Faith in Action

18 Then Jesus asked, "What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? 19 It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches." 20 Again he asked, "What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? 21 It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough."

3. What type of tree is the shortest? (Dwarf willow—5 centimeters (4 in.) when full grown)

4. Who is the world’s poorest man? (I don’t know, but you never heard of him, either.)

The point of the quiz is that we tend to recognize, respect and remember those things in life that are big, while we tend not to pay much attention to the small things. In nearly every area of our lives we seem to think “bigger is better.” Unfortunately, we even believe it in spiritual matters. We think that more people, more money, bigger ministries and buildings, more programs, and greater talent will result in greater effectiveness at God’s work. The three categories that pastors use to compare themselves with others are Bricks, Bodies, and Bucks; if you have more of each of these, you’re better than the guy who has less. We often think that God is doing more where there is something going on that looks grand and marvelous. When we were building the Hall of Faith, we would often have people visit because, they said, “We saw the construction and thought something good must be happening here.”

Which church is God most pleased with—which is having the greatest kingdom effect—the mega church led by the charismatic pastor in the huge new sanctuary that seats thousands with its state of the art audio-visual system? Or the storefront church-plant that has just a handful of people, which opens their doors to the homeless in their community? Just from the outside, we can’t say, can we? We can’t know which church is more pleasing to God. But we often think we can, and that’s the problem.

We tend to disparage smaller things. We think if it isn’t big, God must not be in it.

Not only do we think this about churches and ministries, we also tend to think it about ourselves. We may feel like we aren’t big enough, rich enough, smart enough, talented enough, or important enough for God to use us in any meaningful way. I have struggled with that in the past. I have compared myself to other pastors and concluded that I’m not as good looking; I’m too short; I don’t have strong leadership gifts; I can’t sing and lead music; I’m an introvert in an extravert’s job; I’m not a good administrator; etc. Is it possible that you, too, have a list of reasons why you are not important? Why God can’t use you as well as He can some others? Why your life doesn’t count?

But is bigger always better? Not when it comes to spiritual things. In order to get this point across to his followers, Jesus gave them two illustrations of how God works in his kingdom.

Luke 13:18–21, “Then Jesus asked, ‘What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? 19 It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air perched in its branches.’ 20 Again he asked, ‘What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? 21 It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.’”

What is the kingdom of God like? No one had ever seen the kingdom Jesus was describing, and He never precisely defined it the way theologians wish He had. He just told stories and gave comparisons to help people get an idea of what it was like.

In his first example, Jesus says that God’s working is like a mustard seed that grew and became such a large tree that the birds of the air perched in its branches. The mustard seed is very, very small. The black mustard seed was the smallest seed ever sown by a first-century farmer in that part of the world. Because of its size the mustard seed was used proverbially for anything that was small and insignificant. But even though the seed itself was small, it grew to be the largest of the herbs grown in that area. It could grow to be 12 feet tall—two feet higher than a basketball goal. It was big and bushy enough for birds to nest in it.

In his second illustration, Jesus says that God’s working is like yeast that a woman mixed into flour until it worked all through the dough. As a boy, Jesus had no doubt watched his mother Mary make bread. They didn’t have the dry yeast that we use today; they just saved out a small lump of dough from the previous day’s making of bread. She would take that lump of dough and knead it in to the new flour mixture and eventually that yeast would permeate and influence the entire batch.

It’s important to notice the amount of flour into which the small amount of yeast was mixed; unfortunately, that is lost in the translation from Greek to English. The NIV says, “a large amount” of flour, but the Greek is more specific and says, three satas. That’s about 6 gallons, or about 50 pounds of flour, which was enough to feed 100 people. Jesus was not describing an ordinary household baking situation, because no housewife in that day had an oven large enough to bake all that bread.

So what was the point of these examples? Jesus wasn’t teaching about horticulture or home economics. He was revealing a kingdom truth. When it comes to spiritual things, God uses small things to do BIG things.

§ Abraham & Sarah. When God wanted to create a new nation to call his own, he didn’t start with a large, established family or a royal household. Instead, he used a nomadic man and woman too old to conceive children.

§ Moses. When God wanted to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt, he used a man who had been rejected by his own people, and who had spent most of his adult life herding sheep in the desert.

§ David. When God wanted a king to lead his people, his choice wasn’t the current king’s son, or even the strong, handsome oldest son of Jesse, but the youngest of eight brothers, a lowly shepherd boy.

§ Mary and Joseph. When God came to earth as a human, he didn’t choose a rich and famous family to be a part of. He came as a baby born in a barn to a poor and unimportant peasant family.

§ Apostles. When Jesus chose the twelve men who would be His apostles and carry on His ministry after He left, He didn’t choose famous or influential people; He didn’t choose religious leaders. He picked fishermen, and a despised tax collector, and a religious zealot and other unknowns.

§ Boy’s lunch. When Jesus wanted to feed 5,000 people, he used a small boy’s sack lunch to do it.

§ Widow’s penny. When Jesus watched people give, he wasn’t impressed by the big donors, but by the widow’s penny.
God uses small things to do BIG things.

What we might see as too small and insignificant to matter, God sees as something he can use to accomplish his purpose. Maybe you feel too small and insignificant to make a difference. If so, that’s perfect, because 1 Corinthians 1:27–29 says, “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.” Do you ever feel foolish, or weak, or lowly, or despised by the world? Rejoice, friends—you are just the sort of person God is looking for.

I’m often intrigued by the comment that people sometimes make: “Boy, I sure hope God saves ______. He/she has such great talents, such great gifts; they are so famous; they’ve got such amazing influence…they’ll make a great Christian.” According to this passage, and the examples we just looked at, that isn’t what God is looking for on our resumé. He’s looking for the small, the insignificant, the person who is not all that impressive by the world’s standards.

Why is that? Why would God consistently choose people who were not the shining stars of their day? He didn’t choose the athletes, or entertainers, or politicians, or business leaders, or professors[3], or anybody whom we would judge to have extraordinary abilities or influence. Why would He do that? The answer is in the last verse in this passage, “so that no one may boast before him.” If God primarily chose people with all the skills and gifts and influence, they would tend to take all the credit for what He did through them. But when God chooses nobodies, when He picks people who don’t have all that much going for them, and uses them in extraordinary ways, they happily point to Him and say, “God did it. Whatever good I have done, God did it.” Or as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4:7, “we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

This is not to say that God doesn’t sometimes call people with influence or extraordinary gifts to be His followers, but it does mean He doesn’t want them more than others, because they have a much harder time giving God the credit for what He does through them.

In the movie Pay It Forward, the seventh grade social studies teacher, Mr. Simonet, is challenging his students to think about something beyond their little lives and classroom, and how they might make the world better. Chapter: 3 (Start Time: 10:08, “This is your assignment…” End Time: 10:59, “Here.”) Mr. Simonet believes, as does God, that even a 7^th grader can change the world.

In Greek the word for ministry is diakonia. The root word is konis which means “dust” or “grit.” In other words, ministry is dirty work. It rolls up its sleeves and gets down and dirty with the very gritty needs of individual people. We get our English word for ministry from the Latin root for “small things,” as in the word “miniscule.” Ministry is often involved in small things—little acts, small gestures, and everyday service. There may be the grand plans, and the inspiring vision, and the challenge to do something great for God, but ultimately, it has to get down to the street level and impact specific people, whose lives are often messy.

Few of us in this church have “big lives;” few of us have careers that make a huge visible impact in the public sphere. Our lives and our ministries seem to deal with such ordinary things that it is often difficult to see their eternal value. But just as God can bring a large tree out of an insignificant seed, he can do the same with you and me.

The point is, few of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These were not second-rate achievers. They were the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Trophies are buried with their owners.

The people who make a difference in our lives are typically not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones who do the little things with a big heart. As Mother Teresa once said, “We can do no great things; only small things with great love.”

Roger Barone probably didn’t think it was such a big deal when he fixed Sandy Dykstra’s leaky toilet, but it meant a lot to Sandy, because it saved her the expense of a plumber, and saved on the water bill, which had doubled the month before. The Kids Hope mentors who spent just an hour a week with a child at Van Buren Elementary School didn’t have to have fantastic teaching skills, but they made a huge difference to those children. I have occasionally received a note of encouragement that made my whole day.

So God often uses the small people, and the small things we do to advance His kingdom and purposes in the world. Now let me ask you another question. What if we all did small things? Lots of little drops can make a big river.

Last Saturday, a week ago, we had a pretty hard rain in the early evening. Barbie and I were out, and as we drove back into our neighborhood, we were struck by how much water was running down the gutters. Thousands of gallons of water were running down the street, but all of that came from the accumulation of very small individual drops of rain. A lot of little things can make a big thing.

Here’s an example of the power of small actions multiplied by many. This is a business (and environmentally) oriented illustration from the magazine called Fast Company. The September 2006 cover story is about light bulbs—here is an excerpt from that article:

“Sitting humbly on shelves in stores everywhere is a product, priced at less than $3, that will change the world. The product is the compact fluorescent light bulb, a quirky-looking twist of frosted glass. In the energy business, it is called a “CFL,” or an “energy saver.” One scientist calls it an “ice-cream-cone spiral,” because in its most-advanced, most-appealing version, it looks like nothing so much as a cone of swirled soft-serve ice cream.

“... Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75 or 80 percent less electricity. What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out [all over the country], would be enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.”[4]

I know there are critics who point out the mercury in CFLs is an environmental hazard, and so on, but that story shows the power of small actions multiplied by many people.

That was Trevor’s point in Pay It Forward. In this scene, Trevor’s mother has encountered a homeless man living in her garage and fixing her truck. He’s doing that because Trevor had given him some money as part of the Pay it Forward plan. Chapter: 10 (Start Time: 31:30, “What’s going on with you and my son?” End Time: 33:41, “That’s 27. It gets big really fast.”)

Jerry insists that he is not allowed to pay Trevor back; he’s paying it forward. From a Christian perspective, we would say that “paying it forward” to others is really just responding to the blessings that God has already poured into our lives. We aren’t paying it back exactly, because we can never pay God back. But neither do these acts of service come out of thin air. We have been blessed by God to be a blessing. We see ourselves as pipes, not buckets. A bucket is just for holding something; a pipe is for passing it on. God has poured so much blessing into our lives that we want to pass it on to someone else. Even if it’s a small thing.

“What if we all did small things for God?” The volunteers who set up and tear down for the Interfaith Hospitality Network, and fix meals, and spend overnights here every few months may not see what they do as all that significant, but each of them makes a small contribution that has the enormous effect of keeping homeless families off the street. The parents who volunteer in the children’s ministry, or the youth ministry may not feel like they are all that important, or are making that much of a difference individually, but the cumulative effect of all their efforts is powerful in the spiritual development of our kids. Even your financial contribution may be relatively small in comparison to the total budget of the church, but when we all put our contributions together, it has an impact of over $1 million a year.

We were talking in staff meeting this week that our church is better than the 80/20 rule. That rule of thumb says that in most organizations, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. We don’t know exactly what it is in our church, but we think it is closer to 60/40—60% of the work is done by 40% of the people. But what about the other 60% of you, who do very little if anything to advance the kingdom of God here? There are about a thousand people who consider Faith Church their home. We don’t have anywhere near that many people actually involved in the ministry here.

I want to encourage you, especially if you are not doing anything other than coming to church on Sunday to jump in. Be the one to start the chain reaction. Your life can touch another life, and that life can touch another, and so on.. That’s what we’re doing next Sunday, Faith in Action Day. We are joining our efforts together with others in our church, and with folks from Good Shepherd Church, and the impact on our community will be tremendous.

You never know what is going to turn out to be significant in the kingdom of God. When Jesus died on the cross, no one there knew how momentous an action that was. They thought Jesus was just another martyr dying for his lost cause. They couldn’t see all of human history swing on a hinge; they couldn’t see Satan fall in defeat; they couldn’t see God wrapping His arms around the whole world and loving every man, woman, and child on it. But that’s what was going on that day. It was such a significant event that 2,000 years later, hundreds of millions of people all over the world take some bread and juice in a solemn and yet joyful sacred ritual to remember what He did.

[2] Adapted from “Is Bigger Really Better?” by Larry Sarver on www.sermoncentral.com

[3] Saul is the one exception to this rule: he was brilliant, had the best theological education available, and was a rising star in the religious hierarchy. But he did have one huge flaw: he hated and persecuted God’s people! God chose him anyway.

[4] Fast Company. “How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take To Change The World? One. And You’re Looking At It.” Issue 108, September 2006, Page 74. By Charles Fishman. Responding With Comparison