Big God, Little Faith
“You just need to have faith!”
I hear that from time to time. But sometimes I’m not sure what people mean by that. It can seem a little cliche—like a last-ditch kind of thing. It’s a card we pull out of our back pocket and play when all other options have failed. And it always comes at the worst possible time, like after losing a loved one or getting a devastating diagnosis from the doctor.
Why wouldn’t we say that when everything is going really well, like after we find the winning Powerball ticket on the sidewalk at Walmart? “Dude, you’re a billionaire! Just have faith!”
But it seems to me, as I read the Scriptures, that faith is more than a card trick. It’s more than an insurance policy. It seems to be more like the foundation of a well-built house than it does the color one would paint the trim. Everything hinges on the foundation of faith. At least, that’s the way I read the Bible.
So, faith should be a big thing, right? The problem is, I don’t often feel like I have a big faith. If you don’t know what I mean, I envy you. I don’t know, maybe I’m just a naturally depressed person, but when I look at the world, sometimes it doesn’t look like God’s in control.
Disease! Fatherlessness! Inflation! War in Ukraine! War in Israel and Gaza! Gender confusion! Abortion!
On and on the list of complaints against the sovereignty of God goes. And we are sometimes compelled to cry out to him, “Why won’t you do something? Why are you allowing this to happen?”
Truthfully, my faith isn’t strong enough to look at human tragedy to just grin and walk away saying, “God’s got this!” I must take my complaint somewhere. Just stuffing it inside of me and acting like it’s no big deal eats away at my heart. I may not voice my complaint to you, but that doesn’t mean it just goes away. The cancer is still there.
Thankfully (and I don’t say that flippantly), there is a better way of looking at faith—a way that rubs salve on my gaping emotional and spiritual wounds while still honoring God.
It’s better to have a small faith in a big God than a big faith in a small God.
If God is real, and if he truly cares, and if he is still at work in the affairs of mankind, what do I need to know besides the fact that he is sovereign? A God who is real and is mightier than I could ever dream possible? There is where we begin, by admitting that he doesn’t need my strong faith to accomplish his will.
Faith doesn’t grin. It cries.
King David was known as “a man after God’s own heart.” But we don’t have to go very far into the book of Psalms before we discover that David whined a lot. I use that term for lack of a better word, but it does describe his conversations with God. Take this passage in Psalm 13, where he used language like “How long?” He challenged God by demanding, “Look on me” and “answer me, Lord my God!”
It almost seems disrespectful, and it would be if God were an oppressive, mean-spirited God who delighted Himself by dangling his subjects over the fires of hell. But David saw God—not only as a supreme and sovereign God—but as his Father who yearned for David to enter into an intimate relationship with Him. He knew that God loved him as a father would love his own son.
David’s relationship with God began with his submission to God’s sovereignty, but ended in his confidence that God wanted the best for him—even when it seemed as if God had abandoned him. This is why he ended his prayer by saying, “But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation.”
Faith (the kind that David had) seems to me to be like this: “I’m afraid, and I doubt, but I trust your compassion. Your salvation is greater than my fear.”
Faith opens our empty hands before God.
In Isaiah 66, God makes it very clear what faith looks like. He didn’t say it this way, but if we paraphrased it, we would read, “If you want to know what I value in the hearts of my people, it’s this: I want them to be humble before me, to be contrite in spirit, and to tremble at my word.”
This kind of spirit is bigger than my tiny faith because God is bigger than my circumstance or my feelings. In the midst of my personal suffering, the breakdown of society, wars, disease, pestilence, and moral chaos, I am able to stand before a holy, triune, omnipotent God and dump my inner turmoil into his lap. I am able to freely confess my doubts, fears, and sinful behavior with the absolute confidence that He will not reject me.
As a matter of fact, this kind of humility and honesty before God is the purest expression of our weak and feeble faith in the presence of an infinitely great God. It is a confession that we are not good, but that God is not only infinitely great but infinitely good.
Not only is he infinitely powerful and good, but infinitely faithful. He always keeps his promise to rescue “us from the dominion of darkness” and translate us “into the kingdom of the Son he loves” (Colossians 1:13).
Therefore...
A person who lives this way, in this kind of faith, lives in power. They are able to speak with great confidence and boldness, even when everything in the world is lined up against them, even when their own hearts are telling them that the other side is too powerful. It empowers us to shun addiction and pursue sobriety in the name of Christ, to flee from sexual immorality, and to avoid the pitfalls of cultural Christianity (of just going through the motions).
A small faith in a big God is how we are able to worship God with joy. He is the one who said, “If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts…”(1 John 3:20).
Faith like this is not a last-ditch effort to deal with hardship, nor is it a card trick! It is our first response to both blessing and pain—trusting in the triune God who rules the universe. It compels us to be with Jesus, to do what Jesus did, and to become like him in the process.
Gordon Dasher is a former shepherd and pastor at WFR Church who frequently collaborates with Phil Robertson on his books and blogs. After being a widower for four years, he recently married his wife Anne this past November. They live in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is one of the pastors at Swannnanoa Church.