Dear JimBob,
Is faith a gift or a discipline? I find myself wrestling with faith all the time. Do I need to pray for more faith?
Faithless
Dear Faithless,
I doubt very seriously that you’re actually “faithless.” You’re probably like me and simply want more faith. Wanting more faith is more than half the battle of becoming a person of faith. I’ve always said there are those who doubt in order to avoid belief and there are those who doubt in order to believe. If you’re a doubter who wants to believe, praise God. You’re in good company. Martin Luther, the author of the protestant reformation, was one of Christian history’s greatest doubters, yet he had enough faith for the Spirit to use him to create a powerful movement of God. Much of her adult life, Mother Theresa wrestled with deep doubt and a seeming lack of faith. Yet God used her to touch millions and be a shining example of genuine faith; which, in many respects, gets back to your original question, “Is faith a gift or a discipline?” My answer would be, “Yes,” to both. Yes, faith is a gift, and yes, faith is a discipline.
The Bible is full of references to faith being a gift. One of my favorite stories in the Bible is of the father of the demon possessed man who when asked by Jesus if he believed Jesus could heal his son, responded, “I believe. Help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). The man had enough belief in Jesus to bring his son to him, but he wasn’t really sure whether Jesus could actually do anything. The father wanted to believe, but he needed help believing. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul included faith in his list of some of the gifts of the Spirit. In Ephesians 2, Paul writes, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God…” (Eph. 2:8). John Wesley wrestled with whether even one’s ability to know Christ as Lord, to have enough faith to believe, was a gift from God. Obviously, faith is a gift that we can ask God to increase in our lives.
However, at one and the same time, faith is a discipline. Though there are those who have been given the gift of faith in spades—they have a boldness and passionate belief that puts my puny little faith to shame, all of us have been given or at least offered, some measure of faith. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the story of the master who gave three servants a different number of talents (money). The story really doesn’t say whether one servant deserved more talents than the other. It just simply says the master gave one servant 5, another 2, and another 1 talent. The Reader’s Digest version of the story is that upon the master’s return, each servant was asked what he did with the talents he was given. The servants who were given 5 and 2 doubled the master’s investment. They were rewarded. The servant who was given one talent, hid it and did nothing with it. Five preachers will give you five different sermons on this passage. I personally believe one of the primary points answers your question: Faith is a gift (a talent) given to us by God and whether we have more of it when the master returns is contingent on what we do with what we’ve been given; faith is also a discipline.
Some persons are more naturally “gifted” in sports than others. How far one goes with that gift is almost exclusively dependent on whether the gift is exercised and matured. The young lady who has been given 5 talents in basketball, but who through discipline and use works and matures those talents, 9 times out of 10 will defeat the 10 talent basketball player who has spent her hours watching TV instead of honing and maturing her gift.
Just in case I lost you with that analogy; we often mature and grow in faith when we put what faith we have to use. Too many of us (myself included at times) confuse faith with a feeling. We say that we’ll be obedient when God inspires us, when we feel more faithful. That’s one of the reasons why so few Christian ever see the mighty hand of God. God often calls, awaits our response, and THEN enables, empowers, and emboldens (gives us faith) once we’ve taken a step of faith, even if it’s a reluctant and fearful step. There’s a great illustration of this in the book of Joshua. The Hebrews are about to finally cross over into the promise land after 40 years of wandering in the desert. They’re facing the Jordan river at flood stage. The priests are told to put the ark of the covenant on their shoulders and march into the middle of the raging river. Most of us who want to have more faith would stand on the river bank praying to feel more faith so that we could reach a certain (or required) level of bold and fevered faith so that God would magically stop the river, then we would walk out on dry ground. God had already told them what he was going to do, they didn’t need enough faith to make God do it. They simply needed enough faith to take a step in God’s direction in order to see it done. The account reads, “Now the Jordan
The priests were given just enough faith to touch the water’s edge with their feet, but I can almost guarantee, because they exercised their faith, their faith increased mightily when they saw the water stop flowing. What is faith? It’s believing just enough to say, “Yes,” to God. The more we say, “Yes,” to God, the more we’ll discover we have become people of greater faith.
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