Faith in a Great God

Luke 17:5  The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!"
Luke 17:6  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.

The apostles approached the Lord with a request that many of us ask – “Increase our faith”.  Many of us struggle with this.  We look at our small faith and feel inferior to those who testify and seem to have such great faith in God.  We feel frustrated, for we pray with faith, but our faith does not seem to get things done.  And what does not help are those preachers who tell us to “just believe”, and our prayers will be answered.  And when they’re not, we just tend to feel that our faith was not great enough.

Is God asking us to have greater faith, to exercise a more aggressive “faith”?  What many don’t realize is that they’re beginning to put their faith in “faith”, rather than in the Lord Himself.

Jesus’ answer to His apostles was plain and clear - "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.  Our Lord was obviously not focusing on the “size” of our faith, but on the object of our faith – Him.  It’s not about how much faith we can build up in us.  It’s about how much we know about our Lord, for that is where we put our faith in.  Many Christians mistakenly look at faith like the “force” of Star Wars.  But faith is not about a force, it’s about the object, the focus – who we’re putting our faith in.  Are we putting our faith in a great and mighty God?

Many also make the object of their faith the answer to their prayer, or their request.  “If we have just enough faith”, they say, “our prayers will be answered”.  But the object of our faith is not what we will get, or our prayer being answered.  The object of our faith must always be our Lord Himself.  Many mistakenly live for what God can do for them, rather than simply for God.  And when we live for what God can do we either become frustrated, or we live by faith for the wrong reason.

The Lord was correcting the request of His disciples.  It wasn’t about increasing their faith, it was about increasing their knowledge of who He was, who He is.

Luke 8:24  The disciples went and woke him, saying, "Master, Master, we're going to drown!" He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm.
Luke 8:25  "Where is your faith?" he asked his disciples. In fear and amazement they asked one another, "Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him."

The answer to the Lord’s question “Where is your faith” is found in the answer to the disciples’ question “Who is this?”.  Do we know who we are praying to?  Is the question “who is this?” what drives us to pray, to read His Word – that we may know Him more?  That’s what walking by faith is all about – not just about getting what we want, but about knowing God more and more, trusting that our life in the hands of a great God, with a great love, a great faithfulness, and a great wisdom.  That’s when our faith is great, even if it’s as small as a mustard seed.