Nurturing our Faith
Our friend Beth from Open Table Liverpool gave this reflection recently exploring what it takes to nurture our faith. The reading was Luke 17: 5-10.
When I was at school, I was awful at actually doing homework. for the first few years of secondary school, I pretty much didn’t hand in a single piece of homework, it reached a point where my teachers actually gave up on giving me detentions for not handing it in. however, I can remember actually doing my homework once, and I thought, my teachers going to be so happy I’ve actually done it for once, and like my school had this reward system where we’d get pink slips if we did well, and I thought I’d get a pink slip for it, I didn’t, and when my teacher had marked it and gave it back to me, she didn’t say ‘well done for actually doing your homework for once’, she gave me the same feedback she’d give any other student, and pointed out that I hadn’t actually finished it. Doing my homework was the minimum I was expected to do, and I hadn’t even done that properly, and yet, for some reason I thought I’d be rewarded for doing the minimum I was expected to do.
Faith is the first step, the minimum we need to do. And it can take work just to get and maintain a small amount of faith, it’s not just a simple case of God giving us faith when we want it, or us just choose faith, often, we’ve got to work on it.
In our reading, Jesus implies that the disciples do not yet have enough faith, even though only a little bit is needed, and then tells them a story, that feels a little problematic and uncomfortable, but I think it is about doing the work that is expected of you before your rewarded, or in other words sometimes we need to do the work we need to do before it bears fruit.
We’ve got to work on our faith, and that’s what Jesus Is telling the disciples, faith isn’t something we receive, it’s something we need work on, once the seed is planted we need to nurture it so it can grow and bear fruit.
And nurturing our faith looks different for different people, and it can be made up of lots of different things, for some of us it’s a super formal daily prayer routine, or just reading a bit of the bible and informal praying about it, or praying with a group, or just quietly sitting with god and looking out the window while your waiting for a frozen pizza to cook, there’s lots of different things that could work for someone, and different things work for different people.
That work isn’t always easy, it can take time to work out what works for us and a lot of self-discipline to make sure were doing what we need to do to nurture our faith.
If I’m going to be honest, it’s not something I’ve ever been very good at, and I’ve been struggling with it recently. I’ve not been doing too well the last few weeks, and the first thing to go out the window when I start to struggle is what little self-discipline I have, and with it goes a lot of the things that nurture my faith, then I’m just doing worse overall. But what started to get me out of it was when I was preaching recently, and so I had to read the bible, I had to pray I had to work out what God was trying to tell us. I had to do the things I needed to do to nurture my faith, the things that I had been struggling to do until then.
Where I’ve fallen short, where I didn’t do the minimum I needed to do, was when I didn’t do what I needed to do to nurture my faith, and I was worse for it. What I need to do now is work out what is going to change in my spiritual practice so I can maintain and nurture my faith all the time, not just when I’m doing well. Think for a minute about what you do to nurture your faith, is it working well for you, could it be better, is it not working and you need to look at doing something different. And the thing is, it doesn’t have to big and complex and super formal, it just needs to be what works for you. We don’t need to have a deep strong faith and a big complex super formal spiritual practice, we just need faith the size of a mustard seed and whatever spiritual practice works for us individually to nurture and maintain our faith
Mustard seed faith is transformative, it’s what allows us to know God, to work on ourselves and be better, to know that we are loved and that there is a place at the table for each of us, it can help us do amazing things, to work with God to bring about his kingdom on earth.
Jesus tells the disciples that if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, a tree would obey them and move it self to the sea. I know for me my faith has been transformative, I am doing things I never thought I would be able to do because of my faith. I’ve struggled with anxiety and have low confidence for most of my life, and still do, but 10 years ago if I need to stand up and speak to a group of people, I would have had a panic attack so bad I would’ve been physically unable to do it and I honestly think my faith is the reason I can so this now, my faith in God allowed me to know that he had faith in me, that this is something I can do and he wants me to do, my faith gave me the confidence to do something I never thought I’d be able to do.
Our faith is the foundation that allows us to work with God to bring about his kingdom. Without it, how can we let God in, how can we allow the spirit to work within us so we can do what we are called to do and take our place at the table. and it only takes a little bit of faith.
All we need is faith the size of a mustard seed, but even that takes work, we all need a spiritual practice, to nurture our faith, whatever that may look like for us individually, so we can truly know Gods love, a love so unimaginable vast that it drove Jesus to the cross, to know that there is a place for all of us and that we are invited to take our place and work with God, so we can be transformed, so we can work with God to bring about his kingdom on earth.