Increase our faith!

They say that there is nothing as faithful as a dog, don't they? Our Toby, who most of you will have met, was a prime example of this. He never made a fuss if he was going on a long drive such to to our favourite beach at Aberdaron in North Wales or had to stay in the car for the ferry crossing between Portsmouth and Ouistreham.
His passion in life was to have a ball thrown for him to chase, he never tired of it and would spend ages hunting for one that got lost in long grass or the hedge!

Loyal, reliable and loving, those traits we find so often in our pets seem much harder for us to maintain! 

Faithfulness is a key characteristic of the God we worship. However, there are subtle nuances of meaning when we talk about faith in relationship to God.
Our God is loyal, reliable and loving, that almost goes without saying, but those traits are the product of other fundamental attributes that He alone possesses. Because he is perfectly holy, eternal and immutable (unchanging), being completely steadfast, faithful and reliable is a natural part of His nature.

We, on the other hand, are human, frail and easily led astray, by people and our ambitions. We are naturally self-centred and find it hard to put others first.In Luke's gospel, the disciples had just heard Jesus telling them that they had to go on forgiving their brothers, even if they offended them seven times in one day; (Lk. 17 v 1- 5)....their reaction was, "Lord increase our faith!"

The disciples knew that the only way that they could hope to live in the way Jesus wanted them to, was by faith. They must have been even more shocked to hear the next response from Jesus. He told them, "If you have faith as small as a grain of mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea', and it will obey you". (v 6)

It is faith that Jesus is looking for from us, wherever he found it during his earthly life he commended it, remember the the centurion, (Matt. 8) or the woman in (Matt. 15)? Both were praised by Jesus for their great faith.

In these unusual times, it is our faith in God that should mark us out as Christians and I'm pleased to say that I have seen so much evidence of 'love in action' among our friends, but the challenge Jesus gives us in these verses is that we should expect our 'small faith' to produce 'great things' for God.