Understanding Faith

 When I first came to know Christ as my personal savior, the word "faith" was exciting! God had performed a new work in my heart and I watched how God turned my life upside down for the good.  Then, as I walked with God and was being taught "the word of faith" I ended up hearing so many different "reasons" why faith wouldn't work for some as it would for others. Or there we be some new revelation on how to work the principles of faith.  

I came to the place where hearing the word “faith” would make me tired.  It left me feeling like “faith” was something that I had to DO… a muscle I had to grow.  I was taught from the word that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.  This message was pounded in me many times over the years. Some preachers took this scripture to the point of saying, “Faith comes by hearing and hearing and hearing and hearing….” In other words if we heard “enough” someday our faith meter will rise to the top and we will finally receive what we were believing for.  This can tire a soul out. 

 Well, I was one of those people who "heard and heard" to know avail. It seemed as though repetition didn’t work for me but because well-intentioned preachers of the bible taught this, I believed it was true.  When my faith seemed weak, I took on the responsibility…the blame.  I would think things like "I must not being hearing enough" or " I need to study God’s word more".  "I need to meditate more in His word" and so on.  Well, after 26 years in the word, I have discovered that faith is not what I thought it was.

Faith is a persuasion. Faith is not some sort of resource that grows with the advent of repeating and repeating a verse of scripture.  It is simply coming to a place where we are persuaded about a matter... fully persuaded. 

The word “faith” found many times in the gospels where Jesus was referring to "one's faith" that made them whole (Matt 9:22, Matt 15:28) is the Greek word “pistis” which means persuasion; credence, moral conviction of the Truthfulness of God, especially the reliance upon Jesus for salvation; a steadfastness of mind professing our reliance upon Jesus. These women identified in the above scriptures were “fully persuaded” of what God was willing and able to do for them through Jesus.

  What enables us to have faith is the level of persuasion we have about God’s truthfulness…God’s perspective of a matter.  When John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, the bible tells us that God’s voice from heaven was heard saying, “this is My Son in Whom I am well pleased”.  Jesus was persuaded of the fact that He was the Son of God.  He was full of faith and never doubted Who He was.  So when Satan came to Him in the desert and three times attempted to get Jesus to DO something to prove He was the Son of God, He didn’t respond to Satan’s request.  He knew He was God’s son and didn’t need to do anything to prove it. God’s word spoke it and He believed it….end of subject.  He was fully persuaded of Who He was.

So how does this impact our ability to believe or have faith today?  Well, Jesus was called the “Lamb of God”.  In the Old Testament, once a year, the High Priest was commanded by God to pick out a lamb that was without blemish. This lamb was to be sacrificed for the sins of the people. The High Priest would lay his hands on the lamb signifying that the sins of the people were being imparted to the lamb and the perfection of the lamb was in turn being imparted to the people. Then the lamb was slaughtered as was the sins of the people along with the lamb. This ceremony was a “type and shadow” of what was to come.  Jesus was the one True Lamb Who Took Away The Sins of the World.  Our sins were imparted to Him and His perfection was imparted to us.  So now, when God looks at us, it is Christ’s faith He sees, not ours.  In other words, Jesus’ perfection has been imparted to us and when our faith is based in Christ, we will experience His victory. Our righteousness or right standing in God is in Christ and so too our ability to receive all of God’s promises are in Christ.

 However, if we are looking at our righteousness or what we do or don’t do as a “qualifying factor” in receiving from God, then our faith is not founded in Christ. It is founded on our ability to believe we have “performed well enough to qualify for God’s promises.  This is a form of “self-righteousness” that we are looking to…and faith established on our performance will always bring about doubt and unbelief. 

So when it comes to faith, our ability to access the promises of God is based our how “persuaded we are in what God has freely given us through our faith in what Christ has accomplished on our behalf at the cross.  We must come to the place where we are seeing ourselves qualified through faith in Christ.

You might say, "Why is it so hard to have faith? Well, I can tell you that we can make our faith “inactive” when we have a competing belief; two or more thoughts about a matter that are in conflict with one another. These incongruences can steal away our ability to be fully persuaded.

For instance, we read in 1Peter 2:24  “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed”.  We know this scripture having heard it for years.  Then suddenly circumstances come against us in the way of sickness,. Maybe we get a bad report from a doctor. First thing that happens is fear grips our hearts.  Then we pray and meditate on 1Peter 2:24…some time may pass and we don’t see any change.

 Lo and behold we come across a message from a minister who takes Isaiah 55:9 “ For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” and he states that it may not be God’s will to heal us.  He will say that we aren’t to question God because His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts Higher than our thoughts.

These competing beliefs produce doubt in our hearts… to the extent that we are no longer fully persuaded. Our faith turns into hope and over time, the bible tells us that "hope deferred makes the heart grow weary".  We have these competing issues which feed doubt and unbelief in our hearts. Well, in God’s economy, faith in Christ and what He has accomplished for us through His death, burial and resurrection is what enables us to receive what God has provided for us.

So what do we do?  We look to God for His Grace.  Grace is the Greek word “charis” which means “especially the divine influence in our heart and its reflection in the life of the believer including gratitude”.  We ask God for His grace….His influence to flow into our heart in a greater way as we keep in mind that our ability to believe and trust Him is based on what Christ had done for us.  We must take every thought captive…those thoughts that would be in direct contrast to the work of the cross and bring it into the obedience of the Gospel (which means GOOD NEWS) of Christ.

Let this word grow in your hearts!  You already have enough faith to move mountains when your faith is based in Christ and your identity is found IN HIM.

Blessings.