In Luke 17 the disciples ask Jesus to increase their faith, to which he replies, “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.” Now I’ve spoken before about the significance of the mustard seed, but it is worth repeating. If Jesus just wanted to convey the idea of smallness there were plenty of other things that He could have used that would not carry the significance of the mustard seed, like a grain of sand for example. But the mustard seed is important not just because it is small but because it has life within it. Encased within that very tiny seed is the full potential of the mustard tree. All it needs is the right conditions to make it grow and flourish. What Jesus is teaching by this is, the size of our faith is not nearly as important as the quality of that faith. If that faith is alive then that’s all we need. That living faith will be able to do miracles.

And that leads to another point in this teaching. Jesus is also showing the disciples that a living faith changes the way we pray. Jesus says if our faith is a small as a mustard seed we can tell trees to move into the sea. Living faith makes prayer a declarative experience rather than a petitional one. In other words living faith moves us from asking for things to speaking them into being. The mustard seed of faith tells the tree to move, makes us much more bold in prayer. The faith keeps us close to God and helps us to know His heart and will and then releases us to boldly pray those things into being.

The thing to see, though, is that Biblical prayer is very powerful and often much different than the way we often pray. Jesus commanded demons to leave. He commanded illnesses to be gone. And it appears from this passage that He intends for us to do the same. That is a completely different way of praying than we are probably used to, but if we can grasp it in even a small way it could be life changing. If we have that living faith then we can buckle our seat belts because the ride could get exciting.

May God give us the grace to get there and stay there.

In Jesus,
Pastor Phil

Posted in Pastor's Message

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