The Gift Of Faith

Faith is a spiritual force that comes from God. It is given to the believer as a “sixth sense,” one that goes beyond the five senses (taste, touch, hearing, seeing, and smelling) with which natural man is endowed. It is not a sense that the unbeliever has inherent in himself.

Even the gift of salvation does not come from any natural faith an unsaved person has. He cannot exercise faith to appropriate God in his life because he does not naturally have this life force flowing within him.

Now someone will ask, “What about the Scripture in Ephesians 2:8 which says ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith?” Don’t stop there. Read the entire Scripture:

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

There is no human being in his natural state, with only the five natural senses God has given him, who has the ability to demonstrate the faith necessary to experience the transforming power of the miracle of salvation.

I want to draw you a verbal picture which will help you to stop struggling for faith from this day forward. Your faith life no longer will be like a roller coaster, thinking one day you have mustered enough faith to believe and the next that you cannot have faith to believe for anything.

Picture an unregenerate, unsaved unbeliever. You can testify to him on the street corner, he can come into a crusade service, or in some way, he is witnessed to about the cross of Jesus Christ. What characteristics does that man have? He has a will and power over that will.

When you testify to this man or stand on the platform and invite people to come to Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God goes to that man and begins to call the spirit of that person. Now, this man has a will, he has power over that will, and by determination, he can set his spirit to believe or to disbelieve. The Spirit of God comes and deals with that man.

The man has the ability through the power over his will to surrender his life to Jesus Christ. At that moment when he surrenders his will, the faith that is not of man but the faith of God — God’s gift — is imparted into the life of that sinner. At that moment, the transforming work of God is done!