How Is It That You Have No Faith? | What Does Faith Require Me To Do?
What Does Faith Require Me to Do?
Faith can create a strange tension in us. We want to trust God and put our lives in His hands, but then comes the question: What does trusting Him actually require me to do? Does faith mean I move or wait? Do I keep asking, or simply trust? Is taking action an expression of faith, or am I trying to accomplish something I should have left in God’s hands?
Throughout this series, we have been exploring biblical faith as our response to the self-revelation of God. Faith does not begin with how strongly I can convince myself to believe. It begins with God revealing Himself as faithful and trustworthy, and with us entrusting ourselves to Him in response. But that leaves us with an important question: what part of that response belongs to us, and what belongs to God alone?
Few people in Scripture allow us to explore that tension as clearly as Abraham.
Abraham’s story emerges immediately after the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. At Babel, humanity gathers together declaring, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” They are attempting to establish their own security, significance, and future. Then God speaks to Abram in Genesis 12 and says something remarkably different: “I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great.”
Babel says, “Let us make.” God says, “I will make.”
Right there we find the tension Abraham will spend decades learning to navigate. God gives Abram something to do: go. Leave your country, your family, and your father’s house for the land God will show you. But God also takes responsibility for things Abram could never accomplish himself. God will make him a nation. God will bless him. God will make his name great.
Abram’s responsibility is to respond to what God has revealed. God’s responsibility is to accomplish what only God can do.
The difficulty is that Genesis has already told us, “Sarai was barren; she had no child.” God is promising descendants to a man whose wife cannot have children. As the years pass, the promise becomes increasingly specific, yet Abram remains childless.
Eventually in Genesis 15, Abram brings that tension directly to God: “Lord GOD, what will You give me, seeing I go childless?” That moment matters because Abram has already responded to God in faith, yet he still has questions. Questions and faith are not enemies. Abram does not bury his uncertainty or pretend it does not exist. He brings it into relationship with God.
God answers him, making the promise clearer: “one who will come from your own body shall be your heir.” Then God takes Abram outside, points him toward the stars, and says, “So shall your descendants be.” Genesis tells us that Abram believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.
Abram trusts what God has revealed, even though God has not yet revealed everything.
That distinction becomes incredibly important in Genesis 16.
About ten years have passed, Sarai is still barren, and she has reached a conclusion: “The LORD has restrained me from bearing children.” She has not rejected God’s promise. Instead, she has formed an assumption about the part God has not yet explained. God may fulfill His promise to Abram, but apparently He is going to do it around her rather than through her.
So Sarai creates a plan. Abram can have a child through Hagar.
What makes the plan dangerous is that it can actually be made to fit what God has already revealed. God said the heir would come from Abram’s own body, and Hagar gives him a way for that to happen. The problem is not that Abram suddenly stops caring about God’s promise. The problem is that he becomes willing to pursue the promise without continuing to seek the God who gave it.
Earlier, when Abram did not understand, he asked God. This time Sarai presents an answer, and Scripture never tells us Abram brings that answer back to God. It simply says, “Abram heeded the voice of Sarai.”
Sometimes the danger is not outright rebellion against God. Sometimes it is filling in what God has not said with an answer that seems compatible with what He has said.
We are especially vulnerable to that when the answer gives us something we desperately want. Hagar ends the waiting. She gives Abram a son. The plan even had cultural precedent. But culturally acceptable does not necessarily mean relationally wise, and it certainly does not mean God instructed it. Almost immediately, their solution produces pain and fractured relationships.
The problem was not simply that Abram acted. Biblical faith often requires action. The question is: What was his action responding to?
Thirteen years later, God speaks again and finally makes the promise unmistakably clear: Sarah herself will have the promised son. Abraham responds, “Oh, that Ishmael might live before You!”
By now, Ishmael is not simply a plan. He is Abraham’s son. Abraham loves him and has built thirteen years of life around him. What began as an attempt to fill unanswered space has become something Abraham desperately wants God to use. In essence, Abraham is asking, “Can’t You just bless what we already built?”
That is deeply human. We can make decisions in the gaps of what God has not told us and live with them long enough that eventually they begin feeling like God’s plan. Then, when God actually speaks, His answer can be harder to receive than the answer we created.
But God tells Abraham that Sarah will bear Isaac, and in Genesis 21 she does. “The LORD visited Sarah as He had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as He had spoken.” God does exactly what He said He would do.
Then Genesis 22 brings a very different test. God tells Abraham to offer Isaac, the very son through whom God said His covenant would continue. Abraham cannot possibly understand how those two things fit together. Years earlier, that unanswered space would have tempted him to find a solution. This time, Scripture simply tells us that “Abraham rose early in the morning.”
Hebrews 11 tells us what has changed. Abraham concluded that God was able to raise Isaac even from the dead. He still does not know how God will resolve what appears to be a contradiction. He simply knows enough about God now to trust Him with what he cannot reconcile.
That is the difference between Genesis 16 and Genesis 22. Earlier, Abraham effectively said, “We need to figure out how God is going to do this.” Now his life says, “I don’t know how God is going to do this, but I know God.”
James helps us understand what happened between those two moments. He writes that “the testing of your faith produces patience.” That patience is endurance, the ability to remain under pressure without abandoning trust. Abraham’s faith endured waiting, questions, mistakes, correction, disappointment, and eventually a command he could not reconcile with the promise.
Later, James points directly to Abraham offering Isaac and says that faith was working together with his works and that through those works his faith was brought toward maturity. The Abraham on Mount Moriah is the same man who once agreed to the Hagar plan, but his faith has been tested, endured, and matured.
So what does faith require me to do, and what does faith require me to leave in God’s hands?
Abraham’s story gives us a surprisingly simple answer. What is mine to do? Whatever God has actually given me to do. What belongs in His hands? Everything He never gave me responsibility to solve.
Sometimes God’s instruction is to go. Sometimes it is to wait. Sometimes it is to ask again or keep seeking. Sometimes the hardest work of faith is refusing to manufacture an answer while we wait.
Maybe there is a place in your life where you have grown tired of waiting. Maybe circumstances began answering questions you stopped bringing to God. Maybe you built something inside the unanswered space and have lived with it long enough that it has started feeling like God’s plan.
Abraham’s story gives us hope there too. God did not abandon Abraham because he got ahead of Him. God kept speaking, revealing Himself, correcting him, and calling him into deeper trust. God continued forming Abraham’s faith.
A call back to faith is not a call to believe harder. It is a call back to God, to His presence, His voice, dependence on Him, and a life of abiding in Him. It is learning to respond when He speaks and refusing to take responsibility for what He never placed in our hands.
Eventually Abraham reached the place every life of biblical faith is being formed toward: I don’t know how You are going to do this, God. But I know You.
And when we know the One we are entrusting ourselves to, we can do what He has given us to do and leave the rest in His faithful hands.