The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” He replied, “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.” Luke 17:5, 6
Listening to my pastor, Erik Braun, preach from Luke 17:5-19 this past Sunday, November 13, 2010, I was pierced with the revelation that the secret to the faith which Jesus referred to repeatedly throughout the gospels has more to do with its quality than its quantity. I am also struck by just how often Jesus repeatedly scorned what passed for faith in the eyes of the religious elite in his day.
The preceding five and a half chapters in Luke’s gospel reveal Jesus’ ongoing confrontation with the Pharisees regarding the hypocrisy of their “faith” which He regarded as utterly worthless, due to its dependence on man’s self-righteousness and the work of his own hands; as if, somehow, by what we do during our lives on this earth we can actually earn or merit God’s favor. This worldly logic revolves primarily around the premise that during our lives we develop a good record where our good works outweigh our bad, on some cosmic scale of our own making; we then present this record to God and He owes us! This, in short, is the secular man’s approach to theology/religion.
The truth of the gospel, however, is that God, through His Son Jesus Christ, developed a perfect record and then He gives it to us; and as a result, we owe Him!
This spiritual reality, of course, was totally lost on the Pharisees who, being so convinced of their own righteousness, were completely blinded to their absolute need for repentance, forgiveness and redemption.
But just as the disciples likely began to get comfortable in their own spirituality, especially when compared to that of the Pharisees, Jesus then turned the tables on them in chapter 17 and spoke to them about what Erik calls the “cycle of sanctification.” This cycle involves a life where we are always recognizing the seriousness of sin in our lives [“take heed to yourselves”], living in community together despite our many sins against one another, and lastly always repenting of our sin and drawing nearer to God. In v. 4, Jesus commanded his disciples to forgive their brother even seven times in the same day for committing the same sin against them. This after exhorting them not to cause another brother to sin for “it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause on of these little ones to sin.”
To this the apostles desperately cried out to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” Which, ironically, is the beginning of faith in its purest sense, as true and pure biblical faith comes only from God, and thus, it cannot be manufactured by the spirit of man. Moreover, not only is God the source of pure faith, but He is also its giver and its object. We, however, tend too often to view faith in light of its possessor rather than its giver.
In Hebrews 11:6 faith is defined as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Erik elaborated on this by saying “faith is the instrumentation given by God to apply Himself to us.” I think that is a practical approach that appropriately recognizes both faith’s source and function.
The point I’m driving at in this piece is that for years now, I, and I’m guessing most believers, have been hindered in our pursuit of faith primarily because we have viewed it more as a matter of quantity and not so much as a matter of quality. What I am proposing now is that we shift our focus and go for quality. Like the mustard seed in the examples Jesus cites twice in the gospels both here and in Matthew 17:20 “… if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Our error, and the error of the disciples, is that we look at faith in terms of its quantity and then use carnal means to try to increase it. We measure our faith in terms of blessing as if our material blessings are proportional to the faith we have. Or perhaps we cite our accomplishments as evidence of our faith, but these measures again miss what faith is fundamentally at its core. As Erik said Sunday, “It not like Jesus just pulls out a syringe of faith and shoots us up” because we ask. But at least the disciples were acutely aware of their need for faith and cried out for it, as compared to the Pharisees who were so blinded that they thought they had it all figured out.
So it is not the quantity of our faith that seems to matter so much as its purity. Remember what the writer of Hebrews tells us in 11:6: “For without faith it is impossible to please God.” This after Paul gives us the imperative to “find out what pleases the Lord” [Ephesians 5:10]. Since this is the gospel in a sentence, what does it mean for us? What is this faith that pleases God? And how can a mustard seed worth of faith be so efficacious? What does faith of great quality look like and act like?
Consider the parable of the three men in Matthew 25:14-30 who were given five, two and one talent(s) respectively. The first two were faithful in doing their task when the master returned and the third one was not. It was more that they did do and were doing and not how much they had done when the master called them. Though the mustard seed is among the smallest of all the seeds, its faith [or determination to accomplish its task] is pure. It therefore can break through the hardest of soils and produce a bush, or what is commonly called a tree, that can grow up to ten feet high. The mustard seed has an inborn nature to do or to die doing and not just trying to do. If we leave ourselves the out that we can just try, we’ll tend to quit when faced with even mild to moderate adversity. So “as a grain of mustard seed” seems to be more a reference to the seed’s determination to do rather than a reference to its size or quantity.
Lastly, consider Paul’s admonition in Romans 12:23, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you.” Everything we have, including our position before God, is from grace through faith. Remember Jesus is not so much in the business of literally moving mountains as He is in changing hearts. Our prayer of faith should be like that of the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 3: 16-21 “I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know all this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen.” This is the essence of faith!
No comments:
Post a Comment