Objection: Faith Must Be IN GOD (Mark 11:22), So It Is Not Something You Can Use Yourself to Change Things

Jesus taught that you can use faith by speaking to something without praying to God about it.  If God already stated something in His Word, you can put your faith in that.  You act on His general Word without needing a specific word.  To act in faith in God’s Word is to have faith in God.  What would you put faith in if NOT His Word?  Your faith is in Him that He cannot lie and that He did not lie when He stated something in the Bible.  Therefore, you can act on it with the assurance that God will back His Word.

This does not mean that you have absolute “carte blanche” to speak to anything beyond or contrary to God’s Word.  For example, you cannot speak in faith that you will end up with your neighbor’s wife or house or car.  It has to be assumed that what you are believing and speaking is in line with God’s covenant.  Otherwise, you have no business doing it and you are no different from occult practitioners who try to access the supernatural without God as He reveals Himself in the Bible.

Once you have established that what you are speaking is in line with your inheritance in Christ, you have every right to speak to anything contrary to that inheritance and “move” it out of the way without asking God for special permission to do it.  You do not need special permission in any case where God has given you general permission.  For example, you don’t need to ask God if it’s OK to speak to cancer in someone’s body and command it to die in the name of Jesus.  You already have that authority.  You don’t have to ask God if it’s OK if you share the plan of salvation with a sinner.  You already have the “green light” for that in the Great Commission.

When Jesus spoke about speaking to mountains and trees (see Speaking to Mountains, Trees and Diseases for a list of these Scriptures), in none of the five “mountain and tree” Scriptures did He say that you would pray to God about the mountain or the tree or ask God to do something.  (In the case of Mark 11:24, a “prayer” verse follows, but that verse is not about speaking to things as Mark 11:23 was. Jesus did not say that God would use His authority over that mountain or tree in response to your prayer.  You are the one who uses authority.  (Man has been given authority on the earth – Psalm 115:16.)  In fact, nothing about God’s involvement is mentioned other than your use of faith (the measure of God’s faith that He gave you).

It is critical to notice that Jesus did not say that the mountain or tree would obey God after you prayed.  In these verses, you DIDN’T pray; you spoke to the mountain or tree and it obeyed YOU, not God!

I realize that a lot of people have a hard time with what Jesus taught repeatedly on this subject.  But His words are in red and those people’s words aren’t!  If Jesus said that you can speak directly to things and they will obey you, you should believe Him!  Given that speaking was God’s way of getting something done when it came to all creation (Hebrews 11:3), and we are His children who are supposed to imitate Him (Ephesians 5:1), we should be speaking, too!  That doesn’t mean that you’ll create a new universe, but your words DO frame your personal world – what you believe and say that you will have is what you will have!

This is one demonstration of how man was created in the image of God.  God speaks and things happen.  You have the ability to speak and have things happen as well.  No animal has this right.  This right could not possibly have evolved.  (Your spirit – the real you – could not have evolved from physical atoms anyway; that whole evolution theory is just an example of idle babblings that are falsely called knowledge in 1 Timothy 6:20-21.)  God created you in a higher class than animals.  Now, I realize that Rover might bark his head off and you might capitulate by pouring him a big bowl of dog food to get him to shut up, so maybe Rover can use his mouth to get something out of YOU.  However, Rover cannot bark and cause food to “be.”  You, on the other hand, could speak and cause healing (or sickness, depending on what you’re speaking!) to “be.”  We are the only living things on the earth who resemble God because we are the only ones with spirits who have authority to speak and have things happen.

Jesus and the apostles did not “pray for” the sick in the modern sense.  They did not petition God to heal the sick, as almost all Christians today seem to do, with the inevitable lack of results.  Instead, they used their authority to heal the sick.  This does not mean that God is not involved in the process.  He is the one who gives that authority, and He is the one who hastens His Word to perform it (Jeremiah 1:12).  However, when God gives you authority, it means that the responsibility is now on YOU to exercise that authority because God is not going to exercise your authority for you.  If you don’t use your authority in certain areas, nothing will change until you do.

This objection is mostly the same as “Faith Is Simply Trust in God, Not a Force That You Use to Change Things Yourself,” so there isn’t a need to do a separate write-up for the same objection when it is worded that way.  However, the direct invocation of Mark 11:22 necessitates a specific reply.  When you speak and command things to happen in accordance with your covenant, you ARE exercising faith in God.  Also, objectors like to light into Spirit-filled people who claim that Mark 11:22 really means “Have the God-kind of faith,” in some cases citing the Greek.  While the Greek literally does say, “Have faith of God,” there are good grounds for the traditional “Have faith in God” interpretation.  (See What Mark 11:22 Really Means for more on this sometimes-controversial topic.)  So the fact that I don’t teach that Mark 11:22 really means “Have God’s faith” as English speakers would use the phrase means those objectors have nothing to complain about regarding what I’m teaching, at least.  Other faith teachers will have to defend their own different interpretations.

Where people miss it is that they think that every move you make needs specific permission from God.  God has given us very broad authority and latitude – a lot more than the vast majority of Christians realize.  You don’t have to ask God whether you should have peas or corn with supper tonight.  (When I was a baby Christian, I actually did that, wanting Jesus to be Lord of EVERYTHING, but I had to learn that He gives us quite a bit of room to make our own decisions on nonspiritual matters.)  As I point out elsewhere in this book, He’ll even let YOU decide whom you want to marry or even IF you want to get married!  That’s much bigger than a peas-or-corn decision!

Even when you move mountains (or cancer or other diseases), it is still God’s power backing up your authority that God gave you.  When you believe God’s Word that He gave you that authority to act in the name of Jesus, you ARE exercising faith in God!  To believe God’s Word is to believe God.  When Abraham believed God’s words, Scripture says that He believed God:

Romans 4:3:
For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness.

Galatians 3:6:
Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.

James 2:23:
And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend of God.

When the people of Nineveh believed God’s words that were spoken through the prophet Jonah (God did not speak directly from heaven), the Bible says that they believed God:

Jonah 3:5:
So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.

So faith in God’s Word IS faith in God Himself!  And when you speak in accordance with God’s Word in faith, you WILL change things!  His angels hearken unto the voice of His Word (Psalm 103:20).