Does Faith Come from Your Spirit, Your Mind or Somewhere Else?

Somewhere else.

Romans 10:9-10 makes it clear twice that it is with the HEART that man believes – so faith comes from your heart, not your spirit or your head.

So that was an easy question to answer, at least initially.  Now the problem is, how do we define the heart?

The traditional “faith teaching” is that your spirit and your heart are synonymous terms, but that can be fairly easily disproven.

Proof That Your Spirit and Your Heart Are Distinct

Jesus said in Mark 11:23 that you can have what you say if you don’t doubt in your heart.  Your born-again spirit is created in God’s image (Ephesians 4:24), so your spirit will never get into doubt.

In Mark 16:14, Jesus rebuked the disciples for their hardness of heart.  The book of Hebrews warns against developing “an evil heart of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:12).  Your born-again spirit cannot participate in evil or unbelief.  A few verses earlier, the same author warns against hardening your heart (Hebrews 3:8).  Your born-again spirit cannot get “hard” to the things of God.  How could your spirit get hard when it’s “one spirit” with God (1 Corinthians 6:17), who Himself will never get hard to the things of God?  So your spirit can’t be your heart.

In Acts 5:1-11, we see that Satan had filled Ananias’s heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and that Ananias had conceived this thing in his heart.  No one’s born-again spirit would ever conceive such a thing, nor could Satan ever fill someone’s born-again spirit!

John raises the point in a slightly more subtle manner:

1 John 3:20:
For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.

Here we see that your heart can condemn you, but God, who knows all things, WON’T condemn you (Romans 8:1).  Your born-again spirit will always take God’s side, so your born-again spirit will not condemn you either.

So we can see that your heart is still imperfect, while your spirit man is already perfect.

Thus, your heart and your spirit do NOT refer to the same thing.

So What IS the Heart?

The heart (Greek word kardia) is used in the Bible similarly to how we would use it in English.  It can refer to many different things.  It is one of those cases where “we all know what it means” but we’d be hard-pressed to pin down exactly what that meaning is.

It would seem that the heart must at least be the seat of our emotions.

Romans 9:2:
That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.

2 Corinthians 2:4:
For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you.

The warnings against hardening our heart and getting an evil heart of unbelief make it clear that the heart is also the seat of your human will.

When it comes to faith, faith is not an emotion, but it IS an act of our will.  We can choose to believe or disbelieve God.  If our free will had no bearing on believing, God could not punish those who do not believe with an eternity of suffering.

Not Mental Assent

Faith cannot have to do with the mind because you can mentally assent to gospel truths with no benefit to yourself.  The demons “believe in God” from an intellectual perspective, but that isn’t helping them at all.  You could mentally assent that Jesus is the Savior of the world and still end up in hell because you never acted on that fact by receiving Him.

Action Required

Faith always ACTS on the Word, while mental assent KNOWS the Word but will not act on it.  Action is a CHOICE on your part – a matter of your will.  There is no real faith without corresponding action (James 2:14-26).  So faith always involves your will.  Your will is distinct from your spirit.  If it weren’t, your fallen nature (the dead spirit you had before you received Jesus) would have always kept you from receiving Jesus!

Faith’s Origin

Ultimately, the faith that you have comes from God Himself (Romans 12:3, Ephesians 2:8-9).  So it does not originate from your spirit, your mind, your will, your heart, or any other part of you.  The only question would be where it resides, and the Bible answer is that it resides in your heart.  It is part of the makeup of your heart that God created.