Faith, then, is trust in God or believing in God. In fact, there is only one Greek word (pistis) used in the New Testament for “faith,” “trust,” or “belief.” We aren’t called to just “believe that” God exists, but rather to “believe in” God and to “believe in” Jesus (Acts 16:31). As an analogy, picture a modern-day action movie. Someone is perilously hanging from the edge of a cliff. The hero reaches out his muscular arm to pull the frightened person to safety. The hero says, “Take my hand.” The other person replies, “I can’t. I’m scared!” The hero says, “Do you believe in me?” The person hanging from the ledge says, “Yes.” The hero responds, “Then take my hand.” We understand that if the individual in danger actually has faith in the hero, they will commit themselves to the hero by taking the hero’s hand. Then, of course, the hero pulls the person to safety—tragedy averted! Whew! Having faith in God is kind of like that.
Faith means believing in God by committing our whole self to God and God’s ways. Faith is not, as some prosperity teachers suggest, “a spiritual force, a spiritual energy, a spiritual power.” Faith does not, then, make “the laws of the spirit world function.”8 Rather, having faith simply means that you believe and trust in the Lord. It means you believe that God is able. You have faith that God cares for you. You trust God for your salvation. This is what faith is.
Faith ≠ Positive Confession
This means faith is not equal to positive confession. Some prosperity gospel teachers have claimed that you need to exercise your faith by confessing what you desire—only then will God give you what you wish for. This implies that our confession must always be positive. That is, they claim, “We as believers, as Christians, should never talk defeat. We should never talk failure. If you talk about your trials, your difficulties, your lack of faith, your lack of money—faith will shrivel and dry up.”9 The idea is that we should not engage in negative confession because we will end up inviting bad events into our lives. Such negative confession is, they wrongly suppose, the opposite of faith, whereas positive confession is how we express our faith. Therefore, some claim that “if you confess sickness, it will develop sickness within your system. If you talk about your doubts and fears, they will become stronger. If you confess the lack of finances, it will stop the money from coming in.”10 This is dangerous teaching. First, the concept of exercising your faith is not found in the Bible. More important, though, the Bible never teaches us to deny our present circumstances by pretending that negative things aren’t happening in our lives.
Stop and think for a moment about the logic of positive confession teaching. It makes little sense. Positive confession leaves little to no room for lamenting, and there is a whole book in the Bible called Lamentations. One would feel trapped in a world of depression, sickness, and fear, because to talk about such experiences would open the door to those things. You could never really admit you are sick. You would be able to call someone to pray for you, but you couldn’t tell them why to pray for you, because if you admitted that you were sick, that would be a negative confession, which would welcome sickness into your life. Yet Scripture never instructs us to deny our symptoms.
Many sincere Christians have wasted their time trying to “exercise their faith”—and this is not faith—by trying to convince themselves through positive confession that God has already healed them, even though they are still suffering from sickness. We don’t manipulate God with our confession. Instead, we must humbly come to God, and like the man who had leprosy, kneel and acknowledge, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean” (Matthew 8:2).
Faith ≠ Expectations
To further explain the meaning of faith, faith does not equal expectations. I have heard too many preachers claim that God won’t work in your life if you don’t expect God to. Following this line of thinking, some claim, if you don’t expect God to heal you, it won’t happen. We need to be clear though. Our faith is in God, not in what God may or may not do, and not in whether or not God is going to heal someone. Our faith is in God—period. We believe in God—period. We trust in God—period—even when healing doesn’t come. On the one hand, if I expect nothing from God, then I probably don’t have faith in God. Given that God cares for us, I expect that God will provide for me and heal some people. Faith, however, comes first, then expectations. These are not the same thing. God asks us to have faith, not necessarily to expect. The result is that we can have great faith and trust in God, even when we have little to no expectations of God producing certain results. Again, faith doesn’t equal expectations. It is too much to claim that expectancy “sets the stage for a miracle. . . . It influences Heaven. It starts things to happen.”11 On the other hand, we can affirm that our faith in God may set the stage for a miracle.
A few verses in the Bible might appear, on the face of it, to contradict what I’m saying. I think especially of Mark 11:23–24 and James 1:6–7. The passage from James reads, “But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea. . . . That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” From these verses, it might seem that faith is the same as expectation. Furthermore, at first glance this passage almost makes it sound like if you have the right kind of faith, you will always get what you pray for.
When we continue to read through James, however, we learn that sometimes people do not receive what they pray for because they “ask with wrong motives” and are primarily concerned with their own “pleasures” (James 4:3). Plus, if we remember that faith means trusting in God and being committed to God, it is clear that when James said we “must believe” (1:6), he wasn’t indicating that we must have expectant certainty. Rather, he meant that we must give our full loyalty to God. And when James said we must “not doubt,” he wasn’t saying we can’t have any mental doubts that God might not do what we are asking for. Instead, he meant that our faith and commitment to God must not waver . . . “like a wave” (v. 6). In other words, the book of James calls us to have faith, which is total allegiance to God and trust in God, because God “gives [wisdom] generously” (1:5).12
The meaning of Mark 11:23–24 is similar to the meaning of the previous passage from James. In these verses, Jesus declared, “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” This passage is not a universal and unconditional promise that we will always get what we pray for if we expect we will get it. Even proponents of prosperity teaching, such as Fred Price, recognize that when Jesus speaks of “whatever you ask for in prayer” (Mark 11:24), it doesn’t mean that a woman can pray and “believe God for” or “claim” the husband of her choice, or that a man can realistically expect to “believe that I can eat as much of this cherry pie as I want and it is not going to make me fat” (these comical examples are real life stories Fred Price has encountered).13
Even faith, when rightly understood (as trust and commitment), doesn’t guarantee the outcome we desire. We know this because Jesus added another aspect of effective prayer in the following verse: forgiveness (v. 25). In light of this, and the rest of the Bible’s teaching on prayer, it is clear that in Mark 11:23–24, Jesus’ primary concern is that he wants to encourage his disciples to “have faith in God” when they pray (v. 22). This passage, then, is not a guarantee that all mountains will be moved when we pray with expectation, but an appeal that we must have faith in God if we are going to see any mountains moved.14 Similarly, when Jesus stated, “Ask and it will be given to you . . . For everyone who asks receives” (Matthew 7:7–8), he was not making a guarantee that God will give us everything we ask for; rather, these words are simply meant to encourage us to ask God for whatever we need, given that God will “give good gifts to those who ask him” (v. 11).
Faith Beyond Our Expectations
So Martha still had faith in Jesus, even though she wasn’t expecting Jesus to raise her brother from the dead. And God worked in a way that was different from and beyond what she was expecting. Jesus told her that her brother would rise again, and Martha agreed that Lazarus would “rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24)—as in, “when everyone else rises.” Jesus then told people to move the stone that was covering the entrance to the tomb where Lazarus was buried, but Martha objected: “By this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days” (v. 39). Again, she was not expecting Jesus to raise her brother from the dead. But that is precisely what Jesus did. Thank God that God is not limited by our expectations! While it is good and right for us to expect things from God, our faith is not in what we expect God to do. Our faith always has to be in God.
Faith is not a technique we use to manipulate God to heal us or give us anything else in life. When people think there is some sort of a faith recipe for healing—whether it’s having enough faith, exercising their faith through positive confession, or expecting things from God—they have taken their eyes off of God and put them on themselves. They have put faith in faith, rather than putting their faith in God, and turned God into a cosmic bellhop who is required to do whatever we ask if only we will use the right faith technique. Again, faith is simply our belief in and trust in God.
How Much Faith?
Even after we recognize the true meaning of faith, the question might linger: How much faith is required before God will heal someone? People can have different levels of faith. Remember that faith also means “trust,” and some people do trust God more than others. And so, “the apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’” (Luke 17:5). It is wrong, however, to think God only responds to people who have lots of faith or, perhaps, people who have victorious faith, whatever that means. It would seem strange to think that anyone with faith can be saved by Jesus Christ, but that for someone to receive an answer to prayer—for example, for healing—they need to have a whole lot of faith. Is God gracious only in salvation? No, God is always gracious. And God heals people out of compassion and grace, not because people deserve healing due to their levels of faith.
The Bible only records two instances when Jesus commended people for their “great faith.” In one story, a Roman centurion asked Jesus to heal his paralyzed servant, who was “suffering terribly” (Matthew 8:6). Jesus asked if he should go to heal him, but the Roman replied, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it” (vv. 8–9). Jesus was amazed at the centurion’s response and praised his great faith.
The other instance involves a Canaanite woman who approached Jesus on behalf of her daughter, who was “demon-possessed and suffering terribly” (Matthew 15:22). Jesus probed the woman’s faith, testing her to see if she (and those around her) recognized the universal love of God, and the woman did not relent in her request. As a result, Jesus assured her, “you have great faith” (v. 28). In both of these stories, Jesus did not say that he decided to heal the person because of the amount of faith they had. Rather, he simply observed their great faith. Why did he do this? Biblical scholars agree that the reason Jesus highlighted the faith of these two people is that Jesus was commending these non-Jewish people—a Roman centurion and a Canaanite woman—in order to encourage his Jewish audience to have the same faith in him that these Gentiles had, and to challenge the common Jewish belief that God’s grace did not extend to the Gentiles. That’s why Jesus said to the Roman centurion, “I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith” (Matthew 8:10).15
Little Faith
As with great faith, Jesus did not speak often of a person having “little faith,” and when he did, it was never in connection to healing. Once, Jesus said that those who don’t trust God to provide for their basic needs have little faith, given that “God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire” (Matthew 6:30). On another occasion, Jesus observed the disciples’ little faith when they were afraid their boat was going to sink during a “furious storm” (Matthew 8:24–26). And many sermons have been preached on the story of Peter walking on water. He began to sink, and Jesus then remarked on his “little faith” (Matthew 14:31). Finally, Jesus mentioned the little faith of the disciples when they were concerned about their lack of bread, even though Jesus had already miraculously provided bread on more than one occasion (Matthew 16:8–10).
Sometimes I can identify with the people in these stories and their “little faith.” But these stories about little faith aren’t discouraging. On the contrary, we see through the people in the stories that Jesus worked miracles despite their little faith. Just as God is not limited by our expectations, God is not limited by our level of faith. And so, Jesus saved the disciples and calmed the stormy sea, even though they had little faith. And Peter may have begun to sink, but he still walked on water. I seem to remember Jesus saying something about having “faith as small as a mustard seed” (Matthew 17:20).
When Jesus spoke of faith and healing, he rarely mentioned how much faith people had. Instead, Jesus just spoke generally about “your faith” (Mark 10:52). At the same time, it does seem that unbelief can hinder miracles. When Jesus was teaching in the synagogue in his hometown, many people “took offense at him,” and the Bible tells us that, as a result, Jesus “did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith [or, more accurately in some Bible translations, their unbelief]” (Matthew 13:57–58). The people in Jesus’ hometown didn’t believe in him because they didn’t understand who he was. Nevertheless, Jesus still “laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them” (Mark 6:5 ESV). And I am reminded once again that God is not limited by the amount of faith I have, or by the faith of anyone else for that matter.
The teaching that we need lots of faith to be healed has ironically led to fewer healings because it can make people too scared to pray for healing since they fear they don’t have great faith. Rather than giving up on prayer, whenever you feel like your faith is small, you can cry out to God, “I believe; help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24 ESV).
Healing or No Healing
You may be left wondering, what then shall I do? Or, how should I pray for healing? If you think you must use a specific technique or formula when praying for healing, you may have a hangover from prosperity teaching. We cannot manipulate God into being gracious toward us—grace is a gift, and that means we don’t create it and we don’t earn it. We should pray for healing, and we should do so with faith in God. After all, God “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). And so we should pray. But we should also remember that there is no right way to pray. History sho
ws us that God has responded to all kinds of different people with different ways of praying for healing. Some praying for others to be healed touched them, at times anointing them with oil. Others merely spoke. Some prayed loudly, while others were quiet and calm. Some prayed for an extended period of time, while others saw healing instantly. Some received a revelation from God about a coming healing, and others just prayed with hope. Some were in a church service, some were not. And some had peculiar teaching, while others didn’t.16
So what about Jim who looked into his mirror, confessed his healing, and was healed and released from the hospital? In light of all I find in the Bible, I am convinced that God did heal Jim. But I am also convinced that it was not because of how Jim acted. It was not because of Jim at all. Instead, God, in grace, responded to Jim’s faith. The story might not have ended as it did, though. Many people with great faith, even those who have “claimed their healing,” have continued to suffer through their pain. And many have died in the midst of having great faith.
Sometimes we are too prone to look for God only in the victory of Christ’s resurrection, and by analogy in the victory of our present healings. We need to remember, however, that God was also present in the suffering of the cross of Christ, and by analogy in our present sufferings. In the midst of suffering, we can affirm with Paul that God’s “grace is sufficient” (2 Corinthians 12:9). And just as we pray (and should pray) for God to heal people through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can also pray for God’s grace to endure suffering. Blessed be the name of the Lord!
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