A Not-So-Subtle Reminder

On January 15th, I gave a message entitled, “What Our Faith Really Looks Like”. It was from Acts 12:1-17, the story of Peter’s arrest and his subsequent “escape” from prison via an angel. When Peter got out, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where they were praying for him. This is how Luke describes that moment:

Peter knocked at the outer entrance, and a servant named Rhoda came to answer the door. When she recognized Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, ‘Peter is at the door!’ ‘You’re out of your mind,’ they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, ‘It must be his angel.’”

They couldn’t believe it! So much so, that instead of opening the door, they just assumed Peter had been killed and his angel was paying them a visit. I talked about having faith the size of a mustard seed and how we needed to have faith in God himself and not in what God can do. To trust him, so that we’re not disappointed when things don’t turn out the way we’d hoped, but rather that our faith in him would be strengthened no matter what the result. We should have faith in the miracle worker, not the miracle.

It was a good, solid thought, and, as far as sermons go, a fun one to give. Then Monday happened.

Our family, like every other family, goes through ups and downs, and on Monday the 16th (one day after the sermon) we got some news that put us in a place of realizing that an outcome of a stressful situation was entirely out of our hands. There was nothing we could do to alleviate the circumstance. We just had to (and are still having to) have faith in God that it was all going to work out for the good, however that looks.

As I was processing, I looked down at my desk and saw the jar of mustard seeds that I had used as an illustration in the sermon. It was a reminder that it was time to put some walk behind the talk. Later that week, as my wife and I were on our weekly date and trying to process everything, our son called and wanted to give us something … right away. So he came to the restaurant with a notebook that he had made for each of us. An extremely useful and thoughtful gift. Mine had a wonderfully thought out cover with the Bible reference of Matthew 17:20. Our son, who hadn’t been to church to hear my talk, said he had just “googled a good verse for a pastor”, and that’s why he put it on the cover. It was the exact verse I used in my sermon on the 15th! It says,

He [Jesus] replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.’”

I love our good good Father’s not-so-subtle reminders that we’re deeply loved, never forgotten, and our faith in Him is never misplaced.