Increase Our Faith!

Luke 17:1-10

Jesus said to his disciples: “Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. ^2 It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. ^3 So watch yourselves.

“If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. ^4 If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.”

^5 The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!”

^6 He replied, “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it will obey you.

^7 “Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? ^8 Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? ^9 Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? ^10 So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’”

“I wish I had more faith.” Have you ever said that to yourself? We meet missionaries like the Transburgs from last week and we think, I wish I had enough faith to be a missionary. We grow tired of our mediocre Christian lives and we think that what we need is a boost of faith. Fill in the blank to this question. If I only had more faith, I would________. How would you answer that question? What would you do with more faith?

We know that the disciples struggled with understanding and following Christ and they diagnosed their problem as a lack of faith. The disciples said to Jesus: “increase our faith.” We think faith is something like an empty gas tank—we can just pull up to the divine gas station and say filler’ up. Maybe that’s why you come to church. Life is hard and full of discouragement so you come to church for a dose of faith. I certainly hope you are encouraged when you come to church, but church is not a filling station for faith. As a matter of fact, Jesus said we do not need a lot of faith. All we need is faith the size of a mustard seed and we could accomplish amazing things. You want to be a missionary? Mustard seed faith is enough. Do you want to do great things for God? Mustard seed faith is all you need.

Now this is a sign of potential discouragement because Jesus seems to be saying that most of us don’t even have faith the size of a mustard seed. We really are in trouble! What I believe Jesus is saying is that we already have enough faith. Every Christian has a mustard seed sized faith, otherwise you wouldn’t have saving faith in the first place. That’s the good news. As Christians, we already have the faith that we need. We don’t need more faith as much as we need to express the faith we already have. And here’s the point—faith is not really faith until it is put into action.

Let me put it into a single definition. Faith is the daily expression of trust in a perfect God. If we do not express our trust, then there is no evidence of faith. It’s like the title of John Ortberg’s book: If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat. How many of the 12 disciples had faith that they could walk on water? We have no idea because only one disciple attempted to do it. Maybe some others thought about it, but they never acted on their belief. They did not express their trust in a perfect God. Jesus said if we have mustard seed faith we would be able to uproot a tree with the power of our voice. Taken at face value it sounds like some kind of crazy superhero show where people tear enormous trees out of the ground and throw them into the sea. Christians get all hung up on what this means. Does it mean I could do some kind of miracle if I had enough faith? Jesus does not care about uprooting trees with our mustard seed faith, but he does care about disciples who put their faith into action. If you are a Christian you already have mustard seed faith and this passage will tell us the basic action steps for putting this faith into action.

Number one is not being a stumbling block to other believers. “Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. Jesus knows full well the temptations that face us daily. He knows those temptations are real, powerful and unavoidable. He said they are bound to come. You can’t stop temptations from coming. Even if you lived on a deserted island, temptations would arise from within you. Even though we can limit our exposure to possible temptations, they will always be a regular part of our life, but above all, do not be the source of temptation to anyone else. ^ It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. ^3 So watch yourselves. “Little ones” here could refer to children, but I think Jesus meant anyone who is young and tender in the faith.

The original word is “scandal and it would literally read like this. “Scandals are bound to come, but woe to that person through whom they come. ^2 It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to scandalize one of these little ones.” Last Saturday when we were cleaning up the auditorium, we attempted to move that old baby grand piano that was an eyesore and in the way. We began to slide it and didn’t get a single inch before one weak leg gave way and the thing came crashing down. My first thought was, what would have happened had one of our own kids crawled under there and bumped the leg. The weight of that piano could have mean instant death. This is similar to the millstone idea. If you scandalize another Christian, it would be better for you if the full weight of that piano crashed down upon you, because the judgment awaiting you is much worse than a piano on the head.

There are many ways to scandalize another believer. Obviously any kind of abuse could fit into that category, but so could false teaching. Anything that leads someone away from God and into apostasy is scandalizing their faith. The average person is not going to commit this kind of scandal, otherwise we would all be in trouble. Any sin could potentially cause another believer to sin, so Jesus cannot be referring to ordinary sin, if we could use such a term. It is a solemn reminder that we are responsible for the faith of those around us. We don’t live on a deserted island. Christians live in a community called the local church and what we do affects others. Jesus’ words are clear—“so watch yourselves”. In other words, do not scandalize another person’s faith.

The second way faith is expressed is through rebuking and forgiving. We tend not to like the subject of rebuking, but let me give you a good illustration. Tony and Elaine’s son Al, was working with his boss, both of whom are Christians and attend the same church. Al was going to become involved in the hiring of new employees and so his boss was showing him how he does a background check on new employees. He typed in a generic search and guess whose name popped up on the computer screen? One of the elders from their church. Both men were horrified to see their elder’s picture as a registered sex-offender, but even worse, Al’s boss assumed that the other elders knew about this. In his mind, it was bad enough that en elder would be a registered sex-offender, but far worse if the elders didn’t care. So now what is Al going to do? He called Tony and Elaine to ask for prayer because he feels it is his responsibility to lovingly confront the elder and get things out in the open. Tony and Elaine gave me permission to share this story because it protects the privacy of the individual, but it is a good opportunity to pray for Al. he has an enormous burden to bear.

Thankfully when we have to lovingly confront others it is not usually as severe a problem as Al is dealing with, but the Biblical responsibility is no less for you and I. The same is true for forgiveness—we know it is our calling as Christians to forgive, but it is one of the most difficult things in all of life. C. S. Lewis wrote, “We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it.” Rebuking and forgiving sound like difficult, confrontational things, but it’s what it means to be a church family. Take the example of a nuclear family. What if one of the parents was an alcoholic, but no one ever talked about it—what would you call that family? You would call them a dysfunctional family. What if this family held long standing grudges against each other? Now it is really dysfunctional, isn’t it? I have just described the average church. Your typical church ignores sins and conflict and holds onto unforgiveness and bitterness. Even by worldly standards this is very dysfunctional!

I have heard many visitors say that we are a friendly church? I am glad to hear that and would not like to hear the opposite, but what do we mean when we say that we are a friendly or loving church? What we usually mean is that we are a nice church. I love nice. I wish we could be voted the nicest church on the planet, but being nice is only one-half of love. If we truly loved one another as a church family, we would want the best for one another. We would want each person to continue growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, but this cannot happen apart from gentle rebuking and mutual forgiveness. If you love your children you will guide them away from harmful things and put them on the path of righteousness. If you don’t care about your children, you will let them do anything they want. The same goes for a church family. If we are to be the typical, dysfunctional church that ignores sins and conflict and holds onto unforgiveness and bitterness, then on the surface we would actually appear to be nice. If I just smile at you all the time you’ll think I’m nice—either that or I take happy pills! But no growth takes place in that kind of environment. Paul said in Galatians six that loving confrontations is the same thing as carrying another’s burden. Therefore if we are not willing to confront, then we are not willing to bear burdens, and if we won’t bear one another’s burdens, we are not a loving church.

So how do we maintain this difficult balance between love & acceptance on one hand and gentle rebuking and forgiveness on the other? Most churches do one or the other of these well, but very few do both well. How about Grace Church—could we do this well? I can’t think of a better environment to do this than in the context of the recent Diversity Day saga. Half the people are saying we should be nice and leave people alone. The other half are saying that homosexuals are sinners and need to be changed. But can we do both? Can we be fully accepting and also wish for people to change their ways and follow Christ? We try to do it with very other sin, why not with homosexuality?

This coming week our church is placing a paid advertisement in the Broadcaster. I want to read the content of that ad to you.

GLBT Persons Welcome at Grace Church

If you are a GLBT person, we would like to welcome you to our church. We are an open and inclusive congregation. We accept all people just as they are. We won’t ask you to change before you come. We don’t even ask that you be a Christian, but we do assume you will be an honest God-seeker. We will love you, pray for you and encourage you. In short, you will be treated just like everyone else.

Socrates wrote “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The apostle Paul encouraged us to, “Examine yourselves to see if you are in the faith.” This is what we seek to do—examine ourselves in light of God’s sufficient revelation. Like an actual family, we desire that love permeate all things, but also like an actual family, we do not approve of everything that goes on in our household. As a family of Christ followers, we sincerely want to help all people to change—and boy, do we need to change! Do you have any idea how many sins we have? We have gossip, slander and greed. We lust, quarrel and struggle to forgive those who have hurt us. I’m sorry to say we also have discord, jealousy, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions and envy. This is why we are so desperate to know Christ, because he said, “apart from me you can do nothing.” We are lost without Christ and depend upon him to help us surrender to him.

Yes, you will hear about Jesus at our church, but not the Jesus who has been white-washed by the world and demoted to “a good teacher” who spoke pleasant, moral platitudes to the crowds. The historical Jesus did not pull any punches. He spoke harshly to the self-righteous and gently to the humble, but his message was always the same—“repent or perish”. He constantly spoke in categories of right and wrong and solemnly warned all people to join him as exclusive followers. Does this make Jesus intolerant? Jesus was clearly intolerant of other truth claims—such truth is always ‘divisive’—but open and tolerant of every person to come to him. We seek to be like Jesus and invite fellow sinners to join us.

I believe this is faith in action. Remember, faith is not really faith until it is put into action. Faith is the daily expression of trust in a perfect God. If you are a Christian, you already have a mustard seed sized faith—but that’s enough. We have a guarantee form Jesus that this is a sufficient supply of faith. That mustard seed faith of yours is just waiting to burst forth in God-glorifying action.

Rich Maurer

April 2, 2006