What is faith?

Faith is knowing what God has promised in Christ, being certain it is true, and being certain He means it for you.

All three have to be there. Take any one away and what is left is not faith, whatever else it may be.

Faith has content 

Faith is not a mood you work up in the absence of information. It begins with information. Faith has content. Nobody trusts a promise he has never heard, or a God he knows nothing about, which is why faith and ignorance never grow together.

The more you know of what God has said, the more there is to rest on.

It is certain knowledge, and the certainty is about the One who made the promise, not about your own feelings, which change hourly. Every promise a person makes to you carries unspoken conditions: if nothing goes wrong, if I am still able, if I do not change my mind. God's promises carry none of them. He cannot lie and He does not go back on what He has said, so a promise of His is as settled as something already done.

The biblical definition of faith  

Scripture puts it exactly that way in the verse on faith that everybody quotes.

Hebrews 11:1 (NKJV)

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

That verse is usually read as though faith takes over where evidence runs out. It actually says the opposite. It is not really a definition of faith at all; it is a description of what faith does. Faith itself is the substance, faith itself is the evidence. It takes a promise about a future you cannot see and makes it solid enough to build on now.

Faith and a future you cannot see  

Noah is the proof. He built an enormous boat on dry ground because God had told him water was coming (Hebrews 11:7). He was not guessing and he was not being irrational. He had the best evidence available to any creature, which is the word of the One who was going to send the flood. Nothing in his experience supported him. Nobody had ever seen a flood. He worked at it for decades, and every day of those years the sky stayed clear. His ground was never the weather. It was what God had said.

The flood was real judgement and it fell on the whole world. Noah knew that was coming, and so did everyone else once the boat started going up. Knowing it did nobody any good. What Noah had that they did not was a sentence spoken to him personally — God told him to bring his household aboard, and told him why.

You are in the same position, minus the boat. The gospel is not a report about God for you to assess. It is a promise addressed to whoever will have it, and being certain that it includes you is not optimism about yourself. It is taking God at His word about what He is offering.

Knowing about God is not the same as trusting Him  

A man can hold the first two parts and be no better off for them. He can be sure God exists, sure He is holy, sure He judges, and be frightened by all three, because knowing what God is like is not the same as having a promise from Him. This is where nearly everyone stalls.

James 2:19 (NKJV)

You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe—and tremble!

“You do well” is not a compliment. James is being cutting: well done, you have caught up with hell. Demons hold flawless theology. They know God exists, they know exactly who Christ is, they know what He is able to do. They even feel it, which is more than most people manage — they tremble. But they tremble the way a condemned man trembles at his judge, not the way a child trembles before his father. Everything they know is true, and none of it is spoken to them.

The man who is not frightened at all 

Then there is a man who is not frightened at all. He can sit in church for years, explain the cross accurately, defend it in an argument, and stand exactly where he started. The demons at least tremble; he does not manage that much.

What he is missing is not more information and not stronger feeling. God's promise in Christ is not a report about God. It is an offer, held out to whoever will have it. You do not have to prove you were included before you come; the offer is what settles that. Faith takes God at His word and comes.

The promise is a person  

The promise is not a general assurance that things will work out. It is a person. God's word to you is that Christ died for sinners and rose, and that whoever comes to Him He will not cast out. So faith does not rest on how well you have done or how strongly you can believe. It rests on Christ, and it is worth exactly what He is worth. That is why the amount of it was never the question. Weak trust in a strong Saviour saves; strong trust in nothing does not.

Where does faith come from?  

So where does faith come from? Everything described so far is something you do. You come to know what God promised, you become certain of it, you take it as meant for you. That makes it sound as though God does almost all of the saving and leaves the last small piece to you. Paul rules that out.

Ephesians 2:8–9 (NKJV)

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.

The grace is God's gift and so is the faith that takes hold of it. Paul tells the Philippians the same thing in plainer words: believing in Christ is something granted to you (Philippians 1:29). This does not mean God believes for you. You do the believing, it is your own act, and from the inside it feels like nothing else. But the ability to do it was given, not produced. A man dead in his sins does not talk himself into loving the God he has spent his life avoiding. God makes him alive, and then he believes.

Conclusion  

So the question was never whether you have worked up enough faith. It was never yours to work up.

Romans 10:17 (NKJV)

So then faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

That is where God gives it, and He has never given it anywhere else. If you want to believe and cannot, you are not looking for a feeling you have failed to produce. You are looking for a promise, and the promise is in a book, read out where God's people gather. Go and hear it.