God, the body touches this corrupted world, and in between is the soul: mind, will and emotions. Your soul will either let God’s glory flow out into your life and the world or let the world’s corruption flow in, depending on what you give your attention to.

He then compares two passages. At Pentecost, Peter quoted David: “I foresaw the Lord always before my face… therefore my heart rejoiced, and my tongue was glad” (Acts 2:25–26). But in the psalm itself, David wrote, “Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices” (Psalm 16:8–9). Both spoke by the Holy Spirit, he says, so tongue and glory must be connected. The tongue is the avenue of glory.

That is why repentance starts with the mouth. Confess your faults to one another, that you may be healed (James 5:16). He says he does this himself, because he is not trying to impress anyone; he wants intimacy with the Father. People come to church for change, not a sermonette followed by gossip.

1 Samuel 2:8 says God raises the poor from the dust and the beggar from the ash heap to make them inherit the throne of glory. As heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, our inheritance is His glory.

Faith to Faith Strength to Strength: Break Up Your Fallow Ground

The title text comes from Jeremiah 4:1–4: if you return to the Lord and put away your abominations, you shall not be moved, and the nations shall glory in Him. “Break up your fallow ground, and do not sow among thorns.” Circumcise your hearts, lest His fury come forth like fire because of the evil of your doings.

Our idea of evil and God’s are different, he says. Evil is anything that keeps you from oneness with God. Many of us have kept going in a decision we knew was wrong out of pride. Fallow ground is idle ground, unbroken, where what is inside cannot be seen. God wants it broken up so nothing holds back what He planted.

Acts 3:19 says, “Repent therefore and be converted,” so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. Most of us ask God to act first and promise to change later. God says to change, and then you will see the conversion. It starts with the mouth, since we confess with the mouth and believe in the heart (Romans 10:9).

He explains the Greek word for repent as a compound meaning, in part, to follow together. Repenting is not asking Jesus to follow you so He can bail you out. It is following Him, as Peter, Nathanael and the tax collector did.

It cannot simply mean knowing better, because we all do things we know are wrong. He tells of taking an old Buick 225 down an unplowed back road in winter with a friend named Jeff to reach a fishing lake. Both doubted it and went anyway, and they were stuck for hours in two feet of snow until they filled the trunk with creek rocks and plowed out. “Never be so loyal to a wrong direction that you refuse to let repentance reverse it,” he says.

1 John 3:1–3 says we will be like Him when He is revealed, and everyone who has this hope purifies himself, just as He is pure. Believers cleansed by the blood are still told to purify themselves: the practical side again. 1 Peter 1:22–23 speaks of purifying our souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit.

Satan works to keep you off that path, as when the Lord prompts a gift and suddenly you think of everything you need the money for. All creation is waiting for the sons of God to be revealed (Romans 8:19). If you are not hearing God, he says, somewhere you stopped following; it is the little foxes that spoil the vines (Song of Solomon 2:15). Reading 1 John 2:15–17 from The Message, he warns that love of the world squeezes out love for the Father, but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity.

Living It Out This Week

The pastor closed by inviting everyone who had put off what God asked to stand and pray for cleansing. Here are practical steps drawn from this faith to faith strength to strength message:

• Do not quit on the timeline. On the practical side of redemption, a year without results is a reason to keep believing, not to stop.
• Stay planted with others. Like the balsam trees, you need fellow believers to stay upright in the Valley of Baca.
• Use strength to pray harder. When relief comes in a trial, follow Jesus in Gethsemane and press in more earnestly.
• Break up one patch of fallow ground. Name a wrong direction you have been too loyal to, confess it and turn back.
• Do the thing He asked. Act on His prompting before second thoughts steal it.

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 Tilling up the fallow ground
• 0:59 A prophecy fulfilled for Greg
• 2:01 Two sides of redemption
• 4:02 Romans 1:17: from faith to faith
• 5:00 God is to you who you believe He is
• 8:04 The Word is tested; strength to strength
• 9:03 Balsam trees and Psalm 84
• 9:59 The Valley of Baca
• 13:01 Gethsemane: He prayed more earnestly
• 14:09 The olive press and Psalm 66:12
• 15:20 Glory to glory and Adam’s lost glory
• 17:35 2 Corinthians 3:18 and the butterfly
• 19:47 Isaiah 42:8 and John 17
• 23:06 Christ in you, the hope of glory
• 26:42 Isaiah 43 and the mystery
• 31:26 Created for His glory
• 33:39 Obedience and the probate court
• 34:48 Spirit, soul and body
• 37:32 Psalm 16: my glory rejoices
• 40:29 1 Samuel 2:8 and Jeremiah 4
• 43:56 Acts 3:19: repent and be converted
• 47:27 Stuck in the snow
• 50:35 1 John 3: purify yourself
• 53:43 Little foxes and closing prayer

Faith to Faith Strength to Strength Series

This message is part of the faith to faith strength to strength series at NTC Ministries:

• First message: From Faith to Faith, Strength to Strength, Glory to Glory: Becoming Worshipers
• Previous: From Faith to Faith, Strength to Strength, Glory to Glory, Part 2 — Making the Valley of Baca a Well
• You are here: From Faith to Faith, Strength to Strength, Glory to Glory #6 — Tilling Up the Fallow Ground
• Next: From Faith to Faith, Strength to Strength, Glory to Glory #7 — Created for His Glory

Frequently Asked Questions

If the cross finished everything, why do I still have to do anything?

The pastor separates the legal side of redemption from the practical side. Legally, everything that pertains to life and godliness was given at the cross. Practically, you still have to believe and obey, the way an inheritance is legally yours but still needs the probate court’s steps. Claiming grace while living in known sin, he says, is deception.

Does God send trials to test me?

No. Citing James, he says God tempts no one with evil, and that Satan works through things in our own lives. What gets tested in a trial is the Word that is in you, not you as a person. That is why the response is to go back to the promise and hold on to it, and to use any strength God gives to pray more earnestly rather than to relax.

What does God’s glory have to do with the words I speak?

He points out that Peter, quoting Psalm 16 at Pentecost, said “my tongue was glad,” while David wrote “my glory rejoices.” Since both spoke by the Holy Spirit, he concludes that the tongue is an avenue of glory. Repentance and confession begin with the mouth, and what we speak either opens the way for God’s glory or keeps our ground fallow.

Scripture References

All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:

• Romans 1:16–17 — from faith to faith
• Psalm 84:4–7 — from strength to strength
• 1 Peter 1:6–8 — faith tested by fire
• Luke 22:42–44 — He prayed more earnestly
• 2 Corinthians 3:18 — from glory to glory
• John 17:20–23 — the glory You gave Me
• Isaiah 43:5–7 — created for My glory
• Jeremiah 4:1–4 — break up your fallow ground
• Acts 3:19 — repent and be converted

How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.

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