Luke pays closer attention to unlikely people than any other Gospel writer, and faith in his account keeps showing up in the people religious insiders would have least expected: a Roman soldier, a sinful woman, a poor widow, and an unmarried teenager asked to believe something no one had ever been asked to believe before.
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Faith in Luke: The Big Picture
Luke, a physician and careful historian, writes with a consistent concern for people on the margins: the poor, women, Samaritans, tax collectors, and Gentiles. His portrait of faith follows the same pattern. Again and again, the people Jesus commends for great faith are exactly the people the religious establishment of the day would have overlooked or excluded. Luke's Gospel is building toward the book of Acts, where the same faith that saved a sinful woman in chapter 7 will spread to the entire Gentile world.
Key Verses About Faith in Luke
Luke 1:45 Elizabeth greets Mary with, "Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her." This is one of the earliest faith statements in the New Testament, spoken about a teenage girl asked to believe something entirely unprecedented, that she would carry the Messiah.
Luke 7:9 Of the Roman centurion who believed Jesus could heal with only a word, Jesus says, "I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel." Luke, like Matthew, uses this story to show faith recognized in someone entirely outside Israel's religious system.
Luke 7:50 To a sinful woman who wept at His feet and anointed them with perfume, while religious leaders looked on with judgment, Jesus says, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace." Her faith, not her past or her reputation, is what Jesus names as the basis of her salvation.
Luke 8:48 To a woman healed after twelve years of suffering, Jesus says, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace." Luke, like Mark, records this healing as directly tied to her faith rather than only to Jesus's power acting apart from her.
Luke 17:5-6 When the disciples ask, "Increase our faith!" Jesus answers, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, Be uprooted and planted in the sea, and it will obey you." The lesson is the same one Matthew records: the size of your faith matters less than the size of the God it is placed in.
Luke 18:8 At the end of the parable of the persistent widow, Jesus asks, "However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?" A sobering question that treats persistent, enduring faith as something that cannot be assumed will still be present when He returns.
What Luke Teaches About Faith That Includes Everyone
Luke's consistent pattern is that faith is available to and demonstrated by people the religious culture of the day had written off: a foreign soldier, a woman with a scandalous reputation, an unmarried teenager, a suffering widow no one else noticed. This is not incidental to Luke's Gospel; it is one of his central theological arguments, one he continues directly into the book of Acts, where the gospel moves outward to Samaria and to the ends of the earth. If you have ever felt like you were the wrong kind of person for God's attention, Luke's Gospel is the most direct answer in the New Testament that says otherwise.
Continue exploring faith across Scripture with Mark verses about faith or Gospel verses about faith, or see the complete picture in the guide to Bible verses about faith, love, and hope. Read the full Gospel of Luke for free in the FaithSpark Bible reader, or explore everything FaithSpark offers at mindgardenpress.com/faithspark-app/.
