I would love to start out with a joke here, but there really aren’t any good jokes out there about faith. The motive behind a joke in this instance would be to lighten the mood. Too often when we talk about faith, it’s so serious. Faith seems difficult and even frustrating at times. But I don’t think it was meant to be that way. It was never intended to be a bad thing or a stressful thing. Jesus told people that it was their faith that healed them. He told them that they could have whatever it was that they had faith to believe for. Faith is good. Faith is how we receive. The word “faith” should make us smile, not give us anxiety!
Faith is one of the roadblocks that kept me from receiving healing for many years, and I believe it’s a key reason why more people aren’t seeing what they’re believing for coming to pass. But it’s probably not for the reason you think. I hear people all the time saying, “I must not have enough faith to receive because I’m not seeing any change.” “I don’t have strong enough faith to believe for that!” It hurts my heart to hear one believer tell another believer, “Well, if your faith was strong enough, you wouldn’t be dealing with this right now.”
All of these statements are absolutely untrue. The problem isn’t that they don’t HAVE enough faith or that they need STRONGER faith to receive, but the problem is that they don’t THINK they have enough faith, they don’t THINK they have strong enough faith. And since they don’t think they have enough, they are constantly trying to get more of something that they already have. They’re like a dog chasing its tail or a hamster on a wheel. Run, run, run, and go absolutely nowhere. But the enemy knows that if he can keep them busy chasing something they already have, then they’re not going to be focused on what’s really keeping them from receiving…and that’s unbelief.
Picture faith and unbelief on a weight scale, with faith on one side and unbelief on the other. If you have an equal amount of faith and unbelief, that scale in going to stay even. As that relates to you, you won’t see any change in your circumstances or see what you’re believing for. Now imagine adding more weight to the side of unbelief. What happens? The amount of faith didn’t change, but unbelief begins to outweigh it. This results in your faith becoming inactive/ineffective, causing a worsening of your problems. But reverse that, remove the doubt, and your faith (still the same amount) outweighs the doubt, becomes active and effective, and you begin to see a change in your circumstances.
I’m going to do a complete teaching on unbelief/doubt and how to eliminate it from your life, so I’m not going to focus on that here, but I do want to ask, and focus on, one specific question about faith today. The question:
Do I have enough faith right now, today, to receive all of God’s promises to me?
Let’s cut straight to the answer: Yes. Absolutely. You do have the faith you need right now to receive whatever it is you’re believing for. I can answer this with such confidence because it is what the Word tells us, and I’m going to show that to you now. Don’t take my word for it. See it for yourself.
Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV) says, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.” Did you see it? The faith you have to be saved (saving faith) is not something you naturally possess. It is a gift from God. Before you get this supernatural kind of faith, all you have is your human faith. Human faith relies on your five senses. If you can see, hear, smell, taste, or touch it, you can have faith in it with your human faith. For example, if you see a chair, even having never sat in it, you have faith that that chair will support and hold you up — natural faith. But having faith to be born again, to believe in something you can’t see, to believe that a Man that you never knew died on a Cross for you and took every sin and sickness into His own body, and then He was raised to life again after being dead for three whole days? Well, that takes the God-kind of faith, and this verse tells us that kind of faith is His gift to us.
So, you now know faith is a gift, but when do you receive that gift? Romans 10:17 says, “So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” God’s Word contains His faith. You receive that gift of supernatural faith, saving faith — God’s faith — when you hear the Gospel message, the message about Christ. That faith that you’re given then enables you to believe that message, and then it’s your choice to receive it by accepting Christ as your Lord and Savior.
So it’s a gift and you receive that gift when you accept Christ. So far, so good. The next logical question is: How much faith is it? Is it a little? Is it a lot? Romans 12:3 says, “For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith [emphasis mine].” You have been given the measure. Not just any measure, but the measure. We all get the same faith when we believe. I believe this is true because Romans 2:11 says that God is not a respecter of persons, which means he doesn’t play favorites. He won’t give one person a couple of dump truck loads full of faith and another person merely a teaspoon-sized amount!
I also don’t believe God would make you promises that have to be received by faith — and all of His promises have to be received by faith — and then not equip you with enough faith to receive them. That would be like dangling His promises out in front of you like a chunk of gold and then making you struggle and work and strive to grab it, never quite being able to reach it. That’s not how He works. He is all about you winning. He’s about you succeeding. He’s about you receiving. This is exactly why He sent his son to die for you and then gave you the faith you’d need to benefit from that sacrifice.
Now that we’ve talked about the “how” and the “amount” of the equation of faith, let’s talk a bit about the “type” of faith that we received from God. We’ll find an example from the Word about the actual type of faith that we possess in 2 Peter 1:1 (KJV). It says, “Simon Peter, a bondservant and apostle for Jesus Christ, to those who have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ.”
I want you to zero in on the words “like precious faith.” This means having the same characteristics or qualities as, equal to, the same as, or identical to. And who is he talking to in this verse? Those who have received that faith through the righteousness of Jesus. And who is that? Stated most simply, it’s those who have believed in the completed works of Jesus Christ on the Cross (as we just saw in Ro 10:17). That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing less. So, is Peter saying here that if you are born again, you have faith of equal value, equal weight and equal strength like his? Yes, he is. You have the same walk-on-water (Matt 14:28-31), heal-the-lame (Acts 3:6), raise-the-dead (Acts 9:40) kind of faith as Peter had!
I want to take a closer look at Peter’s walk-on-water faith as illustrated in Matthew 14. The account begins in verse 22 with Jesus telling the disciples to get into their boat and to cross over to the other side. On the way across, the wind starts blowing and the waves start tossing them around. As they’re struggling to reach the other side, Jesus comes walking out to them on the water. This is where we’ll pick up in verses 28 through 31:
“And Peter answered Him and said, ‘Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.’ So He said, ‘Come.’ And when Peter had come down out of the boat, he walked on the water to go to Jesus. But when he saw that the wind was boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink he cried out, saying, ‘Lord, save me!’ And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and caught him, and said to him, ‘O you of little faith, why did you doubt?’”
Most people focus on the fact that Peter failed because he sunk, but I like to focus on the fact that he walked on water with, as Jesus described it, a little bit of faith! Yes, he sunk when he started to doubt, but he still was able to walk on the water! This is yet another great example that it’s not about the amount of faith you have, but it’s really the unbelief that keeps you from receiving.
Let’s just take a bit more time to see what else just a “little” faith can do. In Luke 17:6, Jesus says, “If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be pulled up by the roots and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a mustard seed before, but it’s a tiny little thing. This is the power of the faith that is inside of you. When you mix that faith with God’s promises to you, you will receive what you’re believing for. Notice, too, that this was Jesus’ response to the disciples asking Him to increase their faith. He told them that they didn’t need more faith, but that they needed to use what they had!
Matthew 17:20 also talks about the power of mustard-seed-sized faith. Jesus says that if you speak to your mountain and tell it to get up and move, it will do it. He also added a short statement that would behoove you to repeat over and over again, perhaps out loud with some moxie, until it gets deep down into your heart: “… nothing will be impossible for you!” Just a quick jaunt down a small rabbit trail: What’s your mountain that you need to speak to? Is it disease and sickness that’s been with you for a while now? Get angry at the unlawful invader and tell it to get out of your body!
In Matthew 17:20 Jesus was addressing the disciples’ question of why they couldn’t cast the demon out of a sick boy. Ultimately, Jesus said it was due to the unbelief in their lives. The first four words in Matthew 17:20 are, “Because of your unbelief.” It was never about the size or amount of faith they had, but the fact they were not using and believing in what they had all along. There comes a point in time where you just have to ask yourself if you actually believe what God’s Word says about you and what you have the ability to do. Not just casually picking and choosing a few verses here and there that may apply, but honest to goodness, staking yourself to the ground, not wavering believing — faith — in exactly what His Word says.
So, let’s recap a few things. You have the faith right now to speak to your mountain and see it move. With little faith, you can receive every single thing that God has promised you in His word. You received the gift of supernatural faith when you heard the Gospel message and believed. You have like precious faith with Peter. You have raise-the-dead faith. You have walk-on-water faith. You have the faith that you need right now to receive everything God’s grace has provided for you.
After reading this article, you may be saying to yourself, “I don’t feel like I have faith like Peter.” That’s the problem right there. You’re still relying on what one of your five senses (feeling) is telling you. You’re trying to use your human faith to believe for something spiritual. And that just doesn’t work. The only way that will change for you — to stop relying on your human faith and start relying on your God-given faith — is if you renew your mind to the Word (Ro 12:2). You can start doing that by taking these scriptures, looking at them every day, and speaking them out loud so your human ears hear the Word that you’re speaking. It’s a start!
So the question of “Do I have enough faith?” should be answered by everyone with a resounding yes! Make this your declaration today:
I have all the faith I need right now to receive everything I’m believing for, and I will no longer be deceived by the enemy telling me any different. I choose to use the faith that I have!”