Imperial Valley Christian Center

Here's a bit I liked from a booklet I'm working on right now about, How I learned What Faith Is.

Before I go on with the story I need to skip forward for just a second, so I don’t cause any confusion.

One of my questions about faith was, ‘Is faith something that happens to me or something I do?’ After I understood what faith was, after I understood what it meant to believe, I saw the answer to my question. It was both. Believing was both something that happened to me and something that I did.

I saw that faith really had three parts, three steps, three phases of development.

1) It was something that happened to me, like the light turning on in a dark room is something that happens to you. It takes no effort of your will to see the contents of the dark room, all it takes is for the light to turn on.

2) But faith was also something that I did, acting on what I saw once the light was turned on.

3) And there was a third step, enduring, holding on to the knowing and continuing to act on it, the phase of faith we call faithfulness.

When the Bible talks about faith it means all three, knowing in your heart, acting on what you know and enduring. Faith that inherits the promises is made up of all three phases.

In Mark 11:23 when Jesus says, believe that those things which you say will come to pass, that’s what he means by believe, know in your heart that what you say will come to pass, say it, hold on to what you know in your heart, and keep saying it until the mountain moves. When Jesus says believe that you received them in Mark 11:24 that’s what he means by believe, know in your heart that you received them, act like you received them, hold on to that knowing and continue acting until the thing you prayed for shows up.