This is an excerpt from my book “40 Moments From Christ’s Final Days.” Click here to get it from Amazon using my affiliate link.
Find this moment in: Mt. 21:20-22, Mk. 11:20-25
People want a faith that moves mountains so they can accomplish everything their heart desires. They want to have such faith that nothing is impossible for them. They want to love God so much that nothing stands in their way.
As followers of Christ, we can have this faith. We can trust God for the impossible. But how that plays out will be much different than we may like.
And as they were passing by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. And being reminded, Peter said to Him, “Rabbi, look, the fig tree which You cursed has withered.” (Mark 11:20-21)
Before we see how Jesus responds, we must first remember what happened to this tree in the first place. One day after Jesus cursed the fig tree, the disciples are shocked to see how withered it’s become. Jesus used the tree to demonstrate Israel’s lack of faith in their God.
The tree was living but fruitless. Because Israel rejected God, He would cut them off from their source of life. As Jesus teaches another lesson about faith, we cannot neglect what He’s saying about those who seem alive but are spiritually dead.
And Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. For this reason I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you. (Mark 11:22-24)
At first glance, Jesus seems to imply that praying in faith grants us an untapped superpower. But Jesus isn’t saying that if we love God enough, we’ll be able to do whatever we want. Instead, if we love God enough, we’ll seek to do exactly what He wants.
Consider how Christ told these very disciples to pray in Matthew 6:9-13. The prayer is based on one fact: we rely entirely on God. In the middle of the prayer, Christ says something we so often miss when we think about this moment around the fig tree: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
When we read about the ability to move mountains, we dream of what we could do if our desires were completely unrestrained by our lack of power. We beat ourselves up because we can’t seem to conjure enough faith to move a speck of dirt, let alone move a mountain, get rich, or heal someone of a disease. But the excitement surrounding this verse is precisely what Jesus points out with Israel. They weren’t concerned with God’s will, only their own. They were doing things that seemed righteous, but inwardly only served themselves.
Christ doesn’t want His disciples to marvel at what God could do to a single tree. When we desire the will of God, then everything we want will not only be possible, but it’ll actually happen. That’s because when we pray according to God’s will, we know God’s will is going to be accomplished.
For Yahweh of hosts has counseled, and who can thwart it? And as for His stretched-out hand, who can turn it back?” (Isaiah 14:27)
If God wants to use someone to throw a mountain into the sea, He will do it. But Jesus isn’t teaching us that faith in God gives us the total ability to exercise our wills and desires on the world. If we want to do a great work, but it’s not happening, then we aren’t working according to God’s will.
Jesus reminds His disciples what He taught them about prayer and fig trees. The faithless will wither like Israel, while those who have faith in God will find their greatest joy, purpose, and desire in God carrying out His will through them. And if God desires it, even if we don’t understand it, we can believe it will happen.
Stop and think: Prayer is central to the lives of Christians. The more we genuinely trust God in every area of our lives, the more we surrender those areas to Him in prayer. However, we must also pray according to God’s will, not our own. How does trusting an all-good, all-powerful God give us confidence no matter how God answers our prayers?
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