Where Is Your Hope?Sample

Why Increasing Our Faith Misses the Point – And What Really Makes the Difference

This first passage starts just before Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem but it is key to understanding the five encounters that follow it.

In Luke 17:5, the disciples ask Jesus to: “increase our faith.” Most likely, they make this request in response to Jesus’ teachings against the Pharisees and religious leaders (Luke 14-16), his teachings on the costliness of being a disciple (Luke 14:25-34), and his commandment to forgive (Luke 17:3-4).

The disciples’ request was warranted. How do we not cause others to stumble into sin like the Pharisees? How do we truly and consistently forgive others who keep wronging us? How do we take up our cross and follow Christ? Oh Lord, increase our faith!

Jesus’ response: “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” (vs. 6).

Given the agrarian culture of first-century Israel, they would have immediately gotten the word picture – and it would have been baffling. The average size of a mustard seed is about 2.5 mm (0.1 inches). Faith that small? Surely not? Faith that small could uproot this tree and throw it into the sea?

What Jesus is highlighting is not the size of faith but its substance and object. The disciples, along with us, may not need more faith: we simply need faith in the right thing.

Over the next week, we will see that the simplest steps of genuine faith cause miraculous results when the object of that faith is Christ himself. Jesus was not building up a club of extraordinary followers with larger-than-life faith. No, He was preparing a group of “unworthy servants” who were “only doing their duty” and would follow Him not only to the ends of the earth but also to their death. Their primary duty was to trust and follow Jesus.

In the original language of the New Testament, that’s what “faith” means: trust. And that is our duty as Christ’s followers today. As members of God’s kingdom, shouldn't we trust Jesus with whatever we have? For He is the only place secure enough to put our faith.