You're gathered around the picnic table with some friends at a cookout on the 4th of July and ready to "dig in" to some mouth watering, charbroiled Hebrew National hotdogs when you realize that somebody forgot to put the mustard on the table.  Everybody starts scrambling around to find the mustard because nobody is going to take a bite until his "dog" is slathered with that  yellowish spread that makes the difference between mediocrity and perfection.  Suddenly someone finds the missing ingredient and the fun begins.  Then someone says, "I wonder how they make this stuff" and somebody else says, "well they start with a very small seed that you plant in the garden".  Then you remember that somewhere in the Bible that Jesus taught about faith using the mustard seed.  You grab your Bible (doesn't everybody take one with them when they go on a cookout?) and, sure enough, in the book of Luke you find the story.  But, you do a little digging and find that there is an in depth message surrounding the mustard seed, faith and forgiveness and here it is.

In Mark 17, Jesus is teaching about forgiveness and in vs. 3 he says, “Take heed to yourselves: if thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him (or confront him), and if he repent, forgive him. (vs. 4) And if he trespass against thee seven times a day, and he turn again and repent; thou shalt forgive him. (seven is the biblical number of perfection or completion and here, I believe, it also represents sort of an infinity or a number of times way more than the average person would tolerate.  In Matthew 18:22, when Peter asks Jesus how many times should he forgive his brother and suggests 7 times, Jesus answers, “70 times 7”, or 490 times a day which is infinity for pretty much everybody)

Then the apostles said to Jesus, “increase our faith”. They were naïve to a lot of the ways of God, but they sincerely wanted to have the faith of Jesus. Now, Jesus gives one of the most profound answers in the Bible and says, in Luke 17:6, “If ye had the faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine (or mulberry) tree, Be plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.” (should here is not a doubtful word like we use today is a more sure word like would)

There are a couple of revelations here we should see. The mustard plant in the Bible was not just a small garden plant from which we, today, get mustard to spread on our hot dogs. It was a very, very small seed but it produced a large enough tree that the birds could roost in it. The point is, even though it was a very small seed, it had the DNA in it to produce a huge tree if planted in good soil and watered. All the seed had to do was to have faith in its Creator that it would become what the Creator had envisioned for it; that is, a very large tree. Do you see the connection here? All we have to do is have enough “mustard seed” faith to believe that what God envisions for us, he is able to make happen.

If we are “born again” we have the DNA of God in us and we should be able to believe that we could “say” to our “sycamine tree”, “Be plucked up by the root and be planted in the sea” and it would obey us. Also notice that “plucking up by the root” is not a superficial way of dealing with a problem; it is a total destroying of the problem, like any common weed in our garden. That’s the way God means for us to handle things and is, in essence, an example of faith. Faith is acting like God means what he says. Jesus so expected his disciples to act this way that he was always saying to them, “oh, ye of little faith”. Don’t make him have to say it of you.

'Till Next Time,
Glory to God,
Hal Mitchell
halmitch@cox.net