Favor
Favor is unmerited grace acting on your circumstances. It places you where hard work cannot.
"For thou, LORD, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou compass him as with a shield." (Psalm 5:12)
Favor is the reason the outcome does not match the input. The room you were not qualified for opens. The person who had no reason to say yes says yes. Joseph goes from a prison cell to the second seat in Egypt in a single afternoon. Daniel is set over a kingdom that had every reason to kill him. Nothing in either man's résumé explains it, which is the point. "Grace" and "favour" are the same word in the Greek, and grace by definition is what you did not earn.
Three Things That Are True of It​
You have to know you have it. A man whose father left him an inheritance, who was never told, walks into every room acting broke. The money sits there untouched. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" (Hosea 4:6). Knowing changes the walk, and the walk is what people respond to.
It runs on obedience. Without obedience you are guiding yourself, and what looks like favor is your own momentum. Favor lands on the yielded, which is why it belongs to the obedient flow picture and not to the striving one.
There is a counterfeit. A man can reach the top of the thing he built and arrive with no peace, and the world will look at his position and call it blessing. Peace is the tell. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace" (Galatians 5:22). If the ascent cost you the fruit, something other than God was carrying you up.
Why It Matters​
Favor is the answer to the fear that God's blessing has to be earned, and to the pride that says you earned it. Both die in the same sentence. God qualifies the unqualified, and then you cannot disqualify yourself.
Declare it. It belongs in your daily confession alongside healing and protection (see Chapter 7), because like every other purchased promise, it is one of the things you already have and simply have not been saying.