God Does Not Supply Faith

"And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him."  Hebrews 11:6

During a recent Bible study, I made the statement, "God does not supply faith."  This was a shock to some, confusing to others and confirming to others still.  The context was that we were contemplating faith in Mark 9:14-29, particularly verse 24, in which a distraught father desiring healing for his son cried out to Jesus saying, "I do believe; help my unbelief."  To most present, it was felt that the man was asking Jesus for an additional measure of faith as if it was something that could be inserted, integrated and made to be a thought and behavior influencing part of a person as if it were some type of software upload.  It does not work like that.

God gave all humans free will.  This means we have the ability to choose God or not.  We can believe in Him or not.  We can have faith or not.  To have faith, we must make a deliberate decision to believe and put confidence in all things, God.  Romans 10:10, 17 states, "for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation... So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ."  What this reveals is that the Lord provides the information.  Having been exposed to it via sermons, classes, study or any other presentation of the word, we then can choose to have faith based upon the information supplied.

Beloved, we so often pray that things would be given to us.  While there is nothing wrong with this, it is important to understand how things typically work. God does His part but requires a part from us. We pray for strength.  God does not supernaturally impute our bodies and psyches with enhanced ability, but he does put us in circumstances through which that strength can be developed and grow.  It works the same way with faith.  If after having a favorable response to information from and about God, faith is developed and grown by learning more about Him, spending more time with Him, trusting self less, and trusting Him more (Prov 3:5-7).  Through these and other ways of living righteously, He will manifest himself to us more and more.  We will ever more clearly see Him moving in our lives and this is what builds faith over time.

We all have gaps, lapses and failures in our faith.  Even the disciples felt the sting of the words, "oh ye of little faith" from time to time.  When these very human moments occur, let us not hope for some magical increase in our ability to stay on the narrow path.  Let us instead avail ourselves of more information from and about our Lord and resolve to trust in Him with a renewed enthusiasm.  Faith is a choice.

In pursuit of a transformed life,

Lee

A Pleasing Faith 8/22/2012

"And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him." Heb 11:6

Trusting others comes hard for some. Trusting the unseen God can be even harder. Perhaps this is so because people have let us down in the past. We feel that the only one we can truly rely upon is our self.

Beloved, the Holy Spirit inspired admonition to have faith in God comes in the midst of a listing of individuals who did just that, often at their own peril or that of loved ones.

• Abel offered a more excellent sacrifice to God than his murderous brother Abel
• Enoch lived such a faithful life that God took Him straight to heaven without having died
• Noah built an ark and saved his family when it had never before rained
• Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son
• Rahab went against her whole village to hide those of God's people spying out the land

The list goes on.  If our progenitors in the faith trusted God in this monumental ways and were never disappointed, can we not trust Him with our relatively small things?  Let us constantly seek to please Him by living the faith that we claim.

Rejoicing in the Lord,

Lee