I like this little snippet that follows immediately after Jesus asked the disciples to forgive people indefinitely. “Every time…” That sounds hard, so the disciples had a simple response:

The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” 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. (Luke 17.5 – 6, ESV)

It’s not the size of our faith, it’s the size of the object of our faith, and…we have to use it (suggested by a note in The Passion Translation). The best illustration of this concept is thick ice on a lake versus thin ice. This author captures it well:

One year, our family lived on a small lake in northern Indiana right below the Snowbelt. Coming from southern California, my jaw dropped the first time I saw heavy trucks travel across frozen water. When we moved to Raleigh, my kindergarten-aged son remembered the trucks on the lake. He tried to scoot across a North Carolina pond after only a few days of freezing weather. Thankfully, he fell through at the shallow edge. Great faith in thin ice won’t hold up a child. The thickness of the ice, not the driver’s faith, held up the truck in Indiana. – Debbie Wilson

Another simple metaphor is airline travel. Given that the equipment is working properly and the crew is competent, how much faith does it take to fly from, say, Denver to Chicago? Answer: just enough faith to get on the plane!

Tomorrow I’ll apply that to our mission. Please stay tuned!

We received the same promises as those people in the wilderness, but the promises didn’t do them a bit of good because they didn’t receive the promises with faith. (Hebrews 4.2, MSG)