When Ronald Reagan was president,
he once told a story about
a woman who went and knocked
on a man's door.
When he opened the door,
she looked at him and said,
"Do you own a black pit bull dog?"
"Well, yes, I do," the man said.
The woman looked at him and said,
"I'm sorry to inform you but your dog is dead."
"Dead?" the man said.
"What happened?"
She looked at him and said,
"My Pekingese killed it."
Do you know what a Pekingese is?
It's a breed of dog.
It weighs about seven pounds.
Tiny little thing,
about six inches tall.
It's the kind of dog you sometimes see people
carrying around in their purse.
Anyway.
"My Pekingese killed it," she said to the man.
And he said, "What?
What happened?"
She looked at him and said,
"It got stuck in its throat."
[LAUGHS]
I think Ronald Reagan told that story
to uh, to emphasize a very important point:
That sometimes something small
can make a very big difference.
And do you know that Jesus made the same point
about, about faith.
I don't know where
you think you are in your walk with Jesus.
I don't know how you evaluate your faith.
But I do know that
Jesus gives us a pretty clear indication
that if you're afraid that your faith is small,
it's actually exactly where it needs to be
in order to make a big difference.
This is what Jesus said in Matthew, chapter 17,
And the reason Jesus said that,
is because he knew something about faith.
He knew that a person's faith
is really only as strong as what you have faith in.
For example, if I put all of my faith
in this little pencil,
and I worship this pencil,
and I bow down to this pencil,
and I give an offering to this pencil,
and I build a church to this pencil,
and I believe wholeheartedly,
with all my heart,
that this pencil one day
is going to lift me all the way to heaven,
well, in the end I'll be disappointed because
I'm putting my faith in something that cannot save.
But when our faith is in the God who
put the mountains into place,
who walked on the water
and calmed the sea,
who used the cross to prove the strength
of his love for you and me,
well, then your faith is already exactly
where it needs to be to make a big difference.
And that's what we'll be talking about this week.
How your faith, whether you think it's
big or small,
can do just that.
A while back, my family and I
spent the day in a state park doing some hiking.
And while we were hiking,
I saw something that I had never seen before.
We saw a rock that was about the size of a basketball.
And on the top of the rock,
out of the middle of it,
was a plant that was growing
out of the rock.
Which looked really unusual.
And the roots of the plant were underneath the rock.
And I thought,
"Boy, it must have taken a long time to get there."
Because this plant would have grown
up out of the ground and it would have,
you know, hit its head on the rock in a sense.
But it didn't give up.
It either found its, you know, found a
crack that worked all the way through the rock
or maybe amazingly
it just chipped away at the rock all the way up
as it was growing.
And it, and it didn't give up.
But,
but I had the thought,
I'm like, "Man, this must have taken a long time."
In fact, I bet we were some of the first people
to see this plant growing up
out of the rock.
If somebody would have come a week earlier
or two weeks earlier
or a month earlier
or maybe many months earlier,
and if you told them
that there was a plant growing in that rock,
they would have called you crazy.
And yet it was.
It was there the whole time.
I think of that story and
it highlights an important biblical truth, I think, that,
that some things take time to grow.
You know, like if you've ever heard the phrase,
"An acorn doesn't become an oak overnight."
It takes time.
Jesus said the same thing is true
about our faith.
That faith takes time to grow.
In Mark, chapter 4, he
talks about a head of grain in the same way.
He says,
In other words, there is progression.
There's growth and that growth doesn't happen quickly.
And that's important to keep in mind in really two areas.
Firstly, it's important to keep in mind
when you're thinking about the faith of other Christians.
You know, don't, don't expect young kids
or teenagers to
act like grown adults all the time.
Don't expect new Christians
to always act like mature Christians.
Don't expect mature Christians
to always act like perfect Christians.
Every Christian's faith needs to grow.
And we need to be patient as it grows.
Secondly, it's important to keep in mind when it comes
to your faith.
If you're like me, then sometimes you
can get kind of frustrated with your faith.
You know, instead of,
instead of being strong and courageous,
sometimes,
sometimes we get afraid.
Instead of facing death with confidence,
sometimes
we feel really timid.
And that's because our faith is never perfect either.
It needs to grow.
And you can be patient with yourself.
Because Jesus is.
Just think about his disciples
and how far they were from being the perfect Christians
during the weekend in which he died.
You know, Judas betrayed him.
And Peter denied him three times.
And the other disciples all ran away.
And by Sunday night, they were all locked
away in a room feeling really, really afraid.
And then Jesus appeared to them.
And he didn't say,
"Man, I am so done with your puny faith!"
The first word out of his mouth was the word,
"Peace."
And then just by being there, he was telling them,
"You know what? Now
"we're going to be together forever in heaven some day."
And that set, that set the church free
to grow
into what it is today:
A planting of God himself
that includes you and me.
Do you ever struggle in your faith?
I want you to know that your struggles in faith,
they, they mean something really significant.
A couple of years ago,
there was some major flooding in Louisiana.
Josh is a guy who lives in Baton Rouge
who was affected by the major flooding.
And like many others,
as the water started to rise -
one feet, two feet, three feet,
up to eight feet -
he got into a boat so that he could stay alive.
And as he was riding in his boat
through the city streets,
he looked off in the distance
and he saw a bush that was shaking.
And as he got closer,
he discovered why it was shaking.
There was a dog that was trapped
underneath that bush
trying to tread water.
Its nose and its eyes were just
barely above the water.
And it was obviously working very hard
to try and tread water.
And so Josh went over to this bush and
set the dog free, grabbed the bush and
threw him, you know, into the bottom of his boat.
And the dog just collapsed
from exhaustion.
from exhaustion. Josh didn't know for how long
Josh didn't know for how long
the dog had been struggling.
It was obviously a very long time.
But,
he knew something.
We knew what it would have meant if
the dog had stopped struggling.
It would have meant that the dog
had given up hope
of any good future ever happening.
And in that sense,
a struggle
is a good thing.
A struggle is a sign
of hope.
Just like it is with your faith.
In Luke, chapter 13, Jesus said this.
He said,
That phrase,
"Make every effort,"
literally means
to struggle.
And so Jesus wants you to struggle.
He expects you to struggle
because he knows
what it means that we struggle.
You know, if a person stops struggling
against sin and against temptation,
if they live in the present
as if they believed there is no good future
waiting for them,
you know what that means?
It means that something very significant
is missing from their life.
It means they're missing hope.
But hope is exactly what we have.
Not because of our struggles.
But because our Jesus chose to struggle.
Under a heavier weight of sin.
Under more aggressive assaults of
temptation than you and I have
ever experienced.
Just so you and I and
everyone else who fails in our faith
so easily and so often
could live with the truth that we're forgiven of
anything that might ever make us ashamed to
stand in front of him.
When you start to feel down about
your struggles, just ask yourself this:
"Did that happen?
"Did Jesus die?
"Were your sins forgiven?
"Did he rise from the dead?
"Is he preparing a place for you in heaven?"
And notice that the best way to address
your struggles in faith,
the best way to address your fear about them
is not to look at yourself.
Because if you shine the spotlight on yourself
and focus on
how good you are,
on how much you believe,
on how far you've come,
on how much better you are
than other people around you ...
Man, you'll be so full of yourself,
you'll never fit through the narrow door of heaven.
But if you shine the spotlight on Jesus
and just look at who he is and what he did,
then you will always see yourself as, as
someone that God has already chose to love
both here on earth and
forever in heaven.
And you will always find reasons
to keep going in your struggling.
When my wife's grandmother
When my wife's grandmother was just starting her family life,
was just starting her family life,
was just starting her family life, she planted a seed in the ground.
she planted a seed in the ground.
It was the seed of a peony bush,
her favorite bush.
And that bush grew up
and she took care of it for many, many decades
until she couldn't take care of it any longer.
When she got to the point
where she couldn't take care of it any longer,
she, she uprooted the bush
and handed it off to my wife's mother,
who then planted it in the ground at her home
and took care of it for many more decades.
And actually uprooted it
eight different times
and moved it with her eight different times
and moved it with her eight different times to eight different homes
to eight different homes
and took care of it very well.
Until she handed it off to my wife
when we got married.
So we took this
very important bush and we planted it
in a prominent location in our
front yard so everybody could
see this precious heirloom.
A number of years ago,
we were having our yard landscaped by
some professional landscapers.
And one Sunday morning,
we were coming home from church
and we saw that one of the landscapers
was already working in yard.
He was
using his big machinery,
the bulldozers and the Bobcats
to clear the yard and level it
and get it ready for the grass seed
that was going to be coming in.
And as we pulled into the driveway,
my wife, Karen, she noticed something.
The peony bush was gone.
The landscaper had
bulldozed over it and picked it up with his Bobcat,
and thinking it was a weed,
just tossed it into the back of the dump truck.
Karen, of course, knew that it wasn't just a weed.
And so, you know what she did?
She went to the garage.
She grabbed a shovel.
And while still in her Sunday dress and her heels,
she jumped into the dump truck.
And she started digging for the peony bush.
She found a few of its remains,
just a few feet down.
But it looked like just a bunch of busted roots.
The
the peony bush, it was gone.
A couple of months later,
they started building a home right next door to us.
And it turned out,
it probably wasn't the best location to
plant a peony bush that was so important.
Because there were Bobcats and bulldozers,
were just going over that same area where
that bush had been.
And it would have been destroyed anyway.
And, um, they were basically using the
peony's grave as their own personal dragway.
A couple of months after that,
my wife was talking on the phone with her sister,
talking about
the peony bush.
the peony bush. These things are hard to get over.
These things are hard to get over.
When she looked out the window and looked
at the place where the peony bush had been.
And do you know what she saw
coming up out of the ground?
Some green leaves.
And do you know what they were coming from?
From the seed of the peony bush
that was still in the ground.
All those bulldozers weren't powerful enough
to destroy
the seed.
A seed is a very powerful thing,
which is why the word of God
compares our faith
to a seed.
In 1 Peter, it says,
Simply put, God's word has great power
in your life when it is planted within you.
It changes you.
It strengthens you to produce the Holy Spirit's
precious and valuable fruit
when it puts its roots deep down inside of you.
And do you know how hard you need to work
in order to make that wonderful growth happen?
Well, how hard does the soil need
to work in order to make the seed grow?
The answer is,
it doesn't.
Earlier this week, we read from Mark, chapter 4,
where Jesus said,
Don't burden your heart with unrealistic expectations.
Great Christian growth
is accomplished not by us working harder
and harder to love Jesus
or prove that we belong to him.
Great Christian growth is accomplished
by spending more time resting in God's word,
soaking in his wonderful promises
and trusting
that the seed that he planted inside you
really is as powerful
as he says it is.
I received a phone call a while back
from a friend that I hadn't heard from in a long time.
So I was very excited to hear his voice.
I picked up the phone and said, "How you doin'?"
"OK," he said.
But in a way that made it pretty clear that he wasn't.
And it didn't take long for him to tell me why.
It was because he had lost something.
"I've lost my faith," he said.
"I don't believe in Jesus anymore."
He grew up believing in Jesus.
He taught his kids about Jesus.
His kids still believe in Jesus and go to church.
His kids still believe in Jesus and go to church. And he's glad for that.
And he's glad for that.
But
he just said that he doesn't believe anymore.
He doesn't have faith.
You ever worry that one day the same thing
might one day happen to you?
Do you ever worry about losing your faith?
It happened for my friend
shortly after there had been some major flooding in
the state of Texas.
And
he said that
it was really painful.
He watched all these news stories about
people dying, including little children.
And he just wondered why a loving God
would ever allow something like that to happen.
And I'd been paying attention to the news.
And I had seen many of the same stories.
And there were some pretty tragic ones.
For example, there was a story about
a mom named Collette
who was driving her 3-year-old daughter
in their truck,
through the floodwaters,
trying to get to safety. But,
but eventually the waters were too high and
she couldn't drive any longer.
And the waters continued to rise,
and so she knew she had to get out of her truck
and so she grabbed her 3-year-old daughter.
They exited the truck.
But as soon as they did,
the powerful current swept them away.
And Collette struggled to keep both her head
and the head of her daughter above the water,
and she couldn't do both.
As they flew down the rapids,
eventually the rescue team that was in a boat,
they saw them coming and they were able to pull
both of them into their rescue boat
just before they would have disappeared
underneath a bridge.
When they landed in the boat,
the 3-year-old was cold but alive.
Collette was unresponsive.
The 3-year-old lived.
But Collette died.
She died saving her daughter's life.
Now I know that,
when we hear stories like that,
it can fill our minds with all sorts of questions.
Questions about God.
Questions about when and why he acts.
And when and why he doesn't.
And I wish I knew an answer
to every last one of them.
I don't.
I do, however, know this:
That when God looked down from heaven
and saw us struggling,
he didn't stay away.
He put on human skin,
dove right into the rapids
and eventually climbed across where
he was assaulted by the high waters of hell that,
that we can't even imagine.
All while holding our fragile souls
that are so troubled by life
and troubled by sin
above the water.
So that we could breathe in the reality of
being forgiven,
of anything that might ever
of anything that might ever separate us from him
separate us from him
and the reality
of knowing that one day we will taste
the best of heaven with our own palate.
And not because our faith is so great.
But because that's exactly what
Jesus promises will happen.
In John, chapter 10, Jesus said this to his,
about his disciples. He said,
Maybe our grip on him
is sometimes pretty weak.
But his grip on us,
it isn't.