Father, how continually You must correct me for my unbelief. My terrible ability to trust You must appear quite strange. Forgive my lack of faith. Forgive my unbelief! Help me to trust You more and not run away from the situations in my life that create the very faith I desire. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

A Life of Prayer We ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers, as is right, because your faith is growing abundantly, and the love of every one of you for one another is increasing.Therefore we ourselves boast about you in the churches of God for your steadfastness and faith in all your persecutions and in the afflictions that you are enduring. — 2 Thessalonians 1:3-4 Nothing needs to grow as much as our faith. “Your faith groweth exceedingly” (2 Thess. 1:3, KJV) is said of one church. When Jesus spoke the words, “According to your faith be it unto you” (Matt.9:29, KJV), He announced the law of the kingdom, which tells us that different people have different degrees of faith, that one person may have varying degrees, and that the amount of faith will always determine the amount of one’s power and blessing. If we want to know where and how our faith is to grow, the Master points us to the throne of God. It is in prayer, exercising one’s faith in fellowship with the living God, that faith can increase. Faith can only live by feeding on what is divine, on God Himself. It is in the adoring worship of God—the waiting on Him and for Him in the deep silence of soul that yields itself for God to reveal Himself—that the capacity for knowing and trusting God will be developed. As we take His Word from the blessed Book and ask Him to speak it to us with His living, loving voice, the power to believe and receive the Word as God’s own Word to us will emerge in us. It is in prayer, in living contact with God in living faith, that faith will become strong in us. Many Christians cannot understand, nor do they feel the need, of spending hours with God. But the Master says, and the experience of His people has confirmed, that men of strong faith are men of much prayer. This brings us back again to the lesson we learned when Jesus, before telling us to believe that we receive what we ask for, first said, “Have faith in God” (Mark 11:22, KJV). It is God—the living God—into whom our faith must strike its roots deeply and broadly. Then it will be strong enough to remove mountains and cast out devils. “If ye have faith . . . nothing shall be impossible into you” (Matt. 17:20, KJV). If we could only give ourselves up to the work God has for us in the world! As we came into contact with the mountains and the devils that are to be cast away and cast out, we would soon comprehend how much we need great faith and prayer. They alone are the soil in which faith can be cultivated. Christ Jesus is our life and the life of our faith. It is His life in us that makes us strong and ready to believe.—Andrew Murray