Luke 17:5-7
Luke chapter 17, beginning at
verse five. Let’s hear God’s word together.
The apostles said to the Lord, increase our faith. And the Lord
said, if you had faith, like a grain of mustard seed, you
could say to this mulberry tree, be uprooted and planted in the
sea and it would obey you. Let’s pray together. Father,
we know that without eyes to see, your ears to hear, our hearts
to perceive what is true from your word, that we would disbelieve
it, we would ignore it, we would cast it aside. But we need your
word more than anything else. It is bread from heaven. It is
water springing from a well of eternal life. So make your word
an effective means of your salvation today. May it lift up our souls
and encourage us in our daily living. This we pray in the name
of Jesus. Amen. When I was in school in
East Tennessee, one of the great oddities of East Tennessee religion
was snake handling. You’ve all heard the jokes of,
are y’all a snake handling church? And thankfully that practice
has died out a little bit. Maybe everybody has been bitten
one last time, and that has ended the practice. I don’t know. But
that was a whole culture up there in the mountains of East Tennessee.
And the premise was something like this. If you have faith,
and I think this comes from the ending of the Gospel of Mark,
the disputed ending of the Gospel of Mark that most scholars agree
does not end the Gospel of Mark, but it’s there nevertheless,
that if you have faith, you can drink poison, And if you have
faith, you can handle serpents and be bitten by the poisonous
vipers and you will not die. This is confirmed in the book
of Acts when the apostle Paul is shipwrecked and he and his
sailing comrades are landed on some small island. He puts his
hand near the fire and a serpent latches onto him and he does
not die. And they think he is a God. And
so we see from time to time in American religion these misguided
faith practices, right? We have snake handlers. If you
have enough faith and you are bitten, you will not die. But
we have these other strange practices. We have these faith healers.
If you have enough faith and an appropriate knock on the head,
right, you’ll get better, right? You laugh, but that’s a prominent
piece of theology in our culture. And there are other wacky views
of faith and how God works through that faith. But I think the Bible
teaches us a very different view of faith. For example, Noah,
we are told, out of reverent fear for almighty God, he spent
a hundred years constructing an ark. Now remember, Noah constructed
that ark in a dry land. He constructed that ark in the
middle of a desert and he hammered and he sawed and he nailed and
he did whatever it took to get that ark built in the midst of
a generation that said, you are a crazy fool. But what did Noah
do? He had faith that God was going
to send judgment. And that judgment was going to
come through a flood and that if he constructed the ark and
he built it according to God’s specifications, that ark would
be a place of safety and salvation for his family. And so we’re
told that Noah built, he hammered and he nailed and he cut and
he sawed for a hundred years out of reverent fear of almighty
God. He had faith. Or how about Abraham? When visited by almighty God,
Abraham went out from his land. He went out from his country.
He went out from his family. He obeyed God, not knowing where
he was going or what would come his way. But he believed like
Noah believed that there was a flood and the ark would be
a way of salvation. Abraham believed that God would
give him an inheritance in the promised land. Or how about Sarah? Sarah, we’re told, was past the
age of child rearing, but she considered him who gave the promise,
able to be faithful. And he gave her the power to
conceive a child of promise. Or circle back to Abraham. Abraham
was tested by God. He was given the test of all
tests, the test that no father of a son would ever want to experience.
Abraham, take your son, your only son, Isaac, the one whom
you love, and go to the mountain I will show you, and there lay
him on an altar. and give him as a sacrifice to
me. And we’re told that Abraham offered
the child of promise on an altar. Can you imagine what Abraham
went through the morning? He awoke, he gathered the wood,
he saddled his donkey, he made the two, three days journey.
He told his servants, you stay behind while the boy and I go
to worship. He was in the act of offering
up his son as an offering. And the angel said, Abraham,
now I know. Now I know that you are a man
of faith.” And he provided the ram that had been caught in the
thicket. Or how about the Israelites?
The Israelites were told the people of Jericho are really
the gatekeepers of the promised land. You got to get through
Jericho to enter the promised land and take your inheritance. And so what was their battle
strategy for Jericho? Well, you’re going to take seven
days and each day you’re going to March around it quietly, fingers
over lips, one lap, day two, another lap, day three, another
lap, and so on. And on day seven, seven laps. And at the end of
that seventh lap, what are you going to do? You’re going to
blow your horns. And what’s going to happen? The
walls are going to fall. Now, who in their right mind
would put that in a military manual on how to conduct a war?
No one. But nevertheless, the Israelites
were commanded by God to do this and they had faith and they did
so. And so we come to our passage in today’s gospel where Jesus
is teaching, he’s making his way to Jerusalem and we’ve seen
him address the Pharisees, we’ve seen him address the crowds,
we’ve seen him address his disciples, but here today in verse five
of chapter 17, it speaks of his apostles. It speaks of those
he will send out into the world to carry the gospel, those who
will be sent out on his behalf to explain and barter and broker
the ministry of reconciliation among the Jews and the Gentiles. And so the disciples, likely
hearing Jesus’ commands, which we have broken up into a couple
of simple sermons over the last few weeks, but particularly last
week’s study, If you have a brother who sins, you’ve got to rebuke
them. And if they repent, you’ve got
to forgive them. And if they sin against you seven times and
they repent seven times, you must therefore forgive them as
many times as it takes. And can you imagine they’re scratching
their heads and they’re saying, this is a really hard thing to
do. I mean, we all live in relationship, don’t we? We live under the same
roof as others. We co-work with others. We go to school with others.
We are around other people. We know how hard it is to be
in fellowship with others. That fellowship is often broken
by sin. And so we might be scratching our heads as well and saying,
this is a tough one, Lord. You want me to forgive others
as often as they sin against me and repent. What a great difficulty.
And so as they are finding it hard to offer forgiveness to
others, they say, we need more faith. Lord, increase our faith. And that’s very often the way
we think, but it’s very often the way the Christian church
or American theology preaches it. You know, there’s this idea
that we preachers or the church of Jesus Christ, we need to keep
enough guilt heaped on you to keep you coming back, right?
If we were during the reformation times trying to raise money to
fix our sanctuary, we would do no better than to do what good
old Tetzel did. and sell indulgences to get your
families out of purgatory, right? I mean, what was the little saying?
When into the coffer a coin doth ring, a soul from purgatory doth
spring. I mean, they had it pretty good,
right? They had you believing, they had the church believing
that when you died, you had to go to purgatory and have your
sins purged. And after purgatory, then you
could go to heaven. And so what better way to get your family
members out of purgatory than to raise a little money for St.
Peter’s? And so false theology like that, it keeps people on
the hook. We keep enough guilt on you.
to keep you coming back and needing the grace, not the grace of God,
because that’s not what it is at all, but the grace of the
church. And dear friends, that’s such
an antithetical view of the gospel, isn’t it? That’s such a dangerous
thing to teach, for Jesus offers himself wholly, he offers himself
freely. And when you come to faith in
God, you’ve got the gift, you have faith. You need to strengthen
it. You need to nurture it, of course.
But you’ve got faith. You don’t need to have it increase.
You don’t need to have the well pump more over into you. But
that’s the way we think as Americans. You don’t have enough of the
spirit. You don’t have enough of the faith. You don’t have
enough of the this or the that. And so we categorize Christians
as some being weak or strong or sufficient or deficient. And so what does Jesus go on
to say to his disciples? He says, if you had faith like
a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree,
be uprooted and planted in the sea and it would obey you. Now there’s two images here that
Jesus gives, and I’m sure it’s causing something of another
speech Jesus gives to come to mind. Well, the first thing is
the mustard seed. We dealt with this several weeks
back, but a mustard seed, at least to the person in Palestine
in Jesus day was the smallest seed. And from that little seed,
they could plant as an anchor tree in their garden, this mustard
seed, and it would grow. And it would grow to about a
15-foot tree. It would provide housing for
birds, and it would provide shade in the afternoon heat. But it
was the centerpiece, in a sense, of their little walled gardens. And so from that little seed
grew the mustard tree. So he takes that image of this
little bitty mustard seed. If you had just a little bit
of faith, not great faith, not huge faith, not American Christianity
faith, just the faith of a mustard seed. You could say, now don’t
mix up your trees and your seeds here. You could say to the mulberry
tree, and you can imagine Jesus is standing there with his disciples.
And as he often does, he sees something that will make a great
object lesson. And he says, you see that mulberry
tree there. Well, if they had paid attention
in second grade or wherever it was, you learned about mulberry
trees in the ancient near East, they would know that mulberry
trees grow into about a 35 foot tree or so, but their root system
goes down and out. And so you see what he’s saying,
disciples, if you had just the faith of a mustard seed, you
could say to that great mulberry tree before us that has roots
down and out in the ground, you could say, be uprooted and planted
in the sea. Now that goes back to something
we’ve heard before from Jesus. He says, if you have enough faith,
you could say to the mountains, be cast into the sea. Now, does
that mean we need to be Christians who walk around to each other
and say, you don’t have enough faith, bop, you know, bonk. Right? We need to be walking
up to trees and say into the sea with you. We need to go to
the mountains to see the fall colors and say to the mountain
into the sea with you. That’s, that’s not at all what
it is. American Christianity gets that all messed up, doesn’t
it? What is Jesus saying? It only takes a little faith
to do great things for almighty God. And so a couple of things
I want us to think about today. The first is this, get faith. You need to have faith, right?
And the Bible teaches us that in order to have salvation, we
need to come to Jesus by faith, receiving his sacrifice and the
forgiveness of sins. Faith is defined in the scriptures
as believing in what we hope for. It’s putting our confidence,
our hope in things that we cannot see. God gives us this gift of
faith. We believe that we’re sinners.
We believe Jesus is the way of salvation. And we believe that
God is mighty to save. And so when we come to Jesus,
when we come to Christ, when we come to God for saving faith,
he gives us this great gift that works. It does many and mighty
things for us in the rest of our Christian life. And so the
first challenge we have is to get saving faith. Believe God. Believe the gospel. Trust in
Jesus alone for your salvation. But there’s an ongoing march
for someone who comes to faith in Jesus, and that march is the
Christian life. And so we nurture our faith.
We might call it a living faith. We have saving faith that brings
us to salvation, but we have a living faith that we nurture
by coming to church, by reading the word, by singing hymns, by
remembering God’s precious promises that are all yes and amen in
the Lord Jesus. And so we come to faith in Jesus,
we get saving faith, but we nurture that into a living faith. And
remember what James, the half brother of Jesus says, faith
without works is dead. And so what we see from the scripture,
we see it from other places, is that when we have a living
faith that springs out of that saving faith, we work for the
Lord. We do many mighty things. And so we need to get that saving
faith. We need to nurture that living faith, but we need to
put our faith to work. And doesn’t God give us plenty
of opportunities to put that faith to work? You visit the
doctor’s office and you get a diagnosis and a course of treatment that’s
going to take every ounce of your being to get through it.
And you say to yourself, God, I don’t know why you put this
on my plate. I trust you. You’ve saved me in Christ. You’ve
given me everything I need in your word and by your spirit
and through the ministry of the church to get through this. And
so I’m just going to trust you. You’re enough. I can’t see the
way forward, but you know the end. And so I’m just going to
trust you or say the outcome of the election in a few weeks
is not the way you want it. And some are already making their
travel plans. I’m going to go to Canada, or I’m going to go
to wherever. Come to Sunday school, we’ll straighten you out. Don’t
do that. But we begin to lose sight of what is good, right,
and true. And so we say things like, well, if the election goes
this way, I’m going to move to Timbuktu. Or if the election
goes that way, all will be well. Friends, we live in a wacky world. It doesn’t matter who’s in the, what is the office called? The
White House. What’s the Oval Office? It matters
who is on the throne. And so we have plenty of opportunities
to put our faith to work. Think of some examples in the
scripture. I just gave you some great examples where God’s people
did great things by faith. But think about Abraham during
all that time where he believed God and he sojourned. At least
on two occasions, there was a famine in the promised land. And what
should Abraham have done by faith? He should have said, I’m in the
promised land. I obeyed. I came here. God has taken care
of me. Everything I do is blessed and there’s a famine. So what? God can provide. But what does
Abraham do twice? He leaves the promised land and
he goes to Egypt for food. Now, going down to Egypt in the
Bible is symbolic of trusting in princes, trusting in chariots,
trusting in horses. It’s symbolic of actually going
to evil instead of relying on God. And twice we see Abraham
go to Egypt for food when there’s a famine, when he could have
just nurtured that faith and said, God, I don’t know how you’re
going to do it. but I know that you’re gonna
do it and I’m gonna sit tight and just watch. Or how about
Sarah, his wife? She was past the age of childbearing
and she of course had that child and was full of great joy when
Isaac came to her. But do you remember when the
angel of the Lord visited? He was on his way to destroy
Sodom and Gomorrah and said, Abraham, I’m gonna come back
this time next year and you’re gonna be bouncing a little boy
on your knee Remember Sarah was in the tent fixing her hair or
something. And what does Sarah do? She laughs. Lack of faith. And so you see these examples
we’ve just given a few moments ago. These people failed and
faltered in their faith living as well. Or how about Israel?
Oh, Lord, get us out of Egypt. Get us out of Egypt. The taskmaster’s
hands are heavy. Their whips are up. Upon our
backs, we’re making bricks without straw. They cried out to God.
He heard and he sent Moses to deliver them. Well, they get
out of the promised land. They get across the Red Sea.
They get into the wilderness. It’s time for food. There’s no
McDonald’s. Manna comes daily from heaven, right? The quail
give them meat. And what did the Israelites begin
to say after a while? We wish we were back in Egypt. For those were better days. It
was hard work, yes, but at least we ate leeks and onions. And
that’s the darkness we can slip into. Oh Lord, you’ve given me
cancer. Oh Lord, the stock market’s down.
Oh Lord, COVID. Fill in the blank. So and so
gets elected president. And we begin to say, God is not
on his throne. And we begin to say, woe unto
me, life is not worth living. And what have we done with our
faith? We’ve not nurtured it. We’ve not trusted what is good,
right and true. And so life gets pressure tested,
doesn’t it? Life comes at us day by day and
things land on our plates. And it’s really a test day by
day. Is God on his throne? Are his promises true? Is Jesus still king? Is God able
to spread a tent or a table in the wilderness and feed his people? One of the great stories that
comes out of the life of Martin Luther is he would go into fits
of depression and his good wife one day entered his study when
he was in a bout of depression. She came in all clothed in black
and mourning clothes and funeral clothes and she came weeping
and he said to his wife, dear Katie, what is wrong? And she
says, oh, I am mourning the death of God. And he says, honey, that
is ridiculous. God is not dead. And she simply
said to him, Albert Martin, your temperament says otherwise. He had gotten into a funk, right? We get into funks. He had quit
believing the promises of God. He was listening to the lies
of Satan. He was listening to the deceit of the world. He was
listening to all the pundits. He had the news channel on, spitting
out news all day long, telling you what’s true. And he had gotten
into a funk. And I suppose that’s where many
of us could be today. We’re in a funk. But thanks be
to God, your face, your body is here in the pew before almighty
God and his word speaks. And isn’t it good? Six days to
be in the world, but one whole day we come in the church and
the world may be wacky, crazy, noisy, dark. But we come in here
and we hear what is good, right and true. And my prayer is that
you will feed your faith. And instead of being like the
apostles saying, Lord, we need more, we need more, we need more.
You take stock and say, I have a savior who has redeemed me. He has bought me with his precious
blood. He has given me faith. He’s given me hope. He’s given
me promises. And no matter what happens in this world. As Martin
Luther said so well, this world may be with devils filled, but
God’s truth abides forever. So dear friends, dear brothers
and sisters, you have faith and it may be teeny tiny, but put
it to work and you’ll see God do amazing things in your lives. Pray with me. Lord, we live in a world that
says we never have enough. We need more, more, more. But
we serve you, a God who provides everything we need. And so Lord,
give us faith like Abraham and Noah and Sarah. Give us faith
like the Israelites when they in their right minds trusted
you. And though they could not see, they knew that you would
provide, that you would bless. Lord, when our lives are pressure
tested by this world, when our lives are weighed down with the
cares and concerns that trouble us, Remind us of everything you’ve
taught us. For you are God and we just need
to be still and to know it. Hear us and help us as we make
our prayer in the name of Christ. Amen.