Many Christians struggle with what I call "Thermostat" faith. In order to have "great" miracles, we believe we must have "great" faith! Or do we?

I asked a church congregation this question: How many would like more faith to heal the sick?

It’s a motherhood issue. What type of Christian would you be if you didn’t desire to see people dramatically pulled from their wheel chairs completely healed. Predictably, most people stuck up their hands.

Yet miracles are strangely absent in most western churches. ‘Strangely’ because Jesus promised that His disciples were destined to perform greater miracles than He had. This was to be normal church. Yet today, miracles are not only missing in action, but obviously the faith needed to implement them?

Slip back two millennia and we find Jesus sitting in a boat asking His disciples a very pertinent question, “Where is your faith?” (Luke 8:25).

After a full day of ministry, Jesus decided to head back across the sea of Galilee. He frequently used this tactic to get away from the crowds that were hounding Him at His every step.

Exhausted, the Lord collapsed into a deep sleep in the boat. During the journey, a fierce storm broke out — a common enough occurrence on Galilee. It was so turbulent that the waves broke over the edge, swamping the tiny craft.

Terrified, the disciples woke Jesus, who immediately quelled the storm. However, the Holy Spirit did not insert this incident into Scripture to record yet another miracle of Jesus. The focus was clearly on the disciples’ inability to take control of the situation themselves, as witnessed by Christ’s penetrating question on what happened to their faith.

At times, the disciples were quite aggressive in their faith ready to call fire down on a village, but then there were moments like this when the action got fast and heavy and their faith was seemingly flushed out of them.

Faith was one of the important teachings of Christ. In fact, it was so important, that an unusual word — oligopistos, commonly translated 'little faith' —  is used six times in the Gospels to describe the disciples’ faith (Matt 6:30; 8:26; 14:31; 16:8 and Luke 12:28).

It’s unusual because of its rarity.  None of the other New Testament authors — other than attributing the word to Jesus — used oligopistos in their writings and surprisingly the word is essentially not found in any of the Greek literature of this period.(1)

Some of the great Rabbis used a similar Hebrew phrase to describe faith. Noah, for example, is said to have little faith, because though he had enough faith to build an ark, he quit believing because he refused to enter the ark until the flood waters forced him in.

The word, oligopistos combines two Greek words, oligos and pistis. Pistis means faith and oligos is used to describe how small an object is such as a “little” fire James 3:5 or a small quantity of fishes Matt 15:34. But the word can also refer to duration — a short period of time — as it is used in Rev 12:12 and Acts 26:28.

So what context was Jesus referring to when he said the disciples had ‘oligopistos?’ Was this a description of the quantity of their faith or the brevity of their faith?