Genuine Faith vs Positive Thinking...

How is real, genuine faith different from positive-thinking? The object of our faith, no matter it’s size, is God. And the object of our confidence is God as well. The Source and Object of our faith is always God. When we lose sight of this, we lose sight of God’s will, and thus we lose connection with Him. Once that happens, we get confused where our confidence goes, and start putting it back into ourselves. If we do not ask God to reveal His will to us, our faith loses its effectiveness. We can’t do miracles without God. The perfect example of this is here in today’s passage. The disciples lost the power to heal because they lost sight of Who it was actually doing the healing. Faith and confidence always starts and ends with God. Anything else is just positive-thinking.

14 At the foot of the mountain, a large crowd was waiting for them. A man came and knelt before Jesus and said, 15 “Lord, have mercy on my son. He has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. 16 So I brought him to Your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him.”17 Jesus said, “You faithless and corrupt people! How long must I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring the boy here to Me.” 18 Then Jesus rebuked the demon in the boy, and it left him. From that moment the boy was well.19 Afterward the disciples asked Jesus privately, “Why couldn’t we cast out that demon?”20 “You don’t have enough faith,” Jesus told them. “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.21 ” Matthew 17:14-21