Untitled Sermon (2)
The writer to the Hebrews said, “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him” (Heb. 11:6). Faith is the essential requirement for relationship with God.
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” (Luke 17:5). The word faith is used in a number of ways: the collection of doctrines, our belief in Jesus Christ that leads to our salvation, a stabilizing factor in life’s tough circumstances, and a belief that a certain thing will happen that releases the power of God. It is this last meaning of faith that can at times cause us difficulty. There are those who maintain that if you believe strongly enough that God will do something, He absolutely will do it. And if He doesn’t, your faith was faulty.
Sometimes it would sound as if faith is measured by size or volume. We can have a measure of it, but we can and should have more, just as Jesus seems to have indicated in Matthew 17:20. Sometimes, like in these verses in Luke 17, Jesus seems to have contradicted himself when He said the “volume” of one’s faith is not the issue. The disciples wanted the Lord to increase their faith. They viewed faith as a power that would make things happen, and the more they had the more they could make happen. It is not faith but the object of faith that makes things happen. God is the one who makes things happen within His will, in His way, and at His time.
To remove their obsession with faith itself, Jesus told them that the size of their faith was not the issue. He said, “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 17:6). Faith is our belief in, commitment to, and trust of Almighty God. The bigness of our faith is not the issue—the bigness of our God is. Faith is our belief in the ability of God to do the impossible and our commitment to trust Him to do the impossible if, when, and how He chooses. We are misguided if we want more faith so we can get the results we want. We need a deeper faith so we can have a more intimate relationship with God and experience the results He wants. Nothing is as exhilarating as experiencing “God things” that can be explained in no other way but that He made them happen—after we surrendered the situations to Him and trusted Him. Our concern should not be that we can talk to trees and get them to move, but that we can talk to God and He will move heaven and earth to accomplish His purpose through us.
