Faith is choosing to believe who you are. Faith is not something you can drum up - you cannot muster up faith. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. It is the Word of God that gives you faith. (Romans 10:17) Faith is an element of the fruit of the Spirit.
"If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you would be able to say to this mountain be removed and cast into the sea." (Luke 17:6)
All the faith in the world has not moved one mountain. What does that tell you about all the faith in human beings? Lumped together, it is less than a mustard seed. Is Jesus trying to rebuke and humiliate you? No, He is telling you that you have all the faith you need. You just have to use it.
You have plenty of faith. You do not have to wait around to have more faith - you simply need to use what you have.
You are required to want to believe who you are. You have that much faith - you need only to use it. The way you utilise your faith is by conversation with God. Once you begin to converse with God, you realise who He is and who you are. The dialogue you have with God is what produces faith in who you are.
God knows all about that, and He calls you to exercise your faith when He tells you to count on the fact that you are dead to sin. You are no longer to allow unbelief to reign in your mortal bodies. You must want to believe whom God has made you to be.
"For sin (unbelief and all of its consequences) shall not have dominion over you." (Romans 6:14) Unless you know, and remember who you are, and are always able to distinguish who you are, you will never move forward in your Christian life. By recognising and believing what your new identity is, there is nothing that God cannot accomplish in you.
You are to believe your new identity. You are to know your old nature is crucified with Christ forever, and a new person, containing the Spirit of Christ has been raised up. Your acceptance of that new identity enables you to destroy the body of sin, so that from now on you should not serve sin.
The way you deal with the power of sin is by grace, through faith in Jesus, who is within you. What should you believe? Through faith, you should believe who you are in Christ, and who Christ is in you. That is revealed many places in Scripture. You now have a new way to look at the Bible, instead of just seeing it as a book of rules and regulations to scare you into obedience. You can look at it as the revelation of who you really are in Christ and who He is in you. This will make a big difference in Bible study as you look inside to find our more about who you really are.
Until you know who you are, you will never feel like that new person. And until you feel like who you are, you will never act like it. You have to go to the basics of knowing who you are, so you believe it, so you feel like it, so you act like it.
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