We all wish to please God.  Don’t you?  Then you need faith, for without it you cannot please Him.  Cannot.  Impossible.  Not possible.  Got it yet? 

We must believe that God is.  You can’t see Him — although if you are a Christian, then you undoubtedly have experienced Him.  But you cannot see Him.  You must believe in God by faith.  And by faith you (or at least most of you) believe that God is a rewarder of you — at least spiritually, right?  God is good and He gives us good things.

Luke 11:11
If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish?

Father God wants good for His children.  He does not issue bad to you; He does not use cursed things to teach you.  But more on that in a later post.  He loves you.  And He wants you to please Him — to love Him, to have faith in Him. 

So how do we aquire this thing called faith?

Romans 10:17
 So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

This is where it starts.  Faith comes by hearing; hearing comes by the word of God.  We must delve into the Word if we expect to develop faith.  If we do not spend time in the Word, then we should not expect God to give faith into our lives.

Luke 12:48b
For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.

God will give us some faith; much is required with it.  When we use it and build it and excercise it, then God is pleased and He will give us more.  Much is required at each step.  With faith we are to please our Father in Heaven.

Remember that Jesus many times looked at the disciples and stated “Oh, ye of little faith!”  These are Jesus’ right hand men.  And they were more than once accused of having “little faith.”  And we stand around and claim such wonderfully strong faith?  Do you do this at all?  We can test with scripture just how strong your faith is.  See Mark 11:24; are you getting what you ask for?  Always?

Probably not, eh?  That’s ok, though.  Only Jesus was perfect.  You are told to work on having faith simply the size of the mustard seed.  Just start out small.  But …. start out.  Have faith.  God gave you faith to believe Him and accept your salvation.  And when you pleased Him by accepting His offer, He would have raised the bar.  And He would have given you the faith for the next step.  What you do with it is up to you.  Are you ready to step out of the boat?

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

What do we see here?  Faith is substance.  It is the tangibility of those things you hope for.  If you have faith, your hope is within reach.  It is the evidence of things not seen.  Hmm.  We live in a physical world, although we are spirit.  God breathed into man His spirit and gave us life.  So while there is a lot of activity around us in an invisible world–  between angels and demons, fighting over us, over our souls — we still live in a physical world.  Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden, told to tend and keep it.  Even after being evicted they were told to till the ground.  So there is the physical and there is the spiritual. 

The spiritual realm is the invisible realm and all things are there.  Through our faith we can pull those things into existence here.  Realize that God is the Creator.  We do not create.  But with faith we have the substance and the evidence of somthing that we do not have in the physical, something that we hope for, something that we can not see.

Read this again, and ponder each word carefully.

Then let’s look here next:

Mark 11:22-26
²² So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. ²³ For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. ²⁴ Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.   
²⁵ “And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. ²⁶ But if you do not forgive, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.” 

So now we have Hebrews, which shows a definition, if you will, of faith; and we have Mark where we get a vivid example of the use of faith by Jesus.  Do you experience the kind of faith that Jesus speaks of here in Mark?  Verse 23 says that if you believe and do not doubt, then you can have whatever you say.  Do you experience this?

Either the Bible is not telling the truth…or you are not fulfilling the requirements of what Jesus is teaching here.  Of course, we could take a third alternative and conclude that the Bible does not mean what it clearly says here; many do that in orthodox religion today.  Their experiences do not live up to the claim, so therefore the claim must not be what it says.

So, no, let us not stoop to redefining what God has inspired Mark to write.  Greek is quite clear and this set of verses is as clear as they can be (plus other Bible verses support the concept as we will study later).  So let’s take God at His Word and ask:  does our walk in faith live up to this set of verses.  If not, then why not?