Faith That Moves Mountains: What It Is and How It Grows

Faith that moves mountains.

This teaching covers what faith actually is, the distinction between faith and hope that most believers have never had explained, how faith is built, the role of what you say, and what to do in the gap between believing and seeing.

What is faith, according to the Bible?

Hebrews 11:1 gives the definition: faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Two words carry the weight.

Substance — the Greek hypostasis was an ordinary commercial term meaning the title deed or the guarantee underlying a transaction. Faith is what gives a hoped-for thing legal reality before it arrives.

Evidence — elenchos, a courtroom word: proof, the thing that convinces. Faith functions as evidence in the absence of sight.

Both words describe something concrete and present, not a mood. That is why Scripture can speak of faith in measurable terms — great faith, little faith, faith as a grain of mustard seed — language that makes no sense applied to a feeling.

What is the difference between faith and hope?

Hope is future tense. Faith is present tense. This single distinction resolves more confusion than any other point in this teaching.

	Hope	Faith
Time	"God will do it"	"I have received it"
Function	Sets the direction, sustains you	Gives the thing hoped for substance
Basis	God's character in general	A specific word God has spoken
Response to delay	Waits	Holds a position already taken
Key text	Romans 8:24–25; Titus 2:13	Hebrews 11:1; Mark 11:23–24

Hope is not the weaker cousin of faith — Scripture treats it as one of the three that remain (1 Corinthians 13:13). But they do different jobs. Hebrews 11:1 says faith is the substance of things hoped for: hope supplies the object, faith supplies the substance. You need both, and you need to know which one you are currently exercising.

The practical test is simple. Listen to how you pray about the thing. If it is consistently "Lord, please would You" and never "thank You that You have," you are praying in hope and calling it faith.

How does faith come?

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17). That is the whole mechanism, and Scripture offers no alternative route.

It does not come by striving. It does not come by emotional intensity, by repeating a phrase until you feel something, or by wanting it badly enough. Those are religious substitutes for the thing, and they exhaust people. Faith is a by-product: you take in the Word on a particular subject, and faith on that subject appears.

Note the tense in Romans 10:17 — hearing, ongoing, not having heard. A verse read once years ago is not the same as a subject you have been living in. This is why believers can have strong faith in one area and none in another. They have heard on one subject and not on the other.

The practical application: if you cannot believe God for something, stop trying to believe harder and go find what He has said about it. Read it until it stops being information and starts being conviction. There is no timetable, and no shortcut.

What does it mean to speak to the mountain?

Mark 11:23 contains an instruction most readers pass straight over. Jesus does not say pray to God about the mountain. He says say to the mountain, be removed. The address is to the obstacle.

"Whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith."

Three things are held together in that sentence: what you say, what you believe in your heart, and what comes to pass. Believing without speaking is incomplete in this pattern; speaking without believing is empty. Romans 10:9–10 describes the same pairing for salvation itself — with the heart man believes, with the mouth confession is made.

A mountain, in the sense Jesus is using, is whatever stands between you and what God has said. It is not a metaphor for a general difficulty in life. It is a specific obstruction to a specific promise.

Why does what you say matter so much?

Because words are how faith gets released, and doubt gets released the same way. Jesus ties them together explicitly — believe in your heart, say with your mouth, receive what you say.

This is not a formula, and it is not positive thinking. The difference is the source. Positive thinking says a thing because saying it might make it so. Biblical confession says a thing because God said it first, and agreement with God is the point. If God has not said it, repeating it is not faith, it is wishful assertion — and the honest teachers in this tradition have always said so.

The corollary is uncomfortable but important. If words release faith, then habitual speech that contradicts what God has said works against you. Not because of a spiritual mechanism that punishes negativity, but because you cannot build conviction on a subject while continually rehearsing the opposite.

This is covered in depth in the teaching on the power of words and confession, including the difference between confession and presumption.

What kills faith, and how do you deal with it?

Scripture names several specific faith-killers rather than treating unbelief as one undifferentiated failure.

Double-mindedness. James 1:6–8 describes the double-minded man as unstable in all his ways, and says he should not expect to receive. Double-mindedness is not doubt that visits; it is holding two settled positions at once.

Anxiety. Philippians 4:6–7 sets prayer with thanksgiving against anxiety, with peace as the result. Anxiety and faith occupy the same space, and one displaces the other.

Unforgiveness. Mark 11:25 sits immediately after the mountain-moving passage — Jesus attaches forgiveness directly to the teaching on faith and prayer. Galatians 5:6 says faith works by love. A believer holding something against someone is working against their own faith.

Ignorance of what God has said. The most common of all, and the easiest to fix. You cannot have faith for something you do not know God has promised.

How do you hold faith when nothing has changed?

By treating the Word as the fixed point and the circumstance as the variable, and by refusing to reopen a decision you have already made.

Abraham is the extended case study in Romans 4:19–21. He considered his own body as good as dead and Sarah's womb likewise — he did not deny the facts. But he did not waver at the promise through unbelief; he was fully persuaded that what God had promised, He was able to perform. Both halves are in the text. He looked squarely at an impossible situation and held the promise anyway.

That is the model for the gap between believing and seeing. Not pretending the circumstance is other than it is, but declining to let it overturn what God said. Hebrews 10:36 names what is required in that gap: patience — literally, remaining under.

A necessary caution. Standing in faith is not the same as ignoring wise counsel, refusing help, or making irreversible decisions on the strength of an impression. Faith and foolishness both look confident from the outside. If a course of action would be reckless without the promise, get counsel from mature believers before acting on it.

What does Hebrews 11 teach about faith?

Hebrews 11 lists roughly eighteen named people commended for faith, and the pattern across them is more instructive than any single example.

Most of them were not moral exemplars. Noah got drunk. Abraham lied about his wife twice. Jacob deceived his father. Rahab was a prostitute, and is named as such in the chapter. Samson's story is largely a catalogue of failure. Faith is credited to people whose lives were visibly mixed, which rules out reading the chapter as a reward for good behaviour.

And the chapter does not end in universal victory. Verses 35–39 describe believers who were tortured, imprisoned, stoned, and killed — and says these all obtained a good report through faith, having not received the promise. Any teaching on faith that cannot account for verses 35 to 39 is not teaching Hebrews 11.

Common questions about faith

Is faith a gift, or something you work at?

Both, in different senses. Every believer is given a measure of faith at the new birth (Romans 12:3), and there is also a distinct gift of faith listed among the nine gifts of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:9), given as the Spirit wills for particular situations. Between those two, ordinary faith grows by hearing the Word and by use.

How much faith do you actually need?

Jesus answered this with the mustard seed (Matthew 17:20; Luke 17:6) — the smallest seed his hearers would have handled. The point is not that a tiny quantity is technically sufficient, but that the question of quantity is the wrong question. Faith works because of what it rests on, not because of how much of it you can summon.

Does doubting mean I have no faith?

No. Mark 9:24 records a father saying "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief" — and Jesus healed his son. Doubt arriving is not the same as doubt being settled in your heart. Mark 11:23 addresses the heart, not the passing thought.

What if I believed for something and it did not happen?

Scripture does not supply a mechanism that guarantees an explanation. Hebrews 11:39 describes people commended for faith who did not receive the promise in their lifetime. Assuming that every unanswered prayer traces back to a defect in the person praying goes beyond what the Bible says, and it has done considerable harm.

Is faith the same as being certain I feel confident?

No. Feelings follow, or they do not; Scripture never makes them the measure. Faith is a settled agreement with what God has said, which is why it can be held on a day when you feel nothing at all.

Where to go from here

Faith comes by hearing the Word, which makes knowing how to read and study the Bible the foundation this teaching stands on — you cannot build faith on a subject you have never read. Since faith is released by what you say, the teaching on words and confession covers the speaking side of Mark 11:23 in detail. And because healing is received by faith, that teaching applies everything here to the most common arena in which believers are asked to exercise it.

If you are new here, the story behind this ministry explains who is teaching and why.

Written by Darius J. · Last updated 9 August 2026