Along with hope and love, faith is a theological virtue. Unlike natural virtues, which can be acquired through habitus, theological virtues are gifts from God. What Jesus teaches in our Gospel today is not how we earn faith but about excercising it. Faith, after all, is your response to God's unceasing intiative toward you.
Because the gift of faith is just that, a gift, it must not only be given but received. But like any gift, it can be lost. The scriptural reading for today in the Office of Readings consists of the the first twenty verses of 1 Timothy. In verse 19, the inspired author mentions by name two believers who "made a shipwreck of their faith"- Hymenaeus and Alexander.
It seems these two shipwrecked their faith "by rejecting conscience." The author writes he has handed them over to Satan for correction, specifically that they might learn not to blaspheme. We are not informed as to the exact nature of their blasphemy. We just know that it had to do with a serious violation of their consciences, which presumably had been rightly formed.
I am not suggesting that sin, even serious sin, results in a loss of faith. But I think repeatedly doing what you know be wrong weakens your conscience and eventually your faith. There are a lot of things these days that the Church has pretty much always held to be wrong that some now insist aren't only not wrong but actually right. This calls for discernment and conscience formation.
There is probably no one who has a perfectly formed conscience. Conscience formation is an ongoing project, an aspect of spiritual growth and conversion that lasts a lifetime. In dealing with conscience formation, an important distinction has to be made between wrongdoing and sin.
Sin is knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway with a fair degree of freedom. Wrongdoing amounts to doing something wrong that you don't know is wrong or are at least mistaken about how wrong it is. Wrongdoing can reduce or even eliminate personal culpability.
In this, faith and reason are in play for sure. More importantly so are faith and will but will assisted by God's grace. It isn't enough to know what's right, we all need help at times to choose it.
It isn't so much about powerfully commanding a mulberry tree to be uprooted and fly into the sea as it is about having the faith to face yourself and, with God's help, the intercession of our Blessed Mother and the saints, uproot whatever needs to be uprooted.
Repentance is the fruit of faith. And so, we must have the faith to ask God, in the words of today's Collect, to "pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and to give what prayer does not dare to ask."
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