Faith And Fealty Series

Faith is an interesting issue. Over the years, I’ve heard stories of people who seemed to demonstrate great faith as they recounted the ways that God has answered prayer. One such person was George Mueller. He lived from 1805-1898. In an era when people would pay “pew rents” in order to have reserved seating at church, Mueller abolished that practice, refused to take a salary from the church and lived entirely on “gifts from Christians for his personal support.” He went on to open orphanages that were also supported entirely on faith. As I understand it, he did not actively raise funds for the orphanages, but prayed with the kids for God to provide - and God did so in wonderful and miraculous ways.

I’ve also learned of other heroes of the faith who did not experience miraculous encounters of providential provision, but instead experienced suffering in profound ways. People like Elisabeth Elliott, who packed up and moved with her husband and several others to Ecuador, only to find their initial endeavors met with seeming futility as her husband and several other men were killed by the very people they were trying to reach.

We could visit other people, even those close to us, who have experienced miraculous healings, provisions of jobs, and other answers to prayer, while others in that same circle have experienced the loss of a job, ongoing illness, and even the death of a spouse and a child.

Why does faith seems to work well for some and not for others? Does God show favorites or is there something more that God is doing?

As we continue our study in the book of Luke, I think we will begin to consider some of those issues. We’ll also get to see a bit of what Jesus expects of us - whether our faith is rewarded with miracles or with the mundane.

If you have your Bibles, open to Luke 17. Over the last few weeks, we’ve observed Jesus going back and forth among speaking to His disciples, the religious leaders, and the crowds. Last week, we observed what seemed to be a bit of an aside to His disciples in response to His parable of the rich man and Lazarus. He was essentially talking about stumbling blocks and forgiveness. As we read this morning, we’ll briefly review the four verses we considered last week, and then continue on to the verses we’ll focus on this week.

Luke 17:1–10 ESV

And he said to his disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”

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.

“Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’ ”

If we could reduce verses 5-10 to a single sentence, we might say…

True faith, even in its smallest measure, is powerful when accompanied by a willing heart to humbly serve God.

It seems like the disciples are responding to Jesus’ difficult teaching about the radical call to forgiveness with this request to increase their faith. So as we consider this text today, we’ll seek to ask and answer three questions:

What is faith?

Do we need more?

What does Jesus expect of us?

So let’s first consider the elephant in the room…

What is faith?

We talk about faith in so many different ways. We talk about our religion as faith. We talk about trusting in Jesus as our Savior as having faith. We also seem to refer to faith as some wish or hope for something in the future or for something that is not a reality to come to reality.

George Mueller believed in faith that God would supply his needs, and He did.