Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. “For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them. (Mark 11:22-24, NKJV)

Faith is God, as Jesus says here, is not restricted to prayer. It’s a faith that can and should be at work in everyday life.

The example given in this passage is a fig tree (see verses 12 -14 and 20, 21 of the same chapter). Jesus curses the tree and the tree literally withers away overnight. Why He cursed the tree is of prophetic importance, as students of Scripture will recognize. But the fact of His action, and the astonishing results leads to this little lesson on faith.

What we trust God for in daily life, Jesus is saying, will be granted.

That’s a huge statement to make. And if anyone other than Christ Jesus had made it, we could try to argue it away. But Jesus Himself is saying, “For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says.”

In fact, the whole Bible can be said to teach this same thing. As we read through the Scriptures we can see the awesome effect that both faith in God and unbelief has on human lives.

An entire generation perished as the result of collective unbelief. The people of Israel exercised unbelief as they came out of Egypt, and they received exactly what they expected (see Numbers 14:27-32, for example).

Yet men and women of God who spoke and acted in faith received the things for which they trust the Lord. For example, Joshua, who took the lead after Moses, commanded the sun to stand still (Joshua 10:12-14). The Bible says that the sun actually stood still and the moon stopped until Israel defeated their enemies.

If anything, this example is much more extreme, according to our present view of physics, than moving a mere mountain. For Joshua’s expectation involved stopping the entire planet from spinning in space. And so far as we know from Scripture, there were none of the global catastrophic effects naturally occurring from such an action.

What does this mean in the here and now of daily life?

God knows our human weakness, and how difficult it is for us to go against our very instincts and “knowledge” of the universe to trust Him anyway. But He does expect us to give Him credit for the things He has already done, not only in ancient history (as with Joshua) but in our very own lives.

For us, many things are impossible and/or seem impossible. Yet Jesus plainly tells us that nothing is impossible with God, if only we will act and speak in faith. And no matter how well such claims sit with our particular theology, we cannot deny what God is saying in and through Jesus Christ. If we trust God for eternal life, a miracle of grace and love and power that will never come to an end, then why stumble over the merely physical and temporal miracles we need in the here and now?

Have faith in God. In the end, that’s all Jesus is really saying. Trust in the power, the goodness, and the loving kindness of the God of heaven and earth.

Amen, Lord Jesus. Amen.