Time in the Bible this morning is exciting to me because of the little bit of theology that we’re going to look at. It’s a corrective to one of the more damaging theological trends of our time. It’s a small passage, but it packs a big punch. You know, sometimes when, when, when you think a certain way and then one small observation comes along, or one new fact, it turns it all around. That’s kind of what we’re going to have happen this morning. There’s been a theological trend that has built steam over the last few centuries of the church. That has had a devastating effect on both the core tenets of the gospel and on the practices of the church. And if you walked with us here at Calvary for a while, you have heard us teach a very high view of God’s power and presence and control of all things. This includes his blessings and the happiness and peace that we experience in Christ, and the joy of knowing our sins are washed away. And this is not because of anything that we’ve done. We are not special people. We are not highly skilled people. Or at least of all. Are we deserving people? God has chosen us to redeem us simply because he wanted to. That’s God’s grace to us. And now we point other people to that grace, and we rest. We rest in the firm knowledge that the God who has chosen us and redeemed us and brought us into his family is now working in all circumstances to shape us into the men and women that God has called us to be.

That includes both blessing and tragedy. That includes health and sickness. It includes having a lot of things and not having enough things. God uses all of it to shape us, to be like Christ. As James said, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect. They may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. The Apostle Paul talked about this in numerous ways throughout his ministry, but maybe nowhere so clear as when he wrote about the thorn in his flesh, which was some kind of an ailment or a problem that dogged him throughout his life. He said, three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. So, James and Paul knew their faith was powerful, not because they were powerful, but because God worked powerfully through their faith.

Now imagine a type of theology that changes faith into something that we produce, and that we strengthen and expand on our own. Picture a God who is who is not strengthening our faith through hardships but is instead sending those hard things into our lives because the quantity of our faith wasn’t enough to earn his blessings. This God would say something like, I have all this wealth waiting for you, healing from your sickness. I have it. It’s waiting for you. I have it all. I’ll give it to you if you can show me that you have enough faith that is called the prosperity gospel. Sometimes it’s called the health and wealth gospel. It’s not a gospel at all. See, gospel means good news. This is not good news. This is terrible news that robs Christians of their confidence in God, because it makes faith into a kind of game. If you have gathered up enough faith, if you force God’s hand to give you the thing that you want. And so, the whole Christian life becomes this mental game of trying to show how sincere and pure your faith is, so that you can claim the blessings that he has for you. And so, when those blessings do come to you, it is a triumph of your faith. And conversely, every failure to get the good thing in your life is an indictment of your faith.

You weren’t strong enough in your trust in the Lord, so you couldn’t give God couldn’t give you what he wanted to give you. This is an unbiblical, damnable, heretical teaching of a false church that has spread all over the world. Did you know that? It’s all over, all over the world. As I mentioned, it’s been around for a couple hundred years, but it really gained steam in the 80s when TV preachers became a big thing. That’s when this thing really took off. The so-called word of faith movement roped unsuspecting people into this nonsense from the comfort of their couches. Desperate people heard a false teacher tell them God’s blessing is waiting for you if you have enough faith. And wouldn’t you know it, the amount of faith that a person had was measured by the number of zeroes they put on the check that they sent to that false teacher. Wow, what an incredible coincidence. But I’m telling you, church, you know I’m not up here this morning with a bone to pick about 80s preachers. That would be strange, wouldn’t it, if we spent our morning doing that? That’s not actually the real problem. There are a lot of people struggling under the weight of a false view of their how their faith works. There’s a lot of people that have bits and pieces of what I just described that they carry with them. There are folks here in our church bearing spiritual burdens because they don’t understand where the power of faith comes from.

Our passage this morning is a wonderfully freeing passage from Jesus. It’s a message from Jesus that will set you free. And ironically, it’s a passage that prosperity gospel advocates use because they misread it. I want you to be really encouraged today as Jesus briefly rewires our thinking on genuine faith. The presence of faith in Christ in your mind and heart, no matter how small, if it is genuine, will accomplish great things. We have just two short verses today because I know you love it when I take my time through the Bible. So, we’re in just Luke 17, verses five and six. Today the apostles make a request to Jesus, and then Jesus answers them by correcting their assumption and explaining the power of genuine faith. Here’s the request the apostles said to the Lord, increase our faith. That’s enough. Let’s stop there. Apparently, the apostles were challenged by what they had just heard from Jesus. If you were here with us last week, you’ll remember that Jesus just told his group of disciples that their job is to look out for each other. Remember that? Look out for one another. When we see a fellow Christian wandering off toward sin or off toward temptation, we’re supposed to rebuke. And if the sin is against us, we’re supposed to forgive. And this forgiveness is not supposed to end.

Jesus said, you might even do it seven times in a day. Which is to say, all the time, every time you’re going to forgive. Christians are to be an endless well of loving correction and gracious forgiveness for the benefit of other people, which in times like these is incredibly rare. Can you imagine? Can you imagine the impact we would have in our culture if living? By contrast, we were endlessly, lovingly correcting and endlessly forgiving. We would stand out in this world. Well, this call to endless forgiveness had an impact on the apostles who were listening. Here Luke switches from disciples. In verse one. He starts to talk about the apostles in verse five. Now back in chapter six, Jesus named the 12 of his closest disciples apostles, which means they are the sent ones. These are the tactical missionaries that he’s training up. So, some or all of these apostles recognize the difficulty of what Jesus is saying to the disciples about rebuking and forgiving. And so, they step forward and they speak up and they say, increase our faith, increase our faith. This appears to be a declaration of exasperation. How are we going to do this? God, how are we going to do this? Jesus. Are we hear what you’re saying? How do we make it happen? We don’t have what we need to keep up that level of faithfulness. You ever feel that way? You ever feel like you can’t do it? I think we all do at times.

You’re reading the Bible and you come to some part that just slaps you in the face and you say, how am I ever going to get there? I do not know how to become the kind of person that this Bible is describing that I ought to be. And then you go to God in prayer and you say, Lord, if I’m going to be this person that you’re describing in this Bible, you’re going to have to make it so. You’re going to have to do the work. You’re going to have to change me by force. That’s what the apostles are saying to Jesus here. Change us. Notice they’re asking Jesus to increase their faith. They realize that to become the kind of person that Jesus is describing, that’s going to be beyond their natural ability. They’re going to need some help. And this is the part of this that they get exactly right. They get a part of it wrong, too, as they often do. We’re going to look at that here in just a minute. But they are totally correct to ask Jesus to work the change that has to happen to become the person that Jesus is telling them to be. Now we can take a cue from these apostles on how to pray differently when it comes to our own personal growth in Christ. So, when we sin and we feel God’s conviction and we repent, sometimes our prayer Sounds like God.

Please forgive me. I’ll do better next time. Right. We’ve all prayed that, haven’t we? Or we’ll say I’ve failed again. I need to work on this. Please forgive me, God. And let me just say that’s fine. That’s fine. It’s fine to pray that way. It’s partially correct. And. And God doesn’t need us to wordsmith our prayers before he’s willing to listen to us. He doesn’t. We can go to God with everything and anything that is on our heart and mind. And we can speak to him in just the words that we have, and it’s totally fine. At one point we are told that we can pray in groans and the Holy Spirit will put words to the groans. Okay. So, we don’t have to think through every single word we say when we pray to God. But what we pray is a reflection of our own theological understanding. And so we grow as we grow in knowledge of God. Our prayers should reflect that your prayers should change over time. And in this case, I want you to grow beyond a simple I’ll do it better next time version of repentance. According to the Apostle Paul in Philippians chapter two, it is our job to work on our own spiritual growth, but our ability to do that is only because God first works in us by His Holy Spirit. That’s what enables it. So, God works and we respond.

The Holy Spirit convicts of sin and then we repent. The spirit produces love, joy, peace, and patience, and then we treat people in those ways. So, when we talk to the Lord about our spiritual growth, we shouldn’t just say, I’ll do better next time. You know, I promise God, I’m going to get my act together. I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it better next time. What we should do is align our minds with what is actually happening and say, Lord, make me into the man who does not blow up in anger. Make that work that in me. Make me into the man who doesn’t blow up with anger. Make me, make me into the woman who does not, does not spread lies. Who refuses to spread lies. Or, as King David put it, create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit in me. You see the difference? It’s a big difference if it’s if it’s God’s work that forms us in Christ likeness, then our prayer should not sound like our growth is entirely on us. So, when we come to Scripture and we face a high calling from the Bible like this command to endlessly forgive people who sin against us, that reaction that we naturally have that says, I don’t have the patience for that. That’s a that’s a that’s correct. You do not you do not have on your own the patience to endlessly forgive people.

No one on their own has the patience for that. You can’t on your own develop a develop thoroughly into the sage, wise, faithful disciple that Jesus describes in the Bible. The apostles get this part exactly right. We’re going to need something more from you, Jesus, to get us where you want us to be. Now it’s that something that they get wrong, and we’re going to look at that in a second. But before we do, what does this say? What does what we’re reading here in verse five say about mustering up enough faith to get God to bless us? I want you to follow me closely here for the next minute, because this is a kind of a detailed argument, but I want you to hear it. Okay? If I think faith is a quantifiable product that I produce and can increase through my own spiritual abilities, okay, it’s not. But if I think that if I think it’s quantifiable and I can grow it myself as the prosperity people say, then what are these apostles asking Jesus for? Exactly what do they want from him? Why would why would King David ask God to create a clean heart for him? Why would he request that? Why would the Apostle Paul tell? Tell us that God is working in us to give us the will to do God’s will? Wouldn’t the correct thing for the apostles to say, here, be Lord, we can do it, we can do it.

We will strengthen our resolve to be faithful to this impossibly high standard that you have set for what faithfulness should look like. We’ll make it happen. Now the disciples get things wrong all the time. So, if the apostles are wrong in asking Jesus for the change, let’s say that this is not what they should be asking for here. If it truly is on them to be faithful enough to be the men God has called them to be and to receive his blessings, then what I would expect is that Jesus would now correct them. I’d expect Jesus to say, what? What? Don’t look at me, fellas. Don’t look at me. You’re asking me to increase your faith. Why? Why are you asking me if it’s. It’s on you to get this done. Guys, here’s the bar. You better jump over it. That’s what I expect him to say. Let’s see what he actually says. 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 most important piece of this answer from Jesus. The part that unlocks everything that he’s saying here, is that he completely debunks the idea that the power of faith is in its quantity. Okay, you gotta grab hold of that. He’s throwing out the idea that the power of faith comes from the quantity of faith.

So, when we hear questions like, do you have enough faith or how much faith do you have? These are these are questions that well-meaning Christians ask each other. But they have a theologically incorrect assumption. The assumption is that a person can have more or less faith, like gas in your gas tank. You know how much is in there, how much faith you got? What’s the indicator say on your faith? Are you full up on faith? Are you running on empty? You need a faith fill up. When the apostles request faith from Jesus. That’s the word that they’re using when they say increase our faith. The way that works is they’re saying grammatically, it’s saying add faith to our faith so that the faith increases. And they want Jesus to fill them up. They think that that’s what will make it possible for them to be obedient. But Jesus completely undercuts this wrong. Theological understanding with a dramatic picture. Which of course is what Jesus does all the time. If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, he said, which you can barely see. Mainly. Basically, he’s saying the smallest possible thing that you can’t hardly see. If you have faith of a mustard seed, you can do miracles. You can command trees to uproot themselves and to reroute themselves. You can go full Lord of the rings here, right? You can.

You can do everything. Now, now, obviously, Jesus is using over the top language here to make a point not to tell us how to make gardening easier, right? The context here isn’t the ability to do miracles. He’s not teaching them how to do miracles. Remember what the context is. It’s the ability to be faithful to the high calling of following Jesus. That’s what he’s talking about. And Jesus is telling us we don’t need a greater amount of faith to do that. In fact, you could barely have any faith at all and see tremendous, powerful works. You see that church? Jesus says the size of your faith could be the tiniest thing that you can think of. The very, very smallest faith isn’t a quantifiable amount. That’s what he’s saying. It’s something you either have, or you don’t. We have to stop thinking of people in terms of having a lot of faith or having a little faith. Genuine faith in Jesus is something that is either at work in you or it isn’t. And if it isn’t, then you will experience no spiritual growth. People. People who have no faith in Jesus are not looking for spiritual growth anyway. And if they are, they’re looking for it in in dead religions that have no power. If you do trust in Jesus, though, what Jesus is saying here, even a little faith, you have everything you need to see God work powerfully to transform your heart and mind, and to accomplish great things in you and through you.

You can. You can look at every command of God’s Word, every trial you face, every hard road, every difficult decision. And you can say, I am fully equipped. I am fully equipped to handle this with the utmost faithfulness because I have faith in Jesus. And you can say that right from the start. From the moment you put your faith in Christ, there’s no additional faithfulness required. You don’t need to gather up and achieve some new level of faith, because the power of faith is not found in you. And that’s key. Throw out all those ideas that we’ve given each other about amounts of faith. Faith is not measured in liters or pounds. The only thing that matters is the object of your faith, not the size of it. If the object of your faith is Jesus, then you’ll see God working powerfully from the moment you trust in him until you’re in eternity with him. I love Pastor Tim Keller’s illustration on this point in his landmark book, The Reason for God. If you do not own a copy of The Reason for God, skip a meal and use the money to buy a copy of The Reason for God. It is just that important. But one of the great quotes of that book is this: it is not the strength of your faith, but the object of your faith that actually saves you.

Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch. Okay, so let’s say instead of uprooting that mulberry tree, we’re climbing it, right? And you see, you’re moving your way up and you’re getting near the top and you see a branch near the top, and you’re going to pull on it and you’re going to pull yourself up to the top. If you reach out and grab that branch and you put your weight into it, what matters at that moment? What’s important is it your confidence in the branch or the strength of the branch itself? Well, of course, obviously the strength of the branch is all that matters, right? No matter what you think of the branch, the branch is what is doing all the work. So, so weak faith in Jesus, strong faith in Jesus. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you are saved not by the strength of your convictions. You’re saved by the strength of Christ. And that same dynamic of faith is for all the Christian life, right? Faith doesn’t change in nature. Okay? It’s the same all the way throughout our entire lives. There will be times when your confidence is going to fail you. There are going to be times when fear creeps in. When doubt starts to bubble up. We have a whole book of the Bible that is peppered with songs written to help us when we are in the valley of the shadow of death, right? When.

When God seems distant, when our, when we fear that our faith is going to fail. A lot of you are experiencing that right now with what’s happening in our state. There’s a lot of uncertainty about the future. There’s fear for our neighbors, maybe even genuine concern for what this means for your family. You know, I have a couple of naturalized American citizens at home myself. I personally understand wondering the direction all this is going. There will also be times of overwhelming grief, especially when loved ones get sick and we experience great loss. Sometimes you find yourself searching for answers. Is this really God’s will for my life? Did I fail in some way to bring this about? You might. You might find yourself starting to doubt whether God really has his hand of blessing on you. And this might cause you to question whether your faith is genuine. Because God wouldn’t really do this to his kids, would he? And then there are times like the apostles here, where you’re faced with a mountain of spiritual growth that’s in front of you. Don’t you find that there are so many times when you feel like you’ve made so much progress in your growth in Christ, and about the time that you feel like you’ve achieved victory in in one area of your life, you’re suddenly met with all of your inadequacy in in another area.

It’s like when I was hiking the Alps here a couple summers ago. We’d spend, our group would spend three hours going uphill at 12 degrees, which, if you’re not familiar, is terrible. It’s a terrible experience. Just constantly up, up, up. Your feet hurt. Your legs hurt. Your back gave up two hours ago. You’re questioning your life choices. Why did I think I could hike the Alps? I’m a flatlander. I don’t know what’s going on here. And eventually you get near the top and you start to see it crest over and you think, oh, good, this is it. It’s about to be all downhill from here. We’ve all drawn a mountain, right? It’s that right? It’s what we’re looking for. I want this, I’m looking for this at this point. And just as you come over the crest, somehow the path curves and it’s just more uphill. How is that possible? And job’s wife starts to creep in. Just curse God and die, right? No matter if it’s fear or grief or spiritual growth, the faith that you have in Jesus will be sufficient, because the power to overcome comes from the creator of the universe, The marvelous power of God comes from the power of Christ. Not the quantity of your faith. The power does not come from inside of you.

It comes from Jesus. It comes from our creator God. Now your faith in Jesus over time will become stronger. It can be tested and strengthened. You’ll grow in spiritual maturity as you walk with Jesus. And a lot of that maturity is going to come as a result of you witnessing the power of Christ uprooting metaphorical trees. You’re going to see great things. You’ll pray and see God bring about uncommon results. You’re going to see lives transformed. You’ll watch someone act with otherworldly forgiveness that no one can conjure up on their own. And it is going to confirm your confidence, and it’s going to temper your faith like steel. But that’s all the powerful branch of Christ that is all coming from God. That is not you tapping into some big storehouse of your faith. Let me conclude this morning by rendering what I think is a final death blow to the totally erroneous, spiritually misleading idea that is the word of Faith movement. As I said earlier, this passage is often used in favor of that movement. So, they will say things like, you can your faith can move mountains, or in this case, trees. I was just talking to Pastor Tim this week, and he told me a story about a guy who lost his wife, and a pastor came to him and said, if you’d had more faith, your wife wouldn’t have died. Yeah, he said that.

Look, if a pastor says or thinks something like that, that that guy should find another line of work. That guy doesn’t read very well. What? Unbiblical nonsense. Tell that to Job. Tell that to God the Father. Terrible pastors who twist God’s word lay huge burdens on the backs of God’s people, and sometimes they carry them for a lifetime. Some of you may be carrying burdens for your whole life, or have been hopefully up till this morning, where you finally lay them down because it wasn’t on you. You didn’t have the power. Prosperity gospel preachers say, if God’s you know God doesn’t bless you, it’s because you didn’t have enough faith. I want you to hear Jesus this morning. Jesus says the tiniest conceivable amount of faith in him will uproot trees if you tell them to. If you use their logic. Okay, again, let me put myself in the position of one of these prosperity people. If you use their logic to interpret what Jesus says here, if you if you name and claim the blessings of God and you don’t see God move in power to give you what you’ve asked for. If you compare that to what Jesus says here, it doesn’t mean you don’t have enough faith. It means you have no faith at all. Remember, the tiniest amount you would have nothing. According to their logic, it would mean your faith doesn’t exist because it’s smaller than the smallest thing.

If they’re right about this passage, unless you can speak miracles into existence with just your words because of the extreme quantity of your faith, then you don’t actually have faith in Jesus at all. And there are genuine believers in Christ who love the Lord deeply, who are carrying around emotional burden of feeling their inadequate quantity of faith is somehow hurting their family or hurting themselves, or they’re kicking themselves over and over again because of something that happened in the past that they can’t now change. They feel like their situation would be so much better if they could just fill themselves with greater confidence. And if that’s you this morning, please let Jesus take that off your shoulders. You are not strong. You are not powerful. God does not and has never determined the length of your loved ones lives based on how much faith you were able to muster up. He doesn’t withhold his blessings to his children until they show themselves worthy, with their incredible displays of well-developed faith. On the contrary, God knows our end from our beginning. He knows the day we die before we’re even born. And he uses everything we experience along the way, both the blessings and the trials to forge us into the godly men and women that he means for us to be. That’s what God is doing. Take that burden off your shoulders. Would you pray with me?