The Need to Grow in Faith

(Overcomer Wu)

“But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith...” -- Jude 1:20

We enter into our new life in Christ through faith. Yet faith is not only the entrance into that life, but it is also the condition that needs to be maintained in all our spiritual life and the measure of growth and progress in that life. It behooves us, therefore, to build ourselves up in the most holy faith (Jude 1:20). As with most life form, faith must be strengthened and nourished for it to grow. However, our growth in faith is often contrary to our natural concepts and thoughts. We often suppose that faith is made strong by receiving great outward encouragement, by having abundant and instantaneous answers to our prayer, by a high emotional states of joy, or by lofty visions of divine things. In reality, these things do not strengthen our faith as much as we imagine. Our faith is to be nourished on the Word of God even as Romans 10:17 tells us in no uncertain term that faith comes by the Word of God Those promises are contained in His written Word. When God first called Abraham, He inundated him with a list of promises. He spoke to him from the sky above and by the visitation of angels, of which one of them is a Christophany (a pre-incarnate appearance of Christ). Abraham saw great fields of hope – great promises of God for himself and his posterity. Abraham feast upon and stood on these promises of God's Word until his faith became nourished and strengthen to press onward when as yet there were no sight of any of their fulfillment.

Likewise, God deals with His people today in a similar way but to a greater degree because we are living in the New Testament era. Yet when He calls any one to great degrees of perfection or of usefulness, He begins by opening up to them the promises of His Word, and the goals to which God intend to bring him even before there are any outward signs of their impending fulfillment. The heart that anchors itself on the promises of God, which are now all contained in His completed divine revelation – the Bible, until those promises become as real as the God Who gave them, will have strong faith.

Another great nourishment to grow our faith is the removing from the soul of our natural and human props. Naturally we lean on a great many things in nature (e.g. your friends), in society (e.g. your financial stability), and even in the Church (e.g. some dead rituals that are not helpful), more than we are aware of. We think we depend on God alone and never dream of how much we depend on other things until God allows them to be taken from us to see how we would react. If indeed our faith rest upon God and His Word alone, the removal of these things will not in any way cause our faith to be shaken. If however our faith is being artificially held up by all the props and they were not removed, we would go on being self-deceived, thinking that we relied on God for all things. God desires and designs our faith to be founded in Him and His Word alone. Thus, He will remove all other foundations and detach us from all other supports, one after another until we are not only exposed of our lack of faith for having it founded on other flimsy sandy foundations, but are driven to place our faith on the solid rock of Himself and His Word.

Yet there are many Christians who cannot endure this utter desolation of their unreliable secondary supports. It would be more than they could bear bear at the moment. They would react in open rebellion against God. Therefore, God allows them to continue to hold on to their props at the expense of not growing in their faith. Examples of such spiritual protracted infancy were seen among some of the saints in Corinth (1 Cor 3:1-2) and some of the Hebrew saints (Heb 5:12-13). In both of these passages, we are told that they were only able to feed their faith on the milk of God's Word and not the more advanced solid food contained in God's Word because they are unwilling to pay the price to acquire them. Yet to those who are willing to undergo the strain of faith by foregoing their props, God allows all sorts of disappointments and hardships – the multiplied infirmities of the body and mind, the extinguishing of bright hopes, missed great opportunities, the alienation of earthly friendships or loss of wealth and property, the misunderstanding of dear ones, etc. – until the landscape of their lives seems swept with a level 5 hurricane, with the eventual result of compelling their heart and soul to rest itself in none other than God Himself and His Word alone.

Oftentimes, when the soul is having all secondary support removed, it does not perceive what is taking place within itself. And it is not necessary for us to know as long as we do not turn our back against God during such fiery trials. Afterwards it finds that faith has been growing and expanding with every wave that beats against it. Faith grows when we least expect it. Ultimately, we shall find that trials and tribulations, hardships and conflicts are God's main fertile field for growing our faith.

In the most advance stage of our faith life, our faith is not only is nourished by the removal of earthly props, but even by the removal of divine consolation. Our prayers seem to be hitting against a brass heavenly barrier and answer to prayer are prolong for years – that is when our faith is tested and stretched to the uttermost. It seems as if the Lord has turned against us and all we can do is to continue holding on with the pitiful cry of, "Lord, have mercy on me and look with compassion upon me!" Yet just as our physical muscles grow and are strengthen through being stretched to the utmost, our faith grows in like manner. At times, faith is expanding and growing beyond all we are aware of, by the very extension of the delay in answer to our prayers. The longer the Lord delayed in answering the prayer of the woman of Syrophoenicia, the more her faith became purified and intense. Long delays serve to purify our faith until everything that is terrestrial, ephemeral and soulish is purged out of it and nothing is left to it except faith alone.

Another nourishment to our growth in faith is to read about and be inspired by other great men of faith. This of course is not limited to just men of faith in Hebrews chapter 11 or elsewhere in the Bible, but there are many great biographies of men of faith such as Hudson Taylor, David Brainard, Watchman Nee, George Mattheson, George Mueller, D.L. Moody – just to name a few. Read the lives of those who have been sorely tried and who have believed God against all odds. Faith kindles faith and “deep calls unto deep” (Psa 42:7). Understanding how God has developed other godly men enables us to not lose heart or faint in His dealings with us. Our faith is inspired and strengthen by reading the trials of the saints more than by reading the pleasant and fairy dream-like stories.

Another nourishment to our growth in faith is God's dealings with us by which He is constantly changing the providential channels through which He sends His supply to us. If God's blessings flow to us in a very predictable and certain way for a lengthy time period, we will subconsciously fix our trust on the way the blessing comes more than on the invisible One, Who is truly our Provider and Protector. When the Lord gave the children of Israel water in the wilderness, sometimes it was from springs like at Elim (Exo 15:27), sometimes from a cleft-rock and sometimes from a well dug in the dry sand (Num 21:16-18). When God sends us great spiritual refreshing, He will change the channel or the circumstances under which they come. When He sends temporal blessings in answer to prayer, He will change the means through which they flow. He does not want us to come to rely on any mode, person, or phenomenon, for they are in reality not the true source of our blessings but God. He wants our eyes of faith perfectly fixed on Himself, and not on His mode or methods of doing things. Hence He will from time to time disappoint us on the old sets of expectation and reveal His grace from a new avenue and surprise us with His infinite wisdom. Thus our faith is strengthened by disappointment until it reaches such perfect union with God that it never looks to anyone, anything, any method, any old channel or any circumstances at any time or season. Strong faith keeps itself detached from all these things and dependent on God alone.

There are other nourishment to our growth in faith that we do have time to cover in this article that is meant to be short and succinct... such as our need to maintain a conscience void of offense so that we may not suffer shipwreck in our faith life (1 Tim 1:19). The converse is of course that if we do maintain a good conscience in all things, that will strengthen and grow our faith in the hours of trials.

In short, our faith needs to be constantly nourished, strengthen and developed by God's Word, by God's removal of our natural earthly props, by our being inspired by other great men of faith, and by God's constantly changing His mode of operation and His channels through which He outflows His grace and His blessings to us. When our faith is thus developed, it can never be disappointed and never be jostled because it is nourished and strengthen by a divine source that is constant and inalterable – God's Word; it cannot be disappointed because it expects nothing but what is in accordance with God's will; it looks to no fixed mechanisms of God's channel of blessings except His infinite wisdom; most importantly, our eyes of faith will be fixed on Christ alone into Whose image we will be transformed from glory to glory.