The Power of Faith
“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.’”
The church is to be a place of mercy, Jesus says, where forgiveness is granted when people repent. Such forgiveness of penitent sinners must have no limits—we must forgive people as often as they repent (Luke 17:3–4). As we hear this instruction, we feel the weight of it, even wondering whether Jesus is commanding the impossible. It can be difficult to forgive others, especially those who sin against us repeatedly.
We are not the first to consider Jesus’ instruction to be too hard, for the first followers of our Lord likewise considered His teaching on forgiveness to be a hard saying. Today’s passage reveals this to us in its record of the Apostles’ request for Jesus to increase their faith immediately after He gave instructions on forgiveness (v. 5). Recognizing a certain connection between faith and power based on episodes such as our Lord’s healing the hemorrhaging woman (see 8:48), the Apostles believed that they would have the power to offer continual forgiveness if Jesus gave them more faith.
The Apostles’ request assumes that faith exists in degrees, and they were right in this, for Romans 12:3 tells us that God assigns a different measure of faith to each person. Nevertheless, the Apostles incorrectly drew a one-to-one correspondence between the power of faith and the degree of faith.
In Luke 17:6, Jesus pointed to the power inherent in even the smallest measure of faith. Even faith no bigger than a mustard seed can command a mulberry tree to be uprooted and planted in the sea. The tree here is the black mulberry tree, which has a vast root system. In that culture, completely uprooting it was considered so difficult as to be impossible. Moreover, trees cannot in reality be planted in seawater. Certainly, our Savior did not intend for His followers to go around commanding trees to be uprooted and planted in the sea. He used hyperbole to call attention to what the mere presence of faith can do. True faith in even the tiniest degree is powerful enough to enable us to obey Christ in what is naturally impossible—continually forgiving those who wrong us.
That the mere presence of faith even in an extremely small measure has such power implies that the power of faith is not found in the faith itself. The object of faith gives faith its power. True faith connects us to the Lord, for whom nothing is too difficult (Jer. 32:17). God Almighty is the power of faith.
CORAM DEO Living before the face of God
True faith, be it strong or weak, unites us to Christ, who is God Almighty incarnate. Therefore, the presence of faith in Jesus gives us strength to do what He commands, for the presence of even a little faith draws on the infinite power of God. Whatever the Lord has called us to do this day, we can do it as we rely by faith on the power of His Holy Spirit.
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