It’s Not the Size of Your Faith
Have you ever walked away from church feeling guilty for not having enough faith?
Maybe you’re fighting anxiety, and somewhere along the way a well-meaning believer told you that if you just believed a little harder, the fear would lift. Maybe you’ve prayed for years for a son or daughter to come home to God, and the silence has started to feel like a verdict on your faith. Maybe you’ve got a hard diagnosis, and you’re quietly wondering whether your faith is big enough to hold.
If so, here’s the whole message in two sentences before we unpack it: it’s not about how much faith you have. It’s about who your faith is in. The accusation that you just don’t have enough faith is one of the enemy’s favorite arrows — and it’s a lie.
The shield is already there
We’re near the end of our journey through Ephesians, in the spiritual-warfare section of chapter 6, where Paul tells us to “hold up the shield of faith to stop the fiery arrows of the devil” (Ephesians 6:16). The word he uses for shield isn’t a little round buckler — it’s thureos, and its root is thyra, the word for a door. Paul is picturing a shield the size of a door, big enough to get completely behind.
Here’s what’s easy to miss: taking up that shield was never about manufacturing more faith. Go back to the first time God called Himself a shield, and you’ll find Him saying it to Abraham: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield” (Genesis 15:1). God doesn’t hand you a shield and wish you luck. He is the shield. Faith isn’t an achievement you produce — it’s an empty hand that receives. It’s getting behind the One who’s already covering you.
We tend to think faith is about how strong our grip is — how sweaty or small or slipping our hand feels as we reach up. But that’s not it. Faith is about how big and firm and strong His grip is.
A faith that was messy
To prove it, God gives us the life of Abraham — the Bible’s great example of faith. And the surprising thing is how messy that faith was.
It started high. God promised him more descendants than the stars, and “Abram believed the LORD, and the LORD counted him as righteous because of his faith” (Genesis 15:6). Abram did nothing but believe, and God credited it to him. Paul builds the whole gospel on that verse — righteousness comes by trusting God, not by earning Him.
Then it faltered. Tired of waiting, Abraham and Sarah tried to engineer the promise themselves, and Ishmael was born — “in a human attempt to bring about the fulfillment of God’s promise” (Galatians 4:23). Ishmael is what the promise looks like when we try to manufacture it ourselves. Most of us know that move by heart: I’ll just buckle down, I’ll work harder, I’ll force it. We grab for control because we want to be in charge. And between that chapter and God’s next word, there were about thirteen years of silence — not abandonment, but formation. God didn’t walk away when their faith faltered. He was forming them.
Then, finally, it grew up. The same man who grabbed a shortcut in Genesis 16 could, by Genesis 22, lay Isaac himself on the altar — “reasoning that God could even raise the dead” (Hebrews 11:19). The better part of forty years from believing under the stars to trusting God on a mountain. Small, then smaller, then grown.
And here’s the freeing part: one of the lies the enemy works hardest to plant is that your faith has to be perfect — that salvation somehow rides on how much faith you can muster. It doesn’t. Abraham’s faith faltered, and God still counted him righteous. Perfect faith was never required.
So how much do you actually need?
That’s the question the whole story drives at, and Jesus settled it. When the disciples couldn’t drive out a demon and asked why, He told them they had too little faith — and then said, “If you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move,’ and it would move” (Matthew 17:20).
Read that slowly. He rebukes their small faith, then says a mustard seed of it moves mountains. So the problem was never the amount. Tiny faith already does the impossible.
Think of the ignition key on a big tractor. The power isn’t in the key — the key just unlocks the engine. There’s no power at all until you turn it on. Too many of us are walking around praying for a bigger key. You don’t need a bigger key. You just need to turn it on.
It’s not the size of your faith that matters. It’s the size of the God your faith is resting on.
Where this leaves you
So picture that child crossing the busy street, her small hand sweaty and slipping inside her father’s. She’s safe the entire time — not because she gripped hard, but because of whose hand she was in.
If you’ve never put your faith in Jesus, the lie that there isn’t enough grace to cover what you’ve done is just another arrow. “Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes” (Ephesians 1:4). You don’t have to clean yourself up first — you simply come, trusting that God’s word is true.
If you’ve been wandering, building Ishmaels, white-knuckling control — God credited Abraham for believing, not for performing, and that same grace is held out to you. And if your faith is strong today, look around on Sunday: part of being the church is locking our shields together so the brother or sister whose shield looks small stays covered.
This is also why worship is war. When we sing the truth of who God is, we’re rebuking the very lies the enemy is trying to plant in our hearts. Your hand might be shaky — that’s okay. His is firm, and it’s big enough. Name the one thing you’ve been gripping for control, and hand it back. Then get behind the shield. You were safe the whole time.
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