Many of us struggle with faith. We want to have more faith but simply cannot. We try to love God more but we have problems trusting him. We want to surrender but we somehow fear we will get hurt. We struggle to overcome sin, negative emotions etc. only to fail time and again, and with each failure, our faith diminishes even more. We look around us at the evil and pain around us, the injustice and the suffering and we wonder even more how we can trust God.
I have begun to realise that trying to build faith by willing ourselves or by looking for supporting reasons in the world around to build our faith on simply DOES NOT WORK. Faith is most effectively built internally through a relational experience with God and his word. Rom 10:17 says "Faith comes from hearing and hearing from the word (Greek: "rhema") of God." It is the Holy Spirit that builds our faith through the operation of the Word. How then is this done? Many presume that this process of faith bulding is intellectual, that the more we read the bible and convince our minds of what it says, the more faith will grow. This is only half true. I am becoming more covinced that true faith can only come from the supernatural conviction of the Holy Spirit when we hear or read the Word of God. This the 'rhema', the voice of God that speaks directly to our inner man for "God reveals himself to us through His Spirit." It is here that we enter into the realm of the subjective. The inner conviction, the still small voice, the sense of prompting, the unexplainable word of knowledge or word of wisdom that drops into our hearts, all bringing with it a heightened sense of faith. It is in this way that our faith in Him is built. We must therefore learn to discern the voice of God during our meditation of scripture. Overtime, we will become more familiar with his voice, experience him more and grow deeper in a faith relationship with him.