Is My Faith Genuine?

How do you know you’ve truly repented? How do you know you’re trusting Christ for forgiveness? How do you know your faith is genuine?

If you have scrupulosity, you know these types of questions well. When your greatest fear is that God is displeased with you or that you’re not even a Christian, these loops are all too familiar. Maybe you’ve also had these thoughts: I know I need faith only as large as a mustard seed, but what if I don’t even have that? I know that it is not the strength of my faith that counts, but its direction—yet how do I know it’s pointed in the right direction? What if my motives are all wrong, my heart is all cold, and there is no hope for me?

Perhaps you’re tripped up by Ephesians 2:8—“by grace you have been saved through faith.” Your introspective, overly tender conscience homes in on the “faith” piece. But what is it? What does it feel like? How do I know I have it? You acknowledge that God is gracious, but you want to know what is your responsibility!

It’s true—faith is the vehicle. But what is the emphasis of this passage? How are we made right with God, brought into the very closest of relationships with the One whom we have offended, when what we deserve is separation? How are we saved? By grace.

What follows from this is that even faith itself is a gift. Consider the second part of this verse: “it is a gift from God, not a result of works.” There’s debate about what “it” refers to in this context, whether grace or faith, but I believe it’s biblically accurate to say both. The whole of our salvation—the grace of God, the faith we have in that grace—is a gift.

If faith were a work, a feeling we have to muster up all on our own, an effort we have to achieve, then it wouldn’t be true that we are saved by grace alone. This doctrine only makes sense if that very faith, too, is a gift of grace.

Even the evangelicals’ “Sinner’s Prayer” can become a kind of work: God answers my prayer for salvation because I hit the bullet points of everything I was supposed to pray. But Ephesians 2 reminds us twice that it is “by grace you have been saved” (v. 5, 8).

The passage says more about what it means to be saved: moving from death to life. Becoming a Christian is not simply a cognitive decision or a positive feeling; it is the transformation of a lifeless heart to a beating heart. When we were dead (read: unable to move toward God), God made us alive (v. 1–5). This is a transformation wholly apart from us, a pure gift from God—initiated, carried out, and fulfilled by him.

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So then how do we respond to these questions scrupulosity raises? As with other obsessions, we know that the way forward is by letting go of our over-responsibility, accepting feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, and throwing ourselves on the mercy of Christ. It is he who saves us. Faith, as I said, is the vehicle—we are saved through it, but we are saved by grace. We are solely dependent on the Lord for life.

This doesn’t answer the question of whether our faith is genuine. But we can’t evaluate our own faith with objectivity. For one, we are finite human beings, so we do not see all, and we cannot know the true motives of our hearts. And we also wrestle with scrupulosity, which will always offer fresh doubts and new anxieties, insisting that the negative is true. It will never be satisfied with any reassurances we find. Looking inward, we find nothing to give us confidence, but only despair, panic, and dread. We really are called to complete, total, utter dependence on Jesus, as well as an abandonment of our own desire to know for sure. As a fellow sufferer once said, part of walking through OCD is learning to let Jesus save me, not my rumination and faith-filled prayers.

You know, as I do, that our faith often feels weak, crippled, or even nonexistent. How could we ever produce the kind of faith that would be worthy of a perfect God? Thus, the promise of salvation could never rest on my cognitive ability, my strength of faith, or my true, untainted sorrow over my sin. It must rest on the One who earned it. Would God move heaven and earth to save his people, invite them to draw near, and then bar the way with hoops and hurdles of required thoughts, feelings, strength, and effort?

We might be weak and our faith might be faltering, but Jesus is strong and able. He is generous in mercy and accepts the faith that is small, the faith that is wobbly, and the faith that is a mixed bag of motives. We are saved and kept not by our own efforts, but by his grace. We’re not meant to be strong, but to lean on the One who is strong. And we’re not meant to conjure up our own faith, but simply to turn to the One who gives us the faith we need. Like manna, he will provide the faith we need to follow him day by day.

You cannot be absolutely certain that your faith is genuine. But what do you know? You are totally dependent on the Lord—for saving faith and sustaining faith. So what if your faith is not sufficient? Take heart—Jesus is.