“5. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him.
6. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind.
7. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord;
8. he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”
Question: Your response to the warning in verses 7-8?

Contrast with gospels and other letters

In verse 7-8 it says that a man of “faith with doubt” is double-minded, unstable, and undeserving of anything from the Lord.
At first glance, that appears contrary to Jesus’ statements and actions:

• On faith so small that it is almost invisible, Jesus said in Matt 17:20 (also Luke 17:6) “… if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.“
• To the doubting father of a spirit-possessed son in Mark 9:24, Jesus gave compassion and healed his son. The father had said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”
• And Paul explains that faith is not something we can produce by our own will, it is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Ephesians 2:8-9 reads, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”

So, how come the guy who has faith with doubt is so undeserving in James?

Possible answer

The nature of our tiny acceptance of faith from the Holy Spirit is critical:
(a) I suggest that James is describing the sceptic who does not step away from his self-reliance at all. He seeks to assess God according to his own intellect; he retains the right to decide whether God exists, who he is and his nature, and whether he meets our human standards of who a god should be. That is not real faith at all, he will not receive anything from the Lord, and he will remain rudderless.
(b) The faith offered by the Holy Spirit is described in Proverbs 3:5, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding;”. Even when we accept the gift of only a mustard seed size of faith, and we allow a small release from our self-reliance, then God can use that to work mountain-moving miracles with it;

The doubting father is really expressing what we also need to see – that even while by God’s grace we are able to commit to Jesus and say “I believe”, in ourselves we don’t have the power to do that, and we need help as a gift from the Holy Spirit to replace our unbelief with a trust from the heart.

Personal application

Faith is not about intellectual belief or knowledge that leads to self-pride, it’s a trust from the heart which leads to humility and dependence upon God. The question I need to ask of myself is, “Have I experienced that growth and strengthening, or am I like the man in James being tossed by the wind?”

Praise God for my experience of learning to live in dependence upon him, however imperfect that is.