4.12.2026 Mustard Seed Faith

A life without prayer is powerless. Maybe that's why there's a gap in your experiences. This is maybe why when you're trying to help others, when we try and go on mission trips, when we try and walk with people and discipleship, why can't we help? Why couldn't I cast it out? Because they know about God and they haven't experienced God yet. Actually, that is the story of the disciples. They don't quite get it yet until Jesus dies and resurrects and appears to them. See, prayerlessness is powerlessness. Prayer is hydration for the marathon of the spiritual life. [00:21:55] (41 seconds)  #PrayerIsPower

You have to know, not just believe. Belief is just trying to live in the arena of theory. Knowing is vulnerably trusting, experiencing God. It's not enough just to believe facts and theology about God. You have to know God. You have to allow him to love you and see you at exactly who you are, not who you're trying to pretend to be with other people, not the performance you put on when you go to church, to be naked and unashamed as we were in Genesis. And the way you access that, the way we get access to the relationship with God, we all want is actually through prayer. [00:22:46] (50 seconds)  #KnowGodNotJustBelieve

It's not really instructions for reshaping the landscape of your life. If you just believed hard enough, it's really not about the quantity of faith. It's really not about you and your effort to try. That's not the emphasis of this metaphor of if you just had a faith like a mustard seed. It's a common way of saying the smallest amount of faith accomplishes impossible things. When your faith is fixed on your relationship with the Lord Jesus, there is power. Even if that relationship is infinitely small, it can actually cause great, impossible change. [00:04:59] (40 seconds)  #SmallFaithBigImpact

The reason they could not cast the demon out, the reason they were unable, the reason they could not help was because they were trying to do so like the rest of the world. They were trying to help out of their own power. Earlier, Jesus gave them the authority to cast out demons. And maybe they were just trusting in this kind of passed on authority rather than a relationship and intimacy with the Lord through prayer and fasting. Their faith was on themselves and their abilities, even empowered abilities, rather than on Jesus. [00:07:44] (35 seconds)  #RelationshipOverAuthority

It's a wonder why we don't experience more of God's love because we haven't tried to walk the ways of Jesus. He believed, Brennan Manning, about God's love. He spoke about it. He counseled other people in it. He studied it. He wrote about it. But it was only when he was stripped of everything, when there was nowhere to hide, where he actually, for the first time, 18 years in trying to follow God, where he experienced the love of God. In prayer, that's when his beliefs about God became knowledge about God. [00:15:13] (33 seconds)  #BeliefToKnowing

And the reason it all dies is because God wants to really know you and show you that even though all of that died He is still for you. He still loves you. He went to that cross for all of that. That's the pattern of church history actually if you notice it. It comes if you look at church history how does the spirit of God move? How does missions get riled up? It's not through effort. It's not through ingenuity. It's not through money. It is through humble people who do everyday things like pray. [00:27:03] (38 seconds)  #HumblePrayerMoves

As we pray, you know what happens? The blinding light of God's transfiguration begins to seep into our experience. The Spirit allows our eyes to discover who we truly are. As we fix our hope on God, as we fix our relationship on God, it begins to radically change us, empower us. That is what we're invited to in prayer. That is why these disciples could not help because they were just believing in their head. They were not knowing the Lord through prayer and fasting. [00:23:45] (36 seconds)  #PrayerTransforms

I think many of us, many of you, are probably disenchanted with your Christian life because you have beliefs and ideas but have never known those things. Grace, hope, power. Those are really good ideas on paper. You believe them. But until they become something you know, they're just things on a page. Until they live in your flesh and bones and soul. This is why so many of you still believe in grace and experience in no shame because you haven't known grace. You know about it in your head. You believe it and you haven't felt it. [00:20:06] (44 seconds)  #ExperienceGrace

That's why so easily circumstances, when they don't go your way, they crush your hope because you believe in hope but you don't know hope. You believe in power through prayer. It sounds great but you don't know it. And many of us, we experience this difficulty, right? We pray really hard and nothing happened and that causes jadedness, frustration, thinking that God is apathetic or indifferent and we remain callous to God. We all have different versions of that. We have theory. We have beliefs about God but we don't live in the knowledge of God. [00:20:51] (35 seconds)  #BeyondTheories

So yada, knowing someone, is actually deeper than believing. So knowing is deeper according to the Hebrews. Knowing is personal. Until you have a personal experience, it's just a belief that's in the head. And so they use it a little bit oppositely. So I'm going to use it that way in my explanation. So you want to know God. It's when you know God, actually you can truly begin to actually help others. Because who's the one to heal? Not you, not me. You must tap in to the one who actually knows that person, loves that person. [00:16:36] (38 seconds)  #KnowGodDeeply

But to be sure, since we have many accounts of Mark's gospel and it's in there, that this was originally part of the story, that Jesus literally said the words, but this kind never comes except by prayer and fasting. And so even though it's not included in our account in Matthew's gospel, for accuracy's sake, in the story itself recorded by Mark, the earlier gospel, we see that it includes this comes by prayer and fasting. I think that's important because it articulates what Jesus means by mustard seed faith. Mustard seed faith is fixed on Jesus through this relational act of prayer and fasting. [00:07:03] (41 seconds)  #MustardSeedThroughPrayer

But what happens is when you come before the glory of God you know what happens? Something still dies but you can still stand before His presence because what dies is your old self. What dies is the old creation. What dies is all the performing all the faking everything else and that's what we're afraid of. You have to let that self die. All the false views of worth that you dress yourself up with for other people die. The ways that you present your fragile self to prop yourself up before your peers. All the ways that you trick other people or you try and trick yourself all that dies before God's presence. [00:26:19] (44 seconds)  #DyingToSelf

that word little faith you won't find it anywhere else in the Bible it's interesting little word it's not a total lack of faith it's someone whose beliefs aren't expressed in a way that makes them any different from the life of the unbeliever so they're religious but their life looks no different than a non -Christian maybe we have no power because we're living exactly like non -Christians we just have religion sprinkled on our lives it's a powerless faith because there is no fasting if they just had mustard seed faith they would have been able to help they had no power no authority because they tried to assume it themselves [00:31:31] (43 seconds)  #NotJustReligion

Prayer is not a business meeting where you're bringing to God your business plan where you're trying to convince Him to do things and invest in things that He otherwise would not. You're not trying to come to God with funding and timelines. I think too many of us come like that. It's a space where sometimes you don't come with anything where you just let this light that could kill everyone in the world where you have now access to it to shine through and it fills all the brokenness of your life and you become someone that God intends you to be. [00:25:34] (34 seconds)  #PrayerNotBusiness

Do you know the love of God? Or do you just believe it? I'm willing to bet. A majority of you have never experienced. Because I know, Brenna Manning, 18 years, I've had glimpses of this. And I'm still fighting to know the love of God in my own heart. This is the journey of the Christian life. Because it's very easy to believe something in your head. It's totally different to know it. Let me use another analogy. How do you know your spouse loves you? [00:18:21] (32 seconds)  #KnowGodsLoveDeeply

I think it's about 10 years ago that I was with an elder in our church, caring for a homeless man who had come through our church doors. We got to know his story. We helped him get some temporary housing downtown. We were meeting with him on a semi -regular basis. I was able to give him one of his first Bibles, and we felt like things were really progressing. He wasn't always regular in coming to church, but he would come in and out. Sometimes he would share his struggles, and we'd get a chance to walk with him and pray with him. [00:00:05] (31 seconds)  #WalkingWithTheHomeless