How to Strengthen Your Faith When It’s Weak — Spurgeon’s Counsel
⏱ 12 min read
You have been a Christian long enough to be embarrassed about this. You sit down in the chair on a Tuesday morning, the book open, the cup of tea quietly going cold beside you, and the honest sentence in the middle of your chest is my faith feels weak right now. Not gone. Not lost. Weak. The kind of faith that, if it had to walk a long way today, would tire by the second mile and need to sit down on a low wall and rest.
The internet, asked the question how do I strengthen my faith, will give you the loud answers within ten seconds. Pray more. Read more scripture. Get accountable. Memorise verses. Listen to better sermons. All of these are good. None of them are wrong. And most of them, applied to a weak-faith season, will produce more guilt rather than more faith, because the trying-harder engine you already know does not work very well has been quietly suggested again as if it might work this time.
This is a slow reading of Charles Spurgeon — the nineteenth-century London preacher who wrote, among hundreds of other things, a small book called All of Grace for the soul whose faith felt too weak to count — on the question of how a weak faith is actually strengthened. The slow practice this essay walks has its 140-day form in the Bible Study Workbook for Women, built around the daily rhythm Spurgeon would have called quiet feeding — the slow consistent return to the strong Christ on which a weak faith leans.
Spurgeon’s central counsel, said in his own dialect: weak faith on a strong Christ saves; strong faith on a weak Christ does not. The strength is not in the believer. The strength is in the One the believing leans on. You do not strengthen your faith by manufacturing more belief in your own chest. You strengthen your faith by looking, slowly and repeatedly, at the One it is resting on — until the chest catches up to what the eye is seeing. This essay walks the looking.
Why the loud answers do not work in a weak-faith season
When the faith is weak, the engine the loud answers run on is already tired. Pray more requires energy to pray. Read more requires energy to read. Memorise more requires energy to memorise. The advice assumes you have the engine; the weak-faith season is the season in which the engine has gone quiet. Adding more demands to an engine that is sputtering produces a guiltier weak faith, not a stronger one.
Spurgeon, who pastored thousands of Londoners through every kind of weak-faith season the nineteenth century could produce — bereavement, illness, financial collapse, depression (he knew that one personally, intimately, for years) — had a different first move. He did not start by asking the weak-faith soul to do more. He started by asking the weak-faith soul to look at someone other than itself. The looking is the strengthening. The trying is what comes later, once the looking has done its quiet work.
Here is the first line from Spurgeon worth keeping near the page. It is the line that, on its own, undoes most of what the loud answers have been doing wrong:
He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain. What delightful encouragement this truth affords us! If our Lord is so ready to heal the sick and bless the needy, then, my soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee.
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read what he is doing. He is not telling you to strengthen your faith. He is describing the Christ your faith is in. Prolific of grace. Radiant with lovingkindness. A swift arrow of love. Virtue evermore going out of Him, as sweet odours exhale from flowers. The whole paragraph is a long, slow looking-away from the believer’s own chest toward the Person the believer’s faith is resting on.
And then — only at the end — the instruction. And notice how small the instruction is. My soul, be not thou slow to put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee. That is the whole prescription. Put thyself in his way. Not generate more faith. Not try harder to believe. Put thyself in the path of the One whose virtue is evermore going out. The strengthening, in Spurgeon’s reading, is the natural consequence of being repeatedly in the path. The soul that keeps stepping into the light of the moving Sun gets warmer over time. The soul that stays in its own room with the curtains drawn does not, no matter how hard it tries to feel warm.
The somatic moment — feeling the weakness without judging it
Pause for a breath. Set the screen down. Bring one hand to the chest, just below the collarbone. Notice the weakness. Do not try to fix it. Do not measure it. Do not name it as failure. Just notice it is there. The body has been carrying the weak-faith season for a while now — the small tiredness, the slight reluctance in the morning chair, the way the prayers have gotten shorter. Stay with the hand for one slow inhale and one slow exhale. The weakness is not a moral failing. It is, often, the body of a soul that has been faithful for a long time in a hard stretch. Let the body acknowledge it. The strengthening Spurgeon is describing does not start with shame; it starts with the slow, honest seeing of where you actually are, and then the small repeated turn toward the One whose virtue is evermore going out. The hand on the chest is the start. The turning toward Christ is the rest.
The second line — the slow company of the evening hour
Here is the second passage from Spurgeon, the one that names how the strengthening actually happens in real time — not in a dramatic moment, but in a slow, repeated, almost domestic intimacy with God:
Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Watch what he is describing. The faith-strengthening practice is not a campaign. It is speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. It is o that he would walk with me. It is the slow giving-up of the whole heart and mind to Him, with every other thought hushed. It is the cool twilight, the stars like the eye of heaven, the cool wind as the breath of celestial love.
This is what the faith-strengthening practice actually looks like in Spurgeon’s hand. Not a stricter regime. A slower one. The soul that has been running its faith on willpower is being invited, in this passage, to lay down the willpower and to come into the fellowship — the abiding — that the Holy Spirit has been given to provide. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. That is the engine Spurgeon is pointing to. Not your trying. The Spirit’s abiding. Already given. Already there. The strengthening is the slow noticing of what has already been provided, not the manufacturing of what is missing.
This is also why the Bible Study Workbook for Women is built the way it is. A small daily page. The same kind of slow returning. Not a curriculum to complete; a room to keep coming back to, in which the abiding Spurgeon names has a daily form. Faith does not strengthen on a sprint. Faith strengthens on a slow, repeated, almost boring rhythm of small returns to the same true sentences about who Christ is, until the chest catches up. (For the related question of what faith actually is in the first place, before the strengthening question can be properly asked, what is faith according to the Bible — Owen’s working definition walks Owen’s three-part working definition; and for the question of what believing itself looks like once the affections are engaged, what does it mean to believe in Christ — Edwards on true belief is the Edwards companion.)
The third line — the Trinity that is doing the work you have been trying to do
Here is the third passage from Spurgeon. It is, in some ways, the line that resolves the whole essay, because it relocates the strengthening engine into the place it was meant to live the whole time:
Thou, O Father, art the source of all grace, all love and mercy towards us. Thou, O Son, art the channel of Thy Father’s mercy, and without Thee Thy Father’s love could never flow to us. And Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive that divine virtue which flows from the fountain-head, the Father, through Christ the channel, and which, by Thy means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit.
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
Read this slowly. Spurgeon is mapping the whole thing. The Father is the source. The Son is the channel. The Spirit is the One who enables us to receive. The grace, the love, the mercy, the virtue — all of it is flowing, from a fountain-head, through a channel, received by the Spirit’s enabling, entering into our heart, abiding there, bringing forth glorious fruit.
You are not the source. You are not the channel. You are not even the receiver in your own strength. You are the heart in which the receiving happens — by the Spirit’s means. The whole strengthening of faith is, in Spurgeon’s hand, a Trinitarian flow that the Spirit is already enabling in you, daily, whether you feel it strongly or weakly. The weakness is the receiver’s experience of being a weak receiver. It is not evidence that the flow has stopped. The flow does not stop. The Father is the source. He does not run out of grace. The Son is the channel. He does not get blocked. The Spirit is the enabler of reception. He is already at work in your heart, today, while you are reading this, while the faith feels weak.
So the way you strengthen your faith is not to manufacture more strength in the receiver. The way you strengthen your faith is to put yourself, repeatedly, under the flow — by the slow daily practices that have always been the way the saints did this — and to let the flow do its slow work of fattening a weak receiver into a stronger one. Put thyself in his way, that he may smile on thee, as Spurgeon said in the first passage. The smile is the flow. The way is the practice. The strengthening is the result.
The slow practices that put you in the way
A short list, in Spurgeon’s hand, of what the putting in the way looks like in a weak-faith season. None of these are demanding. All of them are quiet repetition:
The morning sentence. One line of scripture, read slowly, by the kettle. Not a chapter. Not a plan. One line. Held for the day. (For the practical form of this, how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin is the gentle on-ramp, and how to make a prayer journal from scratch — a DIY guide is the five-minute set-up.)
The evening hush. A quiet five minutes before bed, with the body lowered, the eyes closed, the soul addressing Him by His names. Father. Son. Spirit. My Joy. My Hope. The names slowly remind the chest of what the head already knows. The reminding is the strengthening.
The prayer for the loud noise that is keeping the faith weak. If the weakness is the by-product of an anxious mind that will not stop, prayer for anxiety and overthinking — calm your mind with scripture walks the slow scripture-anchored prayer for the 2am chest, where the weak-faith season often gets its loudest weight.
The hundred-day rhythm. If the weakness has been longer than a season — if it has been a year, or two, of the faith feeling thinner than you would like — the practice that has carried more weak-faith souls than any other is the slow hundred-day return to the verse-a-day rhythm. 100 days of faith over fear — the slow practice that actually holds walks the full version of this slow rhythm, day by day, in the same key Spurgeon would have recognised.
None of these will produce a sudden strong faith by Sunday. All of them, kept for three months, will produce the slow noticing that the chest is catching up to the eye — that the seeing of Christ has thickened, the trusting has become slightly more reliable, the morning has become slightly less reluctant. The strengthening is real. It is not dramatic. It is the slow consequence of the putting yourself in the way, repeated until the way has become your home.
So — how do I strengthen my faith?
The Spurgeon answer, gathered into one sentence: you do not strengthen your faith by trying harder to believe; you strengthen your faith by repeatedly putting yourself in the path of the strong Christ on whom your faith is resting, and by letting the Spirit, who has already been given, do the slow enabling work He is already doing. The result, over months, is not a heroic faith. It is a quieter faith — one that has caught up to what the eye has been seeing, that leans more easily, that no longer needs to manufacture its own strength because it has remembered, finally, whose strength it has been borrowing the whole time.
The viral line — weak faith on a strong Christ saves; strong faith on a weak Christ does not — is the comfort to keep near the page on the worst days. The weakness of your faith is not the disqualifying thing. The strength of the Christ it is leaning on is the saving thing. The weak hand on a strong rope does not fall. The strong hand on a thin rope does. The work is the looking, slowly and repeatedly, at the Rope. (And if the believing itself has been the question underneath the strengthening question — if you have been quietly unsure whether the believing is even there — what does it mean to believe in Christ — Edwards on true belief walks the slower diagnostic in Edwards’s hand.)
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The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women.
