Does God respond to faith?

I think it’s fair to say that in most western churches it is preached that God does miracles when we have a lot of faith. And if God doesn’t then it is because we didn’t have enough faith (to put it in simple terms). This disturbs me quite a bit because we’ve now made God into a vending machine. No matter how much I press the button for the Galaxy chocolate bar which costs 50p, it’s not going to come out because I have only put 40p in i.e. I’ve not put enough money in. 

So this tells us that God responds to faith. But could it possibly be that faith responds to God!! I’m not saying that having faith doesn’t help, but having faith has to involve some kind’ve element of doubt in the first place.

 

Jesus said to the people in the temple “destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in 3 days”. Now let me tell you something, not many people who heard Jesus say this (if any) believed it. But regardless of their lack of belief, he did it anyway. Yes Jesus was not talking about the physical temple, but even though they didn’t understand what Jesus was really getting at, He still died for them and more importantly was resurrected when no one believed he would do so. 

 

There are loads of stories of Jesus healing people who didn’t even know who he was, let alone have faith in Him healing them. 2 Timothy 2 verse 13 tells us “if we are faithless, he remains faithful – for he cannot deny himself”. God is simply Love.

I do believe that some have more of a spiritual maturity than others, but this is more to do with being able to hear from God and responding to Him (believing him), not the other way round. Romans 10 verse 17 – “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”

 

So here’s my point - We can become too doctrinal on why we do or don’t see miracles happen, but the simple truth is that we come to the assurance that it is His faith that we live on not necessarily our own, and definitely not faith in ourselves.