Living to Move Mountains Part II Matthew 17:14-23

Matthew 17 and the Call to Move Mountains

Last week, Larry Forsberg preached in my place, and I know that was a blessing for those who were here. Two Sundays ago, we did part one of the sermon from Matthew 17, verses 14 -23. And this morning, we'll do part two.

This sermon is titled, Living to Move Mountains. And the big idea of this sermon, what it's calling you to do, because every sermon is calling us to do something, it's calling us, the aim is to truly advance God's kingdom in this world.

So you are to aim to truly advance God's kingdom in this world. And two Sundays ago, we saw the first commitment how, and that is through resisting the urge to live under your own power. What we have seen thus far is that the disciples have been unable to cast out a demon that is possessing a young boy.

The young boy came to them in desperation. The father of the young boy did, saying, heal my son. And the reason the father came to the disciples is that they had been given power to cast out demons. Jesus gave them that power when he sent them out, and presumably they had done so.

And so the father comes to them, and they are unable to do it this time, and Jesus gives the reason why. It is because of their little faith. Now this morning, we will see points two and three, but before we jump in, I want to begin by reading the whole text again, and then we will see what we need to see this morning.

So Matthew 17, verses 14 through 23. And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him and kneeling before him said, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly. For often he falls into the fire and often into the water.

And I brought him to your disciples and they could not heal him. And Jesus answered, oh, faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.

And Jesus rebuked the demon and it came out of him. And the boy was healed instantly. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, why could we not cast it out? He said to them, because of your little faith.

For truly I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there and it will move. And nothing will be impossible for you. As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, the son of man is about to be delivered into the hands of men and they will kill him and he will be raised on the third day.

And they were greatly distressed. Our big idea once again, is to aim to truly advance God's kingdom in this world. And here's our second commitment, how? Through growing a pattern of reliance upon God's power.

Growing a Pattern of Reliance upon God's Power

Growing a pattern of reliance upon God's power. Instead of doing things under your own power, which we all do naturally out of our sinful nature, Jesus calls you to a better way. Verses 17 and 18, we see this where Jesus answers the disciples why they couldn't heal the boy.

And he says, oh, faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to bear with you? So he's rebuking them. And then Jesus rebuked the demon and it came out and the boy was instantly healed. A few weeks back, we looked at Jesus used the same type of language in the passage where Jesus called his disciples to deny themselves and take up their cross.

He told us that everyone will be judged for what they do in this life concerning him. In a parallel passage in Mark 8, Jesus described that unbelievers will be judged for being faithless toward Christ.

This is what he says in Mark 8 .38, whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation. That's what he thinks of the world. Adulterous and sinful generation. Of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

In that passage, Jesus calls the unbelieving world adulterous and sinful. They are faithless because they have no faith in him. And they are adulterous because they live for idols. We'll see that today if you watch the Super Bowl.

It's going to be idolatry on display. The world commits spiritual adultery. The world's supposed to bow their knee to Jesus Christ.

But they don't.

They live for idols. So this is Jesus' view of the unbelieving world. But how does he view the believer who has small faith? We just read what he said about weak faith believers in verse 17. He calls the disciples who did not exercise their faith when they tried to cast out the demon, I mean, he calls them a faithless and twisted generation.

He then says, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? So he calls them faithless. In other words, they are operating like unbelievers who live with no faith. They are perverse or corrupt in the way they tried to cast out the demon because they are doing things their own way.

And as we saw, their way failed. Like, we can cast out this demon. Nothing happened. The man's boy was still left with this horrible situation where this demon was tormenting him. It is not God's design for a believer to live on his or her own strength.

And when you do, Jesus is disappointed.

It's interesting here.

We see how Jesus talks about the world. He talks about the world in a very condemning way. Judgment, condemnation, the like of fire for everyone who has no faith. But then when he talks about believers who struggle with faith, he talks about them in more of a disappointing way.

He rebukes them. He rebukes the disciples as we see. And this rebuke is done in love with the goal that correction takes place. This is discipline. Jesus rebukes his people the way that a good father rebukes his children or a good mother.

It is always done for the benefit of the child. And we need to remember that he is talking to his disciples here who have faith, even though it is small at this point. He's not talking to unbelievers.

When he talks to them, he talks in a condemning way. He calls them adulterous and sinful. He will be ashamed of them at the final judgment because they live their whole lives relying on themselves, living for themselves.

They did nothing for the kingdom of God. They did nothing of eternal value. Jesus said in John 15, seven, when he talks about the vine and the branches, he says, he's the vine and people are the branches.

He says, apart from me, you can do nothing. In the context of the passage, what he means is that you can do nothing of eternal value since the unbeliever did not abide in him and bear fruit. The unbeliever will get to the end of his or her life and what will be shown is no true faith was ever there.

It was a life of complete self-reliance. Romans 8, eight says that those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Romans 14, 23 says, whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. So what he's telling his disciples and what he's telling all of you and me is this.

Don't live like an unbeliever. As a believer, don't live like this godless world who has no faith, who does everything on their own strength. And Doug and I were talking yesterday and we were talking about the verse where Jesus says, when I return to the earth, will I find faith?

It's a great minority. It's a great minority in a faithless and adulterous world. When unbelievers see problems, they say, you know what, we can fix it. I mean, we've seen that the last two years, right?

It's up to us to fix all the problems. They see someone who has a horrible mental condition, for example, like alternate personality disorder and they call it a mental disorder. There must be something wrong with the brain, but they cannot see what's really going on.

They do not see that the supernatural exists. Demon possession is not in the minds of the secular world. Person needs Jesus. Pray for the person. With faith, no medication's gonna do anything. And if you and I truly wanna make a difference in this world, we must have faith.

Unbelievers can make a short-term difference. Yes, when they do things God's way. A farmer who does things the right way will have a crop during the harvest season, whether the farmer's a believer or not, because they do things the right way.

Two weeks ago, I mentioned the positive difference that our founding fathers made. They wrote the United States Constitution, which has many principles that agree with the Bible. Therefore, for the short term, it would bring blessing.

But to truly make an eternal difference, a lasting, eternal difference, you need faith. And specifically, a faith that is going in the right direction. We already looked at the beginning of verse 20, but let's look at the remainder of verse 20, where Jesus says, for truly I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.

What this statement reveals quickly is that this is not to be taken literally. This is to be taken figuratively. He's not telling us that if you have strong faith, you can make the cliffs on the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix River, touch the cliffs on the Minnesota side.

So don't go try that after the service. It's probably too cold to go out there anyways, right? That's not what he's doing here. The moving mountains that results from faith is figurative. In other words, faith in Christ can accomplish enormous things in this world.

Jesus tells us God's designed for us in our journey of faith. In this verse, Jesus compares faith to a mustard seed. We've already seen Jesus talk about the mustard seed in the Gospel of Matthew. For those of you who were there for that sermon.

Now mustard seeds are not something that we are familiar with in this part of the world, but mustard seeds were prevalent in Israel and still are to this day. In Matthew 13 31, Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field.

And when we looked at this passage a while back, what we learned is that the mustard seed was the smallest of all the seeds in the garden. If you were to hold all the seeds in your hand, the smallest one is the mustard seed.

But what is amazing about these small tiny seeds is that they grow to be so big that it looks like a tree. There's all these bushes in the garden and the mustard seed looks like a tree because it's so big.

So a mustard seed starts out small, this tiny little seed, but continues to grow and grow until it's very impressive. This is why Jesus compares our faith to a mustard seed. Our faith should grow big over time like mustard seeds do.

Isn't that an interesting illustration? It does not happen overnight, but eventually true visible growth takes place over time. The result of continued growing in faith is that someone is strong in faith.

Once again, Jesus is using a figure of speech here. And what he says is that if you have faith that is growing, then you can say move from here to there and nothing will be impossible for you. If you exercise faith, great things can happen in your life and in the lives of others.

I was a distance runner growing up. And if you look at how fast I was when I was in high school, it was very small compared to how fast I got to be in college and then after college. It was something that grew over time.

And it was, I stuck with it. And as I stuck with it, I was able to see the progress over time. And you have those experiences in your life, whether it's, some of you are artistic, look at your old paintings, look where those were and look where they are now.

Some of you are good musicians, look where you start out as a musician and look where you are now. Some of you are in business, look where you were, look where you are now. It's amazing where we can go if we stick with it.

This is how faith is. It grows over time. You stick with it. You rely on God. Now, some of the things that you want to accomplish through faith might not happen. For example, you might be praying for someone and you might not see a difference.

But if you keep praying, you will see things happen. It might not be in this person, but it might be in someone else. If you do it, God will work. God will do remarkable things in your midst as you exercise faith.

The one who lives a life of faithfulness lives a life that counts. I was talking this week to Judy Scottam. Bob Scottam passed away the day after Christmas. And for those of you who don't know, Bob was a guy who did a great work in Albania supporting the Lepushis and their ministry there.

And what I told Judy is that Bob lived a life that counted. And he most certainly did because he lived a life of faith. And you are useful to God when you have faith. If you don't live by faith, what difference will you ultimately make in this world that God created?

What difference will you make in this grand story that God is writing? The absence of faith will not make a difference that is deep and lasting. The tragedy of not living a life full of faith is that one actually misses out on life.

On what God intended it to be. When God created the world, he had big plans. The question is, are his image bearers gonna be a part of those big plans or are we actually just gonna squander our existence?

Life is a great journey. It's a great adventure. And the true adventure that is taking place in this world is the life of faith. It is the life of following God. When you watch the Super Bowl later today, if you are watching it, it's gonna look like this is where things are happening.

This is where the excitement is. This is what life is all about. Don't be fooled. What's going on right here right now is what life is all about. And then living out what you hear from this word, that's what life is about.

And it's so unassuming, right? Just like the mustard seed. It grows and grows and grows. And then you look at the person's life, like a Bob Scott, for example, that I mentioned, and thinking, man, what a life well lived.

And then you look at the person who made all that money and got so famous, and you think, what did they really do with their life when it was all said and done? When unbelievers miss the life of faith, they miss out on everything.

And when a believer does not exercise the faith that is there as the Spirit dwells within you, what happens is that a believer misses out on the promises that are yours in Christ Jesus. As one author writes, throughout the ages, believers often have failed to receive God's promised joy, freedom, forgiveness, guidance, fruitfulness, protection, wisdom, and countless other blessings simply because, like those disciples who could not heal this boy, they have not persisted in prayer.

Do you understand that when you pray, you're exercising faith? That's what prayer is. It's an exercise of faith. When we talk about faith, we are talking about living according to what the Bible says, so it's obedience to what God says, and also living a life saturated in prayer.

Two Sundays ago, Doug Schmidt shared with me his experience of officiating a game the day before. He said he spent time in prayer before the game, and his experience of officiating went very well. Well, I wonder why?

And someone even came up to him afterward telling him what a good job he did, and how wonderful he worked with the students. Think of how much better Doug's experience was because he had faith. He prayed for God to be present in his officiating, and God showed up.

The Lord calls you to live a life of complete dependence upon Him. It means living according to His Word, and it means praying the way the Bible tells you and I to pray. In Romans 8 .26, it says, we do not know how to pray as we ought.

Isn't that true? We know this from our experience. Lots of prayers don't make it to heaven. We start out in our journey of faith not really knowing how to pray. We need to learn. We need to learn what prayers God answers and what prayers He doesn't answer.

There was a 17th century Puritan by the name of Thomas Manton who once said, that when you pray, show God His handwriting. So how do we pray? We need to pray for what God has promised. For example, He promises to give power, wisdom, joy, peace, and growth in holiness.

To name a few. And if we will ask Him, He will answer these. In our next point, we are going to look at the peace of God, which is ours through faith. We can also pray for other things, like for a loved one to be saved or for someone we care about to grow spiritually.

These prayers of request won't always be answered. But some of them will. And think about it, pray for 20 people. 10 might be answered. 10 might not be. But what a difference you'll make if you do that.

As we pray, the way He calls us to pray, we will see Him work. And what you must understand is that the world that matters, the kingdom world where God is working for eternity is run by prayer. Prayer is the fuel that runs the engine.

Everyone here who knows Christ is here because someone prayed for you to know Christ. Every night before we go to bed, we pray for Isaiah and Aletheia to enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ, every single night.

And we're trusting that that's gonna come to pass someday. You pray for your children. You pray for your grandchildren. You pray for the kids in this church to know Jesus. God listens to those prayers.

To truly make a difference in this world, you need faith. And if you wanna be useless to God, don't have faith. Just like the disciples were useless to God in this text. They were useless because they did it the wrong way.

They did not pray for this demon to leave this boy, and guess what happened? The demon stayed. And how many times does something not happen in our lives or the lives of others because we don't live by faith?

And how many times does nothing happen because we don't pray? How many times do we fail because we're not really trusting the Lord, but we are trusting ourselves or putting our trust somewhere we shouldn't?

The Christian life is one of prayer and living out our trust in what God's Word says. The Bible makes it very clear from Genesis to Revelation. If you do things God's way, you will see the blessing over the long haul.

When you believe what the Word says and live it, then God is glorified in your life and you experience the blessing of His closeness to you. But if you listen to what your sinful nature says, what the world says, and what the devil says, and live that way, what Jesus thinks about you in those times is that you are faithless and corrupt.

Just like He called the disciples right here in verse 17. He calls them faithless and corrupt. Oh, you of little faith. He's disappointed. And He's disappointed in you and I when we don't do things through His power.

He loves us too much for us to stay in a place of weak, feeble faith. The moments of faithlessness, thankfully, does not always describe a believer because there are true works of faith. Remember earlier He said that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.

So that means an unbeliever never exercises faith. And everything, in some sense, is sinful. But the believer does have faith, of course, because you have the Holy Spirit. The Spirit's working in your life.

But sometimes we don't operate through the power of the Holy Spirit. He calls for our faith to be like a mustard seed, a faith that grows over time. And it is so sad to see Christians who stay in the same place.

10 years go by. 20 years go by. 30 years go by. 40 years go by. And you wonder, have they grown? Are you going in the right direction? I like a quote by John MacArthur. It's not the perfection of your life, but it is the direction of your life.

And one of my professors once said, it's not that you are sinless, but you do sin less. And I remember reading another author who said we should be embarrassed of portions of our life from five years ago.

The reason you are embarrassed is because you've grown in that time. I find it interesting that social media has a way of showing our mistakes from the past. Those who have social media know what I'm talking about.

For better or for worse, I joined Facebook in the fall of 2005. And that was my freshman year of college. I had friends who joined. And this, by the way, this is when Facebook really took off. I think it started in 2004.

And it started for college students.

And I was in college then.

So I was thinking, just college students are gonna be on there. Now everybody's on there. Your grandmas are on there. Kids are on there. Everybody's on there. And Facebook started a feature somewhere along the way that shows your memories from pictures from the past and also what you wrote in years gone by.

And some of you on Facebook have this feature. And occasionally I have memories that come up and I'm wondering,.

What was I thinking?

What a fool.

The older me is embarrassed of the younger me. And I'm wondering even today, what am I writing on there that I'm gonna be embarrassed of 10 years ago? But you think in those ways. And I say this because by God's grace, I have grown over the years.

I believe that.

And the memory feature on Facebook helps me see my growth. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't know it, but he's actually helping me in my sanctification process. But as we grow in Christ, it is wonderful that we can say, I don't do that anymore.

And we should be grateful for the work that God has done in us. The Lord calls you to have a growing faith like a mustard seed. When you do this, the Lord can and will do amazing things through you. Figuratively speaking, you will move mountains.

You'll be useful to God. And when our lives are over, people will be able to say, God accomplished good to those around him or her. He was glorified in this person's life. And this is the only way to live, to be useful to God by continuing to exercise faith, making use of the power that we have in him.

So aim to truly advance God's kingdom in this world. And the second commitment how is through growing a pattern of reliance upon God's power. The second commitment how you are to aim to truly advance God's kingdom in this world is through refusing to doubt God's plan and blessing for you.

Refusing to Doubt God's Plan and Blessing

Refusing to doubt God's plan and blessing for you. And we'll see this in verses 22 and 23. In this last point, we are going to see Jesus' desire to see the faith of his disciples exercised once again.

Let me read these verses here. As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, the Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.

And they were greatly distressed. This is the third time that Jesus told his disciples that he was going to be killed by evil people and that he was going to rise again on the third day. This is the second of four times in Matthew that Jesus mentions this to them.

As we saw the first time when Jesus mentioned death in Matthew 16, 21, the disciples are troubled to hear this news. Once again, they expect him to come, drive out their enemies, which were the Romans at this time, and then they will reign with him in his kingdom.

That was the false Jewish expectation. But this was not the plan. This was never the plan. The plan was always that the Messiah must first suffer before he reigns. I mean, read Isaiah 53. He is going to suffer.

And as the disciples hear Jesus tell them this, they're troubled. They want things to go well for them. And think about this. They're following him around for three plus years. Everybody's following him.

Jesus is the talk of the town. And the disciples are becoming famous too.

These are the people who follow him around.

They're riding on his coattails. And they're thinking by following him, things will go well as we will reign with him. You know, a few years down the road, we'll probably be on his throne with him. We'll be sub-rulers under him.

Is that how it worked? Nope. Jesus is killed by the most powerful people in Israel. And the disciples are thinking, uh-oh, this isn't going to be good. It means great trouble. And what verse 23 says is that they were greatly distressed.

This distress would continue till the day Jesus was crucified. The Greek word for distress can mean sorrow and it can mean an uneasy feeling. Both are true. They don't want to see Jesus die and they are full of fear thinking about this happening to him.

And the inconvenient, uncomfortable future that awaits them. During the last week of Jesus' life when he was in the upper room with his disciples, he comforted them. In John 14, 27, he told them, peace I leave with you.

My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give you. Let not your hearts be troubled. Let them neither be afraid. In John 16, 33, Jesus tells them, I have said these things to you that in me you may have peace.

In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart, I have overcome the world. As Jesus told them about his future suffering and that he was going away, and they knew things were going to be hard for them, what he told them is, I give you my peace.

Jesus is telling them his plan for himself and his plan for them. And they're not trusting here. And the result of not trusting is distress. His plan for them is that through this hard road will be the greatest possible blessing.

And even through the hardship, what will go with them as they trust is the peace of God. What biblical peace means, and by the way, this is important to understand because biblical peace is different from what the world thinks peace is.

What biblical peace means is God calming our hearts in the midst of difficulty. It doesn't come through some meditation like the world thinks. Biblical peace comes as we trust. When the storms raged as Jesus and his disciples were on the sea, what did Jesus say to the storm?

Peace be still. God does the same thing in our hearts. During tribulations of various kinds. You feel a storm going on inside of you. And Jesus says, peace be still. So as Jesus tells us to his disciples, he once again desires for them to exercise faith as we just saw with their effort to try to heal the young boy.

But they failed. And they are failing here as Jesus tells them that he is going to die. Their faith is weak here. It's not like the mustard seed that grows over time. It's at the earliest stage where it's weak.

And what's amazing is that if you look at the life of the disciples, their faith would grow. And they would have peace later on. Think about them standing before the most powerful people in the world.

As they're martyred.

Think of the peace that they had in those moments. In the previous point, I noted all the wonderful realities that are there for us if we exercise faith. In this point, what is highlighted as we look at the distress of the disciples is the opportunity to have peace in the Lord through all the circumstances that you face during the journey of faith.

Weak faith, like the faith of the disciples in this passage, often misses out on the experience of peace that every believer can have. The only people in the world who can have true peace are believers.

Do you understand that? The only people in the world who can have true peace are believers. But believers through our weak faith can miss it. We can be overwhelmed by life, not leaving it to God, and the result is distress, just like the disciples are experiencing here.

They're overwhelmed by the moment. And they don't experience peace. They experience distress. God has all sorts of plans for you. And some of those plans are difficult. And you are tempted to be distressed with the road He takes you down.

But what He calls you and I to do is to submit to His plans, believing that He is doing what is best for you. It is for His glory and for your good. And as you trust Him, you will have this peace. Having the peace of God means trusting the promise of Romans 8 .28.

And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for what?

Good.

The disciples should have known this truth and so should we. The one who travels down God's path, trusting Him, experiences great blessing as you live out your purpose as to why God has you here. If His plan for you is great persecution down the road, you need to be prepared for that.

And He wants you to trust Him so that you will have this peace that goes with you during that tribulation. And what's amazing too is when you exercise faith in Him, then you are useful to Him. Useful to His purposes.

And His peace goes with you every step of the way. Anxiety is something I have struggled with.

Over the years,.

And I still do to this day. So everything I told you hits me really hard.

What I have found is that.

If I am overwhelmed by the moment, not trusting, my anxiety makes me useless to God. Anxiety sidelines you from living out what God has for you. After Jesus was crucified, the disciples were experiencing the same distress they are experiencing in verse 23 when Jesus told them He was going to die on the cross.

In John 20, verse 19, that text says, "...on the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews.". They're distressed again. They were afraid of what was going to happen to them.

They were following Jesus for three and a half years and everyone knew they were His disciples. So they hid from the wicked Jewish leaders and the Romans who killed Jesus on the cross. And they're not believing that Jesus is going to rise from the dead like He told them numerous times.

And this is what happened to them. They believed, and then in that moment, their faith is just gone. So it's hide. But they would come back because they did have genuine faith. And here, they shouldn't be hiding in fear.

They should be getting ready to go to the tomb on the third day when He told them He would rise from the dead. And if they had faith, they would have hope and they would tell others, He is going to be raised from the dead.

Just wait. But sadly, the picture of the disciples after Jesus' resurrection or after His death, that is, is one of distress. They're paralyzed by fear and therefore useless to God. Their lack of trust in God's plan makes them useless for His kingdom purposes.

And we can all relate. To some degree, all of us struggle with fear. We can easily forget that God is writing our story. And what we know is that every circumstance is meant for our good and for His glory.

To live this way, we are full of faith, experiencing His peace, and being useful to His service. So think about that. Trust Him. Be useful to Him. Have peace. That's the life that God calls you to.

Right there.

And what a life it is. The best life there is. Because no matter what you go through, He is with you. And remember the end of the story. Fullness of joy. Pleasures forevermore in God's kingdom. That's the future.

So aim to truly advance God's kingdom in this world. And over this two Sunday sermon, we have seen three commitments how? Through resisting the urge to live under your own power. Through growing a pattern of reliance upon God's power.

And through refusing to doubt God's plan and blessing for you. Hebrews 11 .6, as we saw earlier, says, without faith, it is impossible to please God. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.

Are you believing that today? He rewards you as you live for Him. There's a reward waiting for you in Heaven. There are three types of people in this world. Those who have no faith, those who have weak faith, and those who have strong faith.

And here's my prayer, that Eureka Baptist would have an army of the third. Those who have strong faith. And in so doing, we will indeed move mountains in this community for Christ's sake. Let's do that through His power.

Now next Sunday, when we continue in Matthew, we will see Jesus talk with Peter about the temple tax in Jerusalem. And He will answer the question why it is important that He and His disciples pay these taxes to the wicked people who are running the temple.