Faith Isn't a Currency
Part 5 of 6 · When Healing Doesn’t Come
New to the series? Start with Part 1: When We Question If Faith Is Enough
Five weeks ago, this series opened with a question I carried when we lost our son, Josiah: was my faith not enough? It’s a theologically problematic question, but many people ask it, even if not out loud. It’s a question that gets imposed even when no one says it directly. It’s implicit in the language used and the songs we sing. We’ll come to that in Part 6.
The whole question here hangs on a single word. Enough.
It’s a strange word to attach to faith once you slow down to look at it. Enough for what? Measured how? Weighed on what scale?
This post asks: What is faith, and how much of it do we need?
Where faith begins
The New Testament word for faith in the original Greek is pistis. At its center, it means trust. One older lexicon describes it as the “leaning of the entire human personality upon God or the Messiah in absolute trust and confidence in His power, wisdom, and goodness.”1 Not mere mental ascent to belief, but a leaning. The whole of you, resting your weight on someone else.
And the word is bigger than our English “faith” lets on. Its semantic range includes faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty, and even obedience.2 Notice that each of those is a relationship word. You can’t be loyal to an outcome. You can’t be faithful to a request. Pistis only makes sense between persons.
This understanding quietly rearranges everything. In the Scriptures, faith is humanity’s response to God’s action.3 God acts first. He calls, he delivers, he keeps covenant, he sends his Son. Faith is what answering him looks like.
The order matters because it overturns almost everything we think about what it means to relate to God. So much of our church language implies we initiate. We ‘release our faith,’ we ‘believe for it,’ we ‘press in,’ and then, if we’ve done our part, God moves. The Scriptures run the other direction. God has already moved. The initiative is his, from beginning to end.
Faith doesn’t start the process; it answers the God who started it long before we showed up.
We’ve seen what this looks like on the ground. In Part 2, we watched Jesus marvel twice: once at a Roman centurion’s faith and once at his hometown’s lack of it. What blocked the miracles in Nazareth wasn’t a shortage of belief in that they were possible. The people had heard the reports and didn’t deny them. What they rejected was him, the carpenter’s son, claiming to be more. And the faith that amazed Jesus was aimed at his person, not merely faith for something from him. I won’t rehash it here. The argument is in Part 2 if you missed it.
Hold those two threads together, faith as a response and faith aimed at a person, and you’re ready for the assumption I want to challenge this week.
The currency we made of faith
Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up the idea that faith works like money. We’d never say it that way. But underneath, we run the math the same way we do for everything. A Porsche costs more than a Ford. A house costs more than a week of groceries. Cancer costs more than a common cold. A tumor costs more than a migraine. The bigger the problem, the more faith is required to cover it.
You can hear the economics in the phrase itself: ‘enough faith.’ Enough is a quantity word. It belongs to the ledgers.
Now, the New Testament itself does talk about faith in terms of quantity. It speaks of ‘little faith’ and ‘great faith,’ of faith that is weak and faith that grows, of being ‘full of faith’ and even of a ‘measure’ of it.4 The vocabulary of more and less is right there in the text, and so I won’t pretend it isn’t. But notice where the decisive moment lands.
Watch what happens when that math meets Jesus. In Luke’s Gospel, the apostles come to him with what sounds like the perfect request: “Increase our faith!” (Lk 17:5). More faith. A bigger balance. Jesus answers, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you” (Lk 17:6).
Look at what Jesus does. They ask for an increase, and he answers with the smallest unit of measure available. For a first-century listener, the mustard seed sat at the bottom of the scale—the smallest thing in a garden. If faith worked like currency, this was the moment to say so. You’re right, you’ll need more. Start saving. Instead, he dismisses the premise. He answers the quantity question with a word about smallness; another way of saying quantity was never the issue.
When faith becomes a payment
I want to push this one step further, because the currency picture doesn’t just get the math wrong. It gets the relationship wrong.
If faith is the coin that buys healing, then what we have with God is commerce. We bring the payment; he releases the goods. We come to him the way we’d approach a counter (notice what we call it), hoping we brought enough. And when healing doesn’t come, the conclusion writes itself: the payment must have been short.
But stand that picture next to the cross and watch it collapse. The whole testimony of the gospel is that we could never pay.
Not with works, not with merit, and not, it needs to be said, with faith. The old hymn has it right: Jesus paid it all. There is no outstanding balance. Nothing remains on the account because someone else settled it.
So when we approach God with our faith held out like payment, even sincerely, even desperately, we slip back into treating him as though something is still owed. And it isn’t. Faith was never the price of his attention or the fee for his power. It’s the trust of a child walking into a Father’s house where the debt is gone, for good.
That’s why faith, in the Scriptures, can never be a means to an end. The moment faith becomes a technique for getting something, even something as good as healing, it quietly stops being faith in him.
The object, not the size
So if the amount was never the issue, what is? Let me put you on an airplane.
Imagine someone terrified of flying. Maybe that’s you. At the gate, your hand holding the boarding pass trembles. The walk down the jetway is slow and nervous. You finally find seat 23C and cinch the seatbelt until it hurts (as if that’ll help). By the time the cabin door closes, your knuckles are white on the armrest. Meanwhile, next to you sits a frequent flyer, shoes kicked off and fast asleep before pushback. Not a care in the world.
Here’s the question: which of you is more likely to arrive safely at the destination?
It’s a silly question. Of course, both of you equally.5
Why? The plane doesn’t fly on the confidence found in the cabin. It flies on the integrity of the airframe, the skill of the pilots, and the mechanics who serviced it overnight.
Your nervousness takes nothing from the landing, and the seasoned flyer’s calm adds nothing. Your small, shaky trust has one job: get on the plane. After that, the plane carries you. Or as we said of the bleeding woman last week: her coming to Jesus was the faith. He did the rest.
That’s the grammar of every healing story we’ve walked through in this series. Timothy Keller puts the whole point in two sentences: “It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.”6
Weak faith in a strong branch. That’s the father in Mark 9, holding his convulsing son and crying out: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24). By every measure of quantity, that man fails the test. He says the quiet part out loud, right to Jesus. And the boy is healed anyway.
Our trust should never rest in our own faith, but in the person of Christ. Faith aimed anywhere else eventually breaks, because everything else eventually does. But because Christ endured the worst that suffering can do and came out the other side, we can know he’s with us even on our worst day.
A word for the one in the middle of it
Some of you have spent years running the audit. Replaying the prayers. Wondering if a steadier voice or a more certain heart might have changed the outcome. I’ve run that audit too, longer than I’d like to admit.
Hear this plainly. The ledger you’ve been checking doesn’t exist. No scale weighed your faith and found it a few ounces short. No account found lacking. Jesus answered the request for more faith by pointing to the smallest seed.
The God who is there in the hospital room with you is not an auditor reviewing your believing. He’s a Father who initiated everything, who settled every account at the cross, and who asks of you what he asked of the trembling woman in a crowd and the desperate father holding his boy: come.
Faith is not the price of healing. It’s the hand that reaches for him.
Next week, we close the series where all of this becomes practice: how the church actually prays for the sick, what James asks of elders and the suffering, and how the language we use, and the songs we sing, can lift the burden or quietly hand it back. If this series has stirred questions about what to say at a bedside, Part 6 is for you.
See you next week.
Alexander Souter, A Pocket Lexicon to the Greek New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), 203. Souter’s definition is over a century old, and I haven’t found a better one. The image of leaning does what most modern definitions of faith fail to do: it locates faith in the whole self, as weight transferred onto someone else, rather than in the head as a held opinion.
Emmanuel Oumarou, “Merging Believing Faith and Obedient Faith: Implications of the Semantic Scope of Pistis on the Integrative Conceptualization of the Term in the New Testament,” Journal of Biblical Theology 6, no. 1 (January 2023): 196. Oumarou’s survey belongs to a wider scholarly recovery of pistis as a relational word rather than a merely cognitive one. Some scholars, Matthew Bates most prominently, translate it “allegiance” in salvation contexts. Whatever one makes of that proposal, the direction of the evidence is consistent: pistis lives between persons.
Rudolf Bultmann, “Πιστεύω, Πίστις, Πιστός,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986), 198-205. Bultmann observes that Old Testament faith is never general optimism but a specific response to what God has already done, trust rooted in his past deeds. The believer answers. God has already spoken.
The measure-language is woven through the New Testament. There is little faith (Matt 6:30 // Lk 12:28; Matt 8:26; 14:31; 16:8) and great faith (the centurion, Matt 8:10 // Lk 7:9; the Canaanite woman, Matt 15:28), weak faith (Rom 4:19; 14:1), faith that grows (Lk 17:5; 2 Cor 10:15; 2 Thess 1:3), being full of faith (Acts 6:5; 11:24), a measure and a proportion of faith (Rom 12:3, 6), and even all faith (1 Cor 13:2). So the text freely uses the vocabulary of more and less. Yet at the one moment the disciples ask outright for an increase, Jesus reframes the whole question (Lk 17:5–6): the faith he describes is the kind that, however small, is already enough.
The airplane illustration owes much to Alan Shlemon, “Will Faith as Small as a Mustard Seed Save You?,” Stand to Reason, January 5, 2021, https://www.str.org/w/will-faith-as-small-as-a-mustard-seed-save-you-. Shlemon’s conclusion is the load-bearing part: what matters is what the “small amount of trust [is] in.”
Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Penguin Books, 2008), 234.
Loving this Dan👊 Thank you for sharing your heart.
Thank you for this incredible teaching. I too have had it all wrong. I’ve learned so much in these 5 lessons and I don’t want them to end. Keep going. I’m here for it