Faith is a weird thing. We all put faith into different things, and most people think of religious stuff first when they hear that word. Here are three questions for you:
- Do you have faith?
- In what?
- Where does that faith come from?
I remember reading O Me of Little Faith by Jason Boyett. He talks about how he’s never been able to just believe in things, basics of Christianity mostly, as easily as some people he knows. It’s like some people just naturally have better faith than others.
I understand this gap in the levels of faith mostly in Christianity as I’ve seen so many people from diverse backgrounds walk through life with a wide range of doubt. I always believed a little easier than some but was never free of skepticism, especially as I’ve gotten older. So why is it that some of us are so full of belief in God while the rest of us never escape the struggle of significant doubt?
There’s this idea in Romans 12:3 that says “Be honest in your evaluation of yourselves, measuring yourselves by the faith God has given us.” The key idea is that faith itself may be something we have, but it’s a gift first, something that is given to us by God.
I once heard someone say, “My faith sucks…” Many people, myself included, often feel like we have weak faith or lose it altogether at times. At the same time, the Bible says that God is the “author” of our faith and that faith is not something we produce ourselves. Rather, it’s a gift from God.
So how does that work? If we have weak faith does that mean God gives us that weak faith?
This sounds like one of those miserable cause and effect questions from those standardized tests I always bombed, so the more I think about this the more I feel like a rhinoceros is trying to punch an escape hole through my brain, but it seems like a question important enough to wrestle with.
Consider the question this way: Do some people struggle to believe in a God they love because that God hasn’t given them as much faith as others?
Looking at this whole section of Romans, it sounds like our very faith is like the individual gifts we’re given. We can do some things better than others like how I’m better at teaching than singing. So maybe some of us are just better at faith while the rest are designed to suck at faith.
In thinking through these questions, I’ve come up with three things I believe to be true:
- Faith can grow or increase, especially based on personal experience which I’ll come back to in a future post.
- God gives us faith as needed. It sounds like God has a giant Faith Pez and can pop out extra doses when things get rough.
- Doubt is okay. Those who doubt first often make a great impact.
Do you struggle to have faith?
Do you believe we all have as much faith as we’re supposed to have?
