Jesus welcomed the people, taught them about the Kingdom of God and healed those in need. Luke 9:11

Seeds of the Kingdom

Mustard Seed Faith

by Lindsey Hanekom

“You don’t have enough faith,” Jesus told them. “I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it would move. Nothing would be impossible.”
Matthew 17:20, NLT

I doubt many of us have had to face a situation in our lives when we needed to move a physical mountain. But it was in facing an extremely difficult personal situation I discovered a meaning of the word, ‘mountain’ in this context.

Having a mountain before us means that there is something that has to be scaled in order to overcome it. To move ahead is daunting. It is fraught with the unknown, knowing there will be times of real difficulty, a possibility of getting lost, with no evidence to prove you will ever achieve the seemingly impossible... all in all, an exceedingly intimidating scenario.

When facing these life situations, either from our past or living in them in the present, we face a choice.

Do we stay at the bottom of the mountain, allowing the intimidation to hold us in the same place without a hope for any future? In this place, we disregard God’s view of the mountain completely. We are locked into our fearful viewpoint and can even blame God for the mountain being there, or for him not ‘doing anything about it’.

Do we try to overcome the mountain ourselves, thinking we can scale it on our own without anyone’s help? We can all be very good at presenting to God our list of our solutions to our problems, and then we get frustrated because He doesn’t respond as we think He should and the mountain persistently remains.

Or, do we take all the knowledge that we have of God and set it against the perceived enormity of the mountain? When we do this, we start to see the mountain as He sees it. In His sight, there is no unknown, there is no fear, and there is no intimidation ... indeed it is not impossible!

Whilst the difficulties that we face are still there, the view of them from God’s eyes makes them so much less daunting, they cannot be described as a mountain any more. The more of our viewpoint we give up, the more the intimidation diminishes, and we can walk in His faithfulness to a place of victory and freedom.

I truly believe that the mustard seed of faith is simply hanging on to who God is and allowing the fullness of that to stand against any situation we may face in our tumultuous lives.

Prayer: Father God, You are truly unfathomable and awesome. Help me live from a place of a deep and unshakeable knowledge of who You are and to keep my eyes fixed unwaveringly on You so that You can take this mustard seed of faith and turn it into mountain-moving miracles. Amen.

Lindsey Hanekom Lindsey has worked at all of our UK centres over the years and has settled at Ellel Scotland with her husband, Johann and their two young children, Kyle and Zoe. As part of the Leadership Team at Ellel Scotland, Lindsey has a heart for the deeply broken as she oversees the prayer ministry and is an established and passionate teacher with Ellel. In her spare time, Lindsey enjoys the natural world, particularly the ocean, and is trained as a specialist medic to assist stranded and injured marine mammals.

 

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