Jesus, the Best Faith Teacher
Have you ever noticed that in Acts 1:1-2, Luke says that He wrote about what Jesus began to “do and teach” in his Gospel of Luke. That clearly implies that He is still teaching today! He does it today through the Holy Spirit whom He sent to “teach us all things” (John 14:26). Scripture calls Jesus the “Author and Finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2).
It is up to us to read the Word so that faith can come for specific things. We need to give the Lord something to work with. But we don’t want to get carried away to an extreme on either end. One extreme would be that the Lord just dumps faith on you without regard to your attention to His Word. This is clearly not the case. However, you can go to the other extreme and put all kinds of pressure on yourself to build your faith, and conclude that it’s solely up to you to do that without the Lord’s help. If Jesus is both the Author and the Finisher of your faith, surely He is supposed to have a role in the process too!
You should expect Jesus to teach you faith through His Word and His Spirit. Given that the Holy Spirit teaches you ALL things, that would include teaching you faith, wouldn’t it? You need be to open to Him and realize that God is still in the business of showing you mighty things that you don’t know! A staple Scripture for my life, given that I have a calling to teach the Word, has been this one:
Jeremiah 33:3:
Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.
In other words, don’t just read your Bible with your own understanding to try to figure everything out. Ask God to help you understand it. After all, He wrote it for you, not for Himself! Pray, as Paul did for the Ephesians, that God will give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him (Ephesians 1:15-23). Believe me, if you’ll pray that, God will answer your prayer! It’s so much better than just being dry and intellectual in your approach to the Bible.
By no means should you turn your brain off when studying Scripture. You need to compare Scripture with Scripture to accurately divide it. Concordances and Hebrew and Greek study tools are useful and I have learned a lot by really delving into verses that many people skim over. That kind of study has its place, but nothing can replace the illumination that the Holy Spirit gives. He will always give you illumination of the Word, not illumination beyond the Word. (I don’t want to hear your latest doctrinal revelation if you have no Scripture to back it up!)
Trusting the Lord to teach you takes all the pressure off YOU to figure everything out. Given that Jesus is the Finisher of your faith, and YOU are NOT the finisher of your faith, it makes sense to let the Finisher of your faith do His job in your life!