How To Increase Your Faith In Just Minutes a Day
TODAY'S TEACHING
The apostles said to the Lord, Increase our faith (that trust and confidence that spring forth from our belief in God).
—Luke 17:5
A lot of us pray for more faith the same way we’d pray for rain. We want God to pour it down on us all at once so we wake up one morning fearless, steady, completely confident, never doubting anything again.
That sounds nice. It just usually isn’t how it works.
Faith grows more like muscle than magic. Little by little. Repetition. Showing up again. Reading the same verse for the fourth day in a row because apparently you still need it.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table one morning with cold coffee that had been there long enough that it was no longer steaming. I had prayed the night before for God to strengthen my faith, and if I’m honest, I wanted to wake up feeling different immediately. Stronger. Braver. Certain.
Instead, I still felt like me.
Still resisting worry. Still replaying things in my head. Still wondering if I was doing enough or believing enough.
That’s when I started realizing faith doesn’t usually grow in dramatic moments. It grows in smaller ones that don’t always look important at first.
A man I know kept one Bible verse on a sticky note by his bathroom mirror for almost two weeks. Same verse. Same place. He said he got so used to seeing it he almost stopped noticing it, but then one morning he caught himself halfway through a panic spiral about money and realized the verse had already come to mind before fear did.
That mattered.
Because faith comes by hearing the Word of God, not just once, but over and over until it starts sounding more believable than whatever else is shouting at us.
“So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” (Romans 10:17)
As today's scripture says, the disciples asked Jesus to increase their faith, and what He said back to them was interesting. He didn’t hand them a feeling. He pointed them toward action.
Because faith strengthens when we act on it.
That doesn’t always mean huge, spectacular steps. Sometimes it’s just doing the thing God already nudged you about. Sending the text. Making the phone call. Giving when you feel nervous. Waiting when you’d rather force something.
Those moments count more than we think.
“And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.” (Luke 17:6)
Jesus wasn’t saying you need massive faith. He was saying even small faith does something when you use it.
I think that’s where we get stuck sometimes. We keep waiting until we feel more confident before we move. But confidence usually comes after obedience, not before it.
You do not need to wait until you feel fearless to take a step.
You do not need perfect faith to obey God.
You just need enough faith for the next thing He puts in front of you.
And the more you do that, the more you take action on what God says (James 2:17), the more you’ll start to notice that your faith is stronger than it used to be. Not because life got easier. Because you kept showing up, kept trusting, kept taking small steps with God, every single day.
That’s how faith grows.
If this resonates with you, here's a short prayer you can say today:
"Dear God, sometimes I want faith to show up all at once, like a switch getting flipped, and when it doesn’t happen that way I start thinking something’s wrong with me. Help me stop overlooking the small ways You’re building trust in me every day. Teach me to stay with You in the little moments that I spend in Your Word, the repeated prayers, the quiet acts of obedience that don’t feel impressive but matter more than I realize. I want to keep moving with You even when my faith still feels small. Amen."
God bless you!
Your brother in Christ,
Daniel
Daily Effective Prayer
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DEVOTIONAL QUESTIONS
1. Why do Christians expect faith to grow instantly?
Probably because we expect most things instantly now. If the microwave takes too long, we get annoyed. If a text goes unanswered for an hour, we start wondering what happened. So when we ask God for stronger faith, part of us assumes we’ll wake up tomorrow feeling like some spiritual giant. Usually that’s not what happens though. Usually we wake up still feeling like ourselves, still overthinking a little, still wondering if we’re doing enough. Faith tends to grow slower than we want as we spend time in God's Word (Romans 10:17). Kind of challenging, honestly. But when you look back after a few months, you realize things that used to completely unravel you don’t hit quite the same anymore.
2. What role does God’s Word play in increasing our faith?
What we listen to all day matters more than we think it does. If all we hear is bad news, fear, pressure, people arguing, social media telling us everything is falling apart, then of course our minds start leaning in that direction. God’s Word interrupts that. Faith increases as we spend time in the Scriptures. My wife and I know someone who kept the same verse written on a scrap of paper in her purse for weeks. She’d pull it out standing in grocery store lines, waiting in the school pickup lane, sitting in her car before work. It wasn’t some huge spiritual moment every time. But eventually that verse started coming to mind faster than her anxiety did, and that changed something.
3. Why does faith often require action?
Because otherwise it stays theoretical. We can say we trust God all day long, but eventually there comes a moment where we have to actually do something that lines up with that trust. That’s where it gets uncomfortable. You pray for courage, then God gives you an opportunity to speak up. You pray for provision, then God nudges you to give something away. I wish it worked the other way around sometimes, where we’d feel completely ready first. Usually we don’t. Usually we take the step shaky, awkward, unsure... and then realize God was there all along.
4. Why do small steps of obedience matter so much for Believers?
Because most of life is small and faith without works is dead. That’s just the truth. We think the big moments are what define us, but most of us spend way more time in ordinary Mondays than giant breakthrough moments. Faith gets built there. In the little decision to pray instead of freaking out. In reading one chapter when you don’t feel like it. In sending the text God’s been nudging you to send even though you’ve rewritten it three times already and your thumb keeps hovering over the button. Those things seem tiny, but they add up.
5. How can a Christian know if their faith is actually growing from reading God's Word?
You usually notice it in weird ways. Like scriptures come to mind much faster as you encounter different situations. Or maybe something happens that normally would’ve sent you spiraling for three days, and this time you still get upset, but you recover faster. Or you realize you prayed first instead of panicking first, which honestly is a bigger deal than it sounds like. It’s not that you stop having doubts completely. You just stop letting them run the whole show.
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SCRIPTURE OF THE WEEK
If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.
—Romans 10:9-10
