“You don’t have enough faith,” Jesus told them. “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.” (Matthew 17:20, NLT)
The new year is here and I asked my wife, who loves golf, what her goals are for her game in 2016. She told me she wanted to lower her handicap. I asked, “How are you planning to do that?” She did not have a detailed plan, so we talked about it.
I asked her, “Is the problem with your short game? Putting? Driver? Irons?” She answered, “Getting on the green in regulation.” Pretty simple.
I said, “If we could all do that and two-putt, we would all shoot even par!”
I figured I’d come up with some master plan for my wife’s game (complicated); she said all she needed was one thing (simple). As people often stuck on religion, we get to doing the same with our faith at times. We complicate matters. Yet Jesus said in today’s verse that if you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain.
In Matthew 17, the disciples, who had already been commissioned for healing diseases and casting out demons (see Matthew 10), were unable to drive out a tenacious demon from a seizing boy. When they asked Jesus why they could not do this, he did not tell them they were missing a magic formula or they had not prepared enough or they hadn’t said the proper words. He said, “You have so little faith.”
Then Jesus told them of the mustard seed. These seeds are small, but the plants they produce spread widely, and animals are provided for by their food and shelter. In other words, small things—if they are the right things—can produce big results. Where we make our mistake is in overlooking these small things: Oh, I can’t do that. That won’t amount to anything.
When in comes to faith, though, the power is not in the believer, but in the one who is believed in. God is big. God can make things happen. So again, simple! We take our issues to God, with however little faith we have, and we say, “Lord, I am having a hard time believing for a good outworking in this circumstance, but I know your strength is much bigger than my faith. Please do your great work!”
A while ago, my friend Wally Armstrong, who helped found Links Players many years ago, gave me a journal for tracking my conversations with God in prayer. Others have done the same. What I’ve found to be true is that when I look back on my prayers and God’s answers to them, my faith doesn’t stay small. I begin to see more and more what God can do, not just on the pages of Scripture, but in my own life. I’d encourage you to start a similar journal in 2016—because while your faith may be small now, it doesn’t have to stay that way. Just look what became of the disciples as their faith grew in seeing the wonder and power of Jesus!
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Dereck Wong
January 13, 2016
Copyright 2016 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.