MUSTARD SEED FAITH



He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” Matthew 17:20 (NRSV)

I look at the mustard seed-sized grain in the cup of my hand. So small and so easily lost. Most people think that a pastor should have faith so great that he or she needs a wheel barrow to carry it around, and like all of us, I do when times are easy and the road is newly paved, level and clear. But when the times are hard and the path steep and rocky, when worry stirs the quiet waters of our minds and our hearts are broken hearted, faith is tested and eroded by overwhelming mountains of trouble and sorrow.

In Matthew 10:1, Jesus gives authority to his disciples over, “unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.” So, while Jesus, Peter, James and John are up on the mountain experiencing the transfiguration, the rest of the disciples are left behind to mind the shop, so to speak.

However, when a young boy with a demon is brought to them, they are unable to exorcise the spirit. When they ask Jesus why they couldn’t, he tells them it was because of their little faith. In Eugene Peterson’s The Message, he interprets this as, “you’ve got to get serious about God.”

Did Jesus mean they had too much faith in their own abilities and only a little faith in the power of God? I wonder if they were trying to do it on their own authority and not through Jesus. As one of my seminary professors, Dr. Elmer Colyer, reminded us, “It’s not the size of your faith; it’s who you put your faith in.”

So, I hold out my hand with the tiny grain of my faith to the One who has always had the power to calm the storms of my life, who resurrects my hope, and who sits and weeps with me in my sorrow. Into his nail-scarred hands, I put my faith, my life, my future. And I know. I know that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains and can make all things possible when that faith is put in Christ.


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