What is true, Biblical faith?
People have many misconceptions of what true Biblical faith is. Here’s a classic and all too prevalent example. I’ll summarize the error and give my answer.
The error: Faith means believing as hard as you can to get what you want. Some people think that faith is equivalent to the power of positive thinking, clad with a Christian veneer. It’s like Spirit-led mind over matter. Once you’ve thought positively hard enough about all the things you want in life to the point you become totally convinced they will happen, then you speak them out as if already accomplished, and the results are guaranteed.
This kind of faith generally starts with the idea that God wants you to be materially prosperous (see the chapter on money for that). Or that God wants you to be healthy. Or to have a happy family life. Or to become an influencer with a massive social media following. Or, more generally, that everything you want in life will come to pass and God will prevent any harm reaching your doorstep. Psalm 91 is often quoted to that end, which makes it interesting that the devil also quoted it to Jesus.
Your job then is to meditate on all these good things and become convinced in your mind that God will give them to you. Your posture of faith is what releases the harvest. Believe and you will receive.
But whatever you do, don’t commit the fatal mistake, which is negative thinking or confession. Negative confession is refusing to think any negative thought about myself. Refusing to entertain the possibility that God might be addressing sin or disobedience in my life. Refusing to believe that there might be something wrong about my pursuit of self-fulfilment. Therefore I am not going to speak words or think thoughts which allow for the possibility that what I want in life and what I’ve asked God to do for me may not happen. That can spoil your party really quickly. God will be displeased because above all he wants you to be you and get whatever you want. And God will not release blessing to you, because the release of blessing is determined in the end result by the words you speak. God is only a facilitator.
It’s easy to see how with this kind of thinking God can become an accessory to your personal desires, in which case we are only one step away from remaking him in our own image and worshipping an idol.
The answer: Faith is not about believing as hard as you can. This kind of teaching originated over one hundred years ago in the writings of E.W. Kenyon. It has been argued (though this is disputed) that Kenyon was influenced by the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Eddy taught that true reality is spiritual, not physical. God did not create a material world. God is Mind, and Jesus is not God, only an example of someone who moved past the material world into spiritual reality. Healing can be obtained through rising to a spiritual plane and denying the reality of things happening at the physical level. Illness, in the last result, is not actually real. It’s an illusion which can be dispelled by correct belief. Tragically, many Christian Scientists chose faith over medical treatment and wound up dead. Kenyon, for his part, rejected most of Eddy’s teachings, but hit upon the thought that we could obtain physical healing through speaking a word of faith. He believed that all we needed to claim healing was to believe it in our mind and speak it with our lips.
Kenyon, in turn, had a massive (and acknowledged) impact on the theology of the Word of Faith movement. Many of its teachers are well known. I am not denying that God used these individuals. That is not my place. But I don’t believe that healings came because they spoke words of faith without doubt and obligated God to produce what they wanted. I think they simply operated in Biblical gifts of healing or of faith sovereignly bestowed by God. Why otherwise would only some have been healed? Jesus was the only one to have a perfect success rate in the miraculous!
Things were further complicated by something Kenyon had not really envisioned: that the same words of faith which achieved divine healing could just as well be exercised to obtain other things. If there is no limit to what our mind can accomplish, and God is always at our disposal, why not go forbroke? As time went on, the teaching percolated down to people who desperately wanted blessings from God in their own lives. That blessing may not have been physical healing at all. It might have been more to do with image, popularity, even physical appearance. Or the money needed to achieve those goals. I remember so clearly seeing a picture of a car on a fridge someone was claiming in faith whenever they opened the fridge door. Whatever the nuances of the teaching, what people heard was that all they needed to do was exercise the word of faith, and the material world would come into submission to their verbal confession. Needless to say, multitudes experienced little but disappointment.
Mary Baker Eddy’s movement has largely disappeared, but vestiges of her influence have lived on. How many preachers out there are saying that by having the right attitude you can do anything you want, be anyone you want to be, and God’s role is just to make you happy and self-fulfilled?
The truth is that our words cannot create anything. Faith is a gift from God. It is not something our mind creates through positive believing. This should be a relief for most of us. One of the most honest cries in the Bible came from the desperate father who cried out to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!” Jesus answered his prayer precisely because he was willing to admit his mind was all over the place, but his heart was still crying out for help. Faith is not a matter of how hard we believe. Faith occurs when God meets our desperation through his deliverance. Faith is not generated by the mind. It is birthed through the Holy Spirit planting in our spirit an assurance that God is in charge even though we can scarcely believe it. The greatest prerequisite for receiving faith is an honest recognition that we cannot create it through mental belief or positive confession. The truth is that God’s power is always revealed in our weakness, in our desperate cry for help. But think for a moment. If we could create faith through positive confession, and if the performance of miracles depends on our positive confession, then why do we need God other than as an accessory to our faith?
The faith movement has misinterpreted two Biblical texts in particular. The first is 2 Cor. 4:13: “I believed, and so I spoke.” This is understood to mean that if we follow the two-step process of believing something we want and then speaking it out, God is obliged to meet our request. Apart from the fact God will not be controlled that way, this is not what Paul means. The apostle is in the midst of a painful crisis with the Corinthian church, one that has left him in despair and depression. And so he quotes Psalm 116:10: “I believed, even when I spoke, ‘I am greatly afflicted; I said in my alarm, ‘All mankind are liars.’” In the midst of his despair over the betrayal of the Corinthian believers for whom he has laid down his life, he cries out to God, giving his pledge of maintaining faith in God and loyalty to the gospel in spite of the disasters unfolding around him. To “believe” is not mental assent to certain prayer requests. To believe is to remain faithful to God in spite of the circumstances. His mind was telling him to give up, but deep in his spirit, and in the midst of his doubts, he cried out to God that he would remain faithful. God often shows up in the midst of our desperation. He meets us, as one theologian put it, “at the screaming point.” That is a hard place to be, but it’s often the place we meet the Lord. Think of the father who came to Jesus with his demonized son, reduced to crying out, “I believe! Help my unbelief!” It was that cry that moved Jesus to compassion and resulted in his prayer being answered.
The second misinterpreted text is Mark 11:23-24: “Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it and it will be yours.” Looking at the Mount of Olives, which at that moment he is facing, he tells his disciples that if they believe and do not doubt, they can speak to this mountain and tell it to be cast into the sea. The reference to the mountain can only be understood in light of the passage Jesus is alluding to in Zechariah 14. There, the Mount of Olives(the same mountain Jesus is telling us to speak to) will be split in two, and a river will flow from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea. Jesus is referring tot he coming of the kingdom, initiated in his earthly ministry and culminating at his return. Mountains in the Old Testament represent strongholds, either of God or of the enemy. In this case, the Mount of Olives represents something standing in the way of the will of God. Jesus is telling us is that we have authority to ask God to remove anything which stands against the eternal purposes of God. He does not say that we have authority to name and claim anything we want. We can only ask God for what is in his eternal will.
Despite the undoubted ways God has used many of its leaders, the Word of Faith movement has unintentionally diminished God by exalting our response to him as the critical factor in what he does. In the end, we wind up with a smaller concept of God, and a bigger concept of what in the end is our own useless humanity. We live in a world which sets out to make us little gods, which says that image and appearance are everything, but sooner or later we find out it doesn’t work. And that’s when we need to find a real God, a God who is not at our beck and call, a God who is sovereign, but a God who comes into our world of failure and sets us free.
It should be a massive relief to us that God looks at our heart obedience, not the day to day state of our mind and thoughts. He understands the struggles we are going through trying to pay off student debt, maintain an image on social media, pay the mortgage, raise kids and work for employers who demand everything but don’t give any security in return. That’s a tough place to be. God wants to take us in our place of weakness and give us strength to get through it.
