Grace Notes - Luke 17:5

"And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith."Luke 17:5

How do I respond to the promises of God?

This is a question I continuously ask myself, if God has anticipated my every need and through Christ has provided all my needs by grace, how do I receive all God has for me?

My Spirit is completely interwoven and entwined with all the fullness of Christ. Within me, Christ dwells and I am the temple of the Holy Sprit. I take the glory of God, the presence of God, the power of God, the love of God with me, wherever I physically go.

So what holds me back?

It cannot be faith as I have the same faith inside me that raised Christ from the dead. But what I have is hindrance of unbelief.  I can limit the effect grace in my life, if I don’t believe all God has promised and provided. It is vey simple, for example if God has promised my joy I can both accept and receive it or I can not believe it and not live in the fullness of it.

Faith is just my positive response to all God has provided for me by grace.

As Andrew Wommack explains, Jesus taught the disciples that faith is not a problem to us, it is whether we accept and receive all God has given is the real problem:-

There are many scriptures that speak of varying degrees of faith. However, the scriptures also speak of Jesus increasing in wisdom (Lk. 2:52) that certainly refers to His physical intellect drawing more and more on the perfect wisdom of God that was already in Him at birth. It is in this way that we also increase in faith.

At salvation, the believer is given the supernatural faith of God. We had to use the very faith of God (not human faith) to believe the gospel (Eph. 2:8).

That faith came to us through hearing the Word of God (Rom. 10:17), and once we are born again, it becomes an abiding fruit of the Spirit within us.

Every believer is given the same measure of faith at salvation but not all believers use what God has given them. Therefore, it is correct to speak of growing in faith and having great faith or little faith, but it is important to understand that this is speaking of how much faith we use or manifest - not how much faith we were given. All believers were given "the" same measure of faith.

Jesus' example of the grain of mustard seed underscores the truth that our faith is sufficient if we will just use it without the hindrance of unbelief.

He then continues on into the parable of the servant serving his master to illustrate that our faith is not the problem but rather our use of it. We are using it to serve ourselves instead of our master who is God.