Faith Comes By Hearing

It helps me to remember that this verse was never meant to float free as a slogan. Paul is in the middle of a long, aching argument that runs across Romans 9 to 11, where he wrestles with why so many of his own people had not received the Messiah. Earlier in this very chapter he tells us how much he longs for their salvation, so he is not theorising at a desk. By the time he reaches faith coming by hearing, he has just worked backwards through a chain of steps: calling on the Lord, believing, hearing, and someone being sent to speak (see Romans 10:14). The verse is the conclusion of that chain. Paul is answering a real and painful question, namely how anyone comes to faith at all, and his answer is almost embarrassingly ordinary. Someone has to speak, and someone has to listen. There is no shortcut around the spoken, heard message. That is the soil this verse grew in, and knowing it keeps me from flattening it into a tidy abstraction I can admire and then ignore.

There is a small thing here worth slowing down for. The Greek word behind ‘hearing’ in this verse, akoE, carries two related meanings: the act of hearing with your ears, and the thing that is heard, the report or message itself. English struggles to hold both at once, which is part of why the verse can feel slightly circular if you read it quickly. Paul seems to lean on that double sense. Faith comes as the message actually reaches me, and that message comes through the word of God. So the verse is not asking me to admire the activity of my own ears. It points me past the listening to the thing listened to. What does the quiet work is not my concentration but the content, the good news about Jesus. That is easy to miss. I can fuss over my technique, my focus and my mood, and forget that faith is a response to something genuinely said, not a product of how hard I strain to hear it.

Once I started watching for it, this way of God working through his spoken and written word turns up well beyond Paul. New birth in 1 Peter 1:23 is traced to the living and enduring word of God. In Hebrews 4:12 that word is described as living and active, doing real work inside a person. It is built into the stated purpose of John’s Gospel too, since John says he wrote his account so that readers might believe and have life (John 20:31). The storyline holds together. God speaks creation into being, sends prophets to carry his message, and at last sends his Son, who is himself named the Word. So faith arriving through a heard message is not a quirk of one sentence in Romans. It is how God has long chosen to work, drawing people not by overwhelming them but by addressing them. Christ does not bypass words. He comes to us clothed in them, and the Spirit can make an old message land as if it were spoken to me only this morning.

What the short reflection above does not quite have room to say is this: when I obey the verse, the feeling rarely keeps pace with the listening. I have found there is often a lag. I read, I sit under teaching, I let a psalm be read over me when I can stir up nothing in myself, and for a while it seems to do nothing at all. Then, sometimes weeks later, the ground shifts and I notice I am trusting God again, almost without deciding to. That order is the whole point. The hearing goes first and the faith follows, often a long way behind. It means a flat stretch is not necessarily evidence that something in me is broken. My will still has a job, but its job is small: not to manufacture belief, only to keep me where the word can reach me, and to keep me there longer than feels worthwhile. The believing itself is God’s to give, on his own timing, through what he has said.

• Where have I been trying to feel more faith by effort, when what I actually need is to get back within reach of God’s word?
• When did I last let Scripture be read to me, or read it aloud myself, rather than only scanning it silently and fast?
• Is there a particular promise of God I have stopped letting soak in, and what would returning to it look like this week?
• Who first spoke the good news to me, and is there someone now waiting for me to be the voice through whom they hear it?

If you would like to keep listening, you could read on through more of Romans or find a verse that meets you where you are in how you feel.