Big Healing Book - How Can Faith COME by Hearing When We Already HAVE the Measure of Faith?

How Can Faith COME by Hearing When We Already HAVE the Measure of Faith?

Rest assured that Romans 10:17 and Romans 12:3 do not contradict each other!

Everyone has “the measure of faith” because God created man with the ability to believe. Paul didn’t say that God only gives “the measure of faith” to Christians. That would be an impossible statement, given that an unbeliever must believe in order to become a Christian in the first place! So there is no verse like the following:

Catch 22:22:
For a sinner cannot get faith until he exercises the faith that he doesn’t have yet.

You can see throughout Scripture that unbelievers (those who are not born again) can exercise faith. The “hall of fame” in Hebrews 11 lists people who believed even though they were not born again. God expected the Israelites to exercise faith. He rebuked them when they didn’t do it. Such rebukes would have been unfair if an unbeliever did not have the capacity to exercise faith. In fact, an unbeliever could even have “great faith” like that of the Centurion who was not born again (Matthew 8:5-13).

I’ve heard it proposed that God gives you faith the moment before you receive Christ, which gets around the issue in Catch 22:22 above. But the paragraph above disproves that theory.

The point Paul makes in Romans 12:3 is that we should not be boastful because it was GOD who gave us the measure of faith. Therefore, we should not go around bragging about our faith as if it were our personal doing. Every human being has the God-given capacity to believe.

Romans 10:17 does NOT teach that the general capacity to believe only comes when you hear the Word of God. In its context, it refers to the ability to exercise faith for a particular blessing, in this case the new birth. Although all men have the ability to believe, they cannot believe any statement of God that they have not heard yet. Even though a sinner can believe, he cannot believe the gospel until he hears the gospel. Thus, faith for a particular blessing only “comes” when someone hears the Word of God on that particular matter.

Picture a huge indoor stadium with various desirable blessings located in different places throughout it. As a human being, you have the ability to reach out and take those blessings into your hands. But there’s a catch – all the lights have been turned out! So even though you have the ability to grasp those blessings as a human being, you still can’t grasp them because you don’t know what they are or where they are. Now if someone gives you a flashlight, you could go around finding those blessings, and once you locate them, you can take them into your hands. With the flashlight, you now have the ability to take certain blessings as you find out about them. The general ability to take is what Romans 12:3 is about. The ability to take a particular blessing (the new birth in this case) is what Romans 10:17 is about.

The man in Acts 14:7-10 HAD the measure of faith as every other person does. However, after listening to Paul preach what GOD (not modern man) calls “the gospel” (the good news), he had faith to be healed. He was able to activate his faith for the particular blessing of healing. (Even then, he did not get up and walk until he ACTED on his faith to be healed, but that fact is covered elsewhere.)

So in short, you have the God-given ability to believe, but that ability can only become active and receive something when you hear the Word of God on a particular matter.

You don’t build yourself up in the Word to develop your ABILITY to believe. You already have that! You build yourself in the Word to become convinced of WHAT you can believe specifically so that you can act on it. God is not unfair; He has not asked you to believe and then made is so hard to believe that you’ll never do it.

Don’t make the mistake that so many people make – reading and reading and reading thinking that if you just read “enough,” someday you will have monumental faith. Your success in life is not based on how much Scripture you’ve read or how much Scripture you’ve retained in your head – it is based solely on how much Scripture you ACT ON. If you act on a single Scripture, you will get better results than a person who has memorized the entire Bible but never ACTS on any of it.

Make your focus acting on the Word, not simply stuffing yourself with the Word. If you are a hearer but not a doer, you deceive yourself.

James 1:22:
But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.