Jesus was talking to his disciples one day and used the reference “if you have faith as 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.”    -Matthew’s gospel.

“Hahaha Jesus you’re pretty funny.”  That’s probably what Thaddeus thought, but since we don’t have a Gospel according to Thaddeus, we’ll never know.  This exchange with his disciples must have left them scratching their beards as well.  Was Jesus just messing with their heads and the gazillion of other believers that followed them, or was he serious?  Sure Jesus that’s easy for you to say, you’re the incarnation of God himself.  I know none of you ever thought about this, it’s probably just me.

I’ve always thought of this verse as a showing the ‘size’ of your faith.  You know mustard seeds are tiny, yada yada.  So it went, even if you had a speck’s worth of faith, you could rearrange the geography of your neighborhood.  How devastating it became when you wondered to yourself if you had enough faith when prayers that you prayed were seemingly unanswered.  Enough faith?  Are you kidding me?  I know I had at least a enough the size of a mustard seed!  I mean someone in the prayer chain had to have some right?

So here I am the other night sharing with someone what Father’s been showing me lately, and out pops this very mustard seed reference in my explanation.  Hmmm.  I went to the verse in Matthew 17:20  I love how the guy in The Message puts it,  “Because you’re not yet taking God seriously,”   Really.

OK, here’s the deal.  If you make “faith” a spiritual state of being to be attained, then what Jesus is saying will make you go crazy.  If on the other hand, you look at faith as part of a relationship, then a dim light begins to appear over your head.  Now if you begin to connect it to the reality of Galatians 2:20.  Jesus is now living in me, and I now have a relationship with him the light gets a little brighter.  Oh wait, now that you see it as a part of relationship and that relationship is founded and connected in Christ, and Christ has set you free to have a relationship with your heavenly Father, your faith light is getting even brighter.  It gets even better.  Now that you are living in Father’s love and the Spirit of Christ is transforming your mind in love, you now start having vital relationships with other believers.  Now we’re talking mega watts.  You begin to see that there are no limits to what Father has for you because you are now immersed in the ever-growing sense of God’s heart and that’s when it hits you.  Jesus was talking about the sense of faith that he was living in with his Father that he would freely make available to them.  Problem was, the disciples weren’t getting it.  Jesus was alone in this reality. We’re not.

Jesus said ‘faith as a mustard seed’.  In Matthew 13 he talks about the kingdom of God being like a mustard seed that when planted grows not into a bush but a tree!  It breaks out of the DNA that would have kept it a bush.  Here’s how the dots connect.  All of the potential of growth is in the tiny wittle seed.  But it can’t do it by itself.  It needs the dynamic relationship between soil, water, air, and sunshine to grow.  But with Father infusing himself into the mix of the relationships it is transformed into something magnificent that branches out and changes the geography of the ground it was planted in.  Indeed because it’s not a fixed finite thing, but a growing, ever expanding relationship, what’s to stop it? 

bob humphrey