Faith like a mustard seed by Jeff Cayzer
There are several passages in the gospels where Jesus mentions mustard seed. Here is just one of them: “… truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” (from Matthew 17:20).
We often have a problem seeing any relationship to our reality in such words. Many years ago, a friend of mine, preaching to our congregation, asked a question, starting with the mustard seed. After reading the passage from Matthew, he asked whether we had that sort of faith. The answer was obviously no; it was outside our experience. Then he showed us the palm of his hand and shook from an envelope one tiny speck of dust. He asked us to believe it was there, even though from where we were sitting, it was impossible to be sure. But we managed to believe him this far.
“That,” he said, is about the size of a mustard seed.
“Now”, he said. “I think you will agree that it’s so tiny it’s almost invisible. It’s just a teensy bit more than nothing at all.”
“How many of you don’t think you have the faith the Bible talks about?”
Most of us thought we were pretty much lacking in that sort of faith.
“Now how many of you think you have just a little bit more faith than no faith at all?
So little that it’s almost not there?
“That teensy-weeny little bit of faith, so tiny it’s almost no faith at all — that’s what Jesus is wanting to build on and grow. And we just have to let him do his work of making it grow. Don’t try to anticipate the end result. That’s his job. Your job is just to give him room to make it grow in you.”
That story has its own power for our lives, as I have found since then.
More recently, I have been experimenting with replacing the words “faith” and “belief” with “trust”, and looking at some of the examples, both in the Old and New Testaments, and in daily life, of people trusting God no matter what. I’m still starting on the journey of understanding what it means to trust God and of trying to move from attempted control across to trust in areas of daily life.