What is faith?

Question 07052

Saving faith is the hinge on which everything in the Christian life turns, and it is also the thing people most commonly misunderstand. Some treat it as a leap in the dark. Some treat it as a feeling they have to work up. Some treat it as agreeing with a list of propositions and then wonder why nothing in them has changed.

The Bible is far more concrete than any of that. Let me set out what faith actually is, what makes it saving, and why the strength of your grip matters far less than the strength of the one you are gripping.

What the Bible means by faith

The New Testament word is pistis, with its verb pisteuo, and the family of meanings runs through trust, reliance, confidence and faithfulness. It is not the vocabulary of speculation. In ordinary Greek it was the word you would use of entrusting your money to a banker or your case to an advocate. You do it because you have reason to.

The classic definition sits in Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Assurance and conviction are strong words, and neither of them means guesswork. What is unseen is not therefore uncertain. I have never seen the Battle of Hastings either, and I am entirely confident it happened.

So faith rests on testimony. Romans 10:17 says it “comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” God speaks, we hear, we trust. That is the shape of it every single time, and it explains why the preaching of the Word is never optional in a healthy church.

It is worth adding that faith is not a virtue God rewards. If it were, we would be saved by something in ourselves after all, and the whole logic of grace would collapse. Faith is the receiving of a gift, and nobody congratulates a beggar on the excellence of his open hand.

Saving faith is more than agreement

James is blunt about this in James 2:19. “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe, and shudder.” Demons have flawless theology and no salvation whatever. So intellectual assent, however correct, is not by itself saving faith.

The older writers used to break it into three parts, and the categories are still useful. There is knowing the content, agreeing that it is true, and then entrusting yourself to it personally. A man can know the rope will hold and agree that it will hold and still stand on the cliff top with his arms folded. Saving faith is the part where he puts his weight on it.

That is why I press people on the difference between believing about Jesus and believing on Jesus. The first is information. The second is a transaction of trust in which you stop relying on yourself entirely. I have gone further into that distinction in the article on saving faith and intellectual belief.

Notice too what saving faith does to a person. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, and then he packed up his household and left the only home he had. Trust that changes nothing is not the biblical article. Where saving faith is real it reorders a life, not as a payment for salvation but as the natural behaviour of someone who has genuinely put their weight somewhere new.

The object matters more than the intensity

Here is the most freeing thing I know about saving faith. Its power lies in its object, not in its own quality. Weak faith in strong ice will get you across the lake. Strong faith in thin ice will drown you. What saves is not the excellence of your believing but the sufficiency of the one believed.

Jesus made this point when He spoke about faith the size of a mustard seed in Matthew 17:20. He was not setting a minimum quantity to be achieved. He was saying that even a tiny trust attached to an enormous God accomplishes things, because the arithmetic was never about us in the first place.

The father in Mark 9:24 who cried “I believe; help my unbelief!” got everything he asked for. That is not tidy faith. It is honest faith with a crack running through it, and Jesus honoured it. If you are waiting until your faith is impressive before you come, you have misread the terms.

I find this liberating for another reason. It means saving faith can be exercised by people who are frightened, confused, ill, dying or barely able to string a sentence together. Salvation is not restricted to the articulate. If it depended on the quality of our believing, the strong minded would have an advantage, and the gospel would have become a competition.

Where saving faith comes from

Ephesians 2:8-9 says we are saved by grace through faith, “and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” Christians argue about exactly what the gift refers to, and I have worked through the grammar in the article on Ephesians 2:8-9. What is not in dispute is that the whole arrangement is God’s initiative and none of it is a human achievement.

God draws, convicts, reveals and enables. He does not believe on our behalf. Saving faith is genuinely ours in the act of exercising it, and genuinely His in every provision that makes it possible. Scripture holds both without embarrassment, and I am content to hold them the same way rather than tidying one of them away.

What I do not accept is the idea that a person must be regenerated before they are able to believe. The consistent New Testament pattern is that the one who believes receives life, as John 3:16 and John 20:31 both put it. Faith is the empty hand that receives, not the reward for hands already full.

God being the giver also explains why we can ask Him for more of it. The disciples did exactly that in Luke 17:5, “Increase our faith!” If faith were self generated there would be nobody to ask. Because it is a gift, praying for a stronger hold on Jesus is one of the most sensible prayers a Christian can offer.

And because it is a gift, it is not something to boast about or to look down on others for lacking. Paul says in Romans 12:3 that God has assigned a measure of faith. Different believers hold different measures, and the smaller measure is not a lesser Christian. It is simply a Christian at an earlier point on the road.

Faith and the evidence

Biblical faith is never asked to operate against evidence. Luke wrote his Gospel so that Theophilus might have certainty about the things he had been taught. Jesus offered Thomas His hands. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 lists eyewitnesses by name and points out that most of them were still alive and could be asked.

There is a popular idea that faith means believing things you have no reason to believe. That is not Christianity, and I would not want any part of it. Saving faith goes beyond what we can prove, as trust in a person always does, but it does not go against what we know.

So doubt is not the opposite of faith. Unbelief is. Doubt is faith with questions attached, and questions can be taken to God. If you have never done this, the NET Bible notes on John 20 are a good place to see how carefully the evidence was recorded in the first place.

This is why I have little patience with the idea that a Christian should not ask hard questions. Some of the most robust believers I know arrived at their confidence by asking everything they could think of and finding that the answers held. Faith that has never been examined is not stronger, it is just untested.

Faith that endures

Real faith keeps going, not because the believer is strong but because the God who gave it sustains it. Jesus told Peter in Luke 22:32, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail.” That prayer was answered on a night when Peter’s courage failed completely.

This is the answer to the person who fears their faith will one day give out. Your faith is held by hands that do not tire, and the security of the believer rests on the faithfulness of God rather than the consistency of our trusting.

Endurance shows itself over time in fruit, in love for other believers and in a growing hunger for God, which is why the biblical evidences of genuine salvation are worth knowing. They are not entry conditions. They are the signs of life that appear once life is there.

That said, endurance is not the same as never wobbling. Peter sank. Elijah wanted to die. John the Baptist sent messengers from prison to ask whether Jesus was really the one after all, and Jesus responded by sending evidence back and then praising John to the crowd. Wobbling is not disqualifying, and saving faith survives a great deal more turbulence than we tend to assume.

When your faith feels small

Nearly every Christian goes through seasons when believing is hard work. Bereavement does it. Illness does it. Long unanswered prayer does it. In those seasons the temptation is to examine our faith constantly, which is rather like digging up a seed each morning to check whether it is growing.

Better to feed it. Read the accounts of what God has actually done, sit under preaching, tell another believer where you are, and keep coming to the Lord’s Table where the promise is made visible. Faith grows by looking away from itself, and there is no exercise that strengthens it like attention to Jesus.

So, now what?

If you have never put your weight on Jesus, then do it. Not a leap in the dark but a step into the light, trusting what He has done rather than what you can manage. That is saving faith, and the smallest genuine act of it brings you into a salvation you could never earn.

If you are already His, stop measuring your faith and start feeding it. The question is not whether your grip is impressive. The question is whose hand you are in. Whose grip have you been relying on this week?

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1, ESV

One last encouragement. Every Christian you admire has had days when believing felt like carrying something uphill. What carried them was not a superior grade of saving faith but the same Saviour you have, holding the same promises He made to you.