Enough Faith?

“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

Jesus had many followers, but he also had an inner circle of hand-picked disciples. To these, he gave authority to cast out evil spirits and to heal every kind of disease and illness (Matthew 10:1).

These are the ones Jesus is speaking to in this verse. When he came down from the mount of transfiguration, along with Peter, James, and John, this is what was going on:

A man had brought his son to the nine disciples to be healed. The son suffered from seizures caused by a demon. He would often fall into the fire or the water, but these disciples were not able to cast the demon out. When Jesus found out about it, he cast the demon out himself and rebuked the disciples for their lack of faith.  

The disciples had been given authority, but they lacked faith. You might think of it like this:  If I give you the keys to my car, you would have the authority to drive it, but if you really don’t believe you can drive my car, you’re probably not going to get very far.

These disciples had seen Jesus heal the lame, blind, and crippled. They were there when Lazarus came out of the grave. I think they believed that Jesus could heal the boy. But Jesus wasn’t there. It was time for them to move from passive observers to the ones in the driver’s seat. And that required faith—faith in the fact that God would do through them what they had been given the authority to do.

Like the disciples, sometimes we fail to see results because we lack faith in the fact that God will do through us what we have been given the authority to do. Other times, our failure lies in that we try to do things that God has not given us the authority to do.

It’s important to know the difference.