Mustard Seeds

It’s a new year’s start and it begins on a Sunday.  The message is about hope for the future, as God’s child rightly deserves. The word reveals prosperity in abundance. It’s been likened in various times to the difference between mercy and grace. Mercy sustains. Grace multiplies. The scripture centers around Isaiah 40:31. It suggests that those that wait upon the LORD will renew their strength and not grow weary or faint. Jesus, in Luke 18, admonishes the disciples to wait upon Him in the garden for an hour, but it isn’t the passive hang-out-with-nothing-to-do kind of wait. It’s an active pursuing of the spiritual accomplished through praying and the activity of the Holy Spirit.

This active pursuit requires regular attendance on our part at the altar of the Holy Spirit. It is there that the Word of God is to be found, for if we are not concentrating on the voice of God, we will not hear the still, small voice within us and our blessing will be missed. Not because God has not sent one, but because we are blind and deaf to the spiritual world without the exercise.

We find that God’s timing never considers our mind, but rather our heart. If our heart sits not within the precepts of holding the one true God as utmost in our lives and sits not with love for all mankind, then our wait will likely be longer than anticipated. But when our heart flows from the love of the Holy Spirit, the blessing comes in the organic reply of faith.

Faith as small as a mustard seed, according to Matthew 17:20, can move mountains, and that faith grows exponentially through the organic process of waiting on the LORD. The example shows how the mustard seed, when planted and nourished and watered and tended, will grow to a full sized, mature plant that not only gives a harvest of its own, but also yields sanctuary for those seeking it.

In today’s society and in America’s culture we find a plethora of opportunity in finding a place to practice religion. From old denominations to upbeat contemporary congregations, there exist abundant offers to lead our hearts to nirvana. But the question begs to be asked. Do you seek the One true God, or do you seek what is convenient, what is familiar, what is considerate of your opinions, what allows you to be culturally acceptable to your peers?

All of these optional religions will offer some form of truth, yet they dilute, bastardize, and obliterate the clarity of God’s Word. They become a hybrid of the teaching of Jesus, and they offer false hope. The proof lies in the fruit that result from the harvest.

In God’s good example, the mustard seed not only grows organically, but it also produces a fruit. When you harvest that fruit, it returns seeds that can be planted, and the exponential blessing explodes as the individual seeds sown grow into more fruit bearing plants, and the harvest multiplies again. Obviously, one gains not only the initial blessing, but garners repeat blessings going forward, probably enough to feed the poor and to sustain generations, too.

In the hybrid species, the seed produces sterile fruit. Although the fruit of the first plant produces seeds, none of those seeds will result in the growth of a plant that produces fruit. This phenomenon recently made the news in the survivalist journals as companies start to offer specific strains of corn, wheat and other staple food sources that are not hybrids. This allows the individual needing to survive to plant, harvest and plant again from the seed of the fruit of the plants.

So the question’s answer becomes an important guidepost to your journey in God’s Kingdom. Are you experiencing the exponential growth promised through the example of the mustard seed of faith, or do you struggle to see any resemblance of blessings? Do you seek out the One true God, following His commandments to have no other god before Him and loving one’s neighbors as one’s self? Do you hear His Word spoken in truth with clarity in how to apply the Word to your life in such a way that you actively wait upon the LORD? Or, do you go blithely about your life, influenced by all kinds of gods from television to video to magazine mediums that preach all kinds of culture far removed from the truth of righteous living; far removed from the narrow path to His Kingdom? Hybrid Christianity. You’ll be able to tell by the ability of the fruit to multiply.