They Asked for More Faith and He Answered With a Seed

She has concluded, after a long time, that she is not the kind of person who can do this.

She is not being dramatic about it and she is not defending herself. She has watched other people forgive things that look larger than hers, apparently without the same trouble, and she has drawn the only available conclusion, which is that there is a capacity involved and that she has less of it than they do.

She has asked God for more. Repeatedly, sincerely, for years, in the plainest possible terms: give me more of whatever it is that they have.

And nothing has arrived, as far as she can tell, and the not-arriving has become its own piece of evidence.

The disciples make exactly that request in Luke 17, and it is worth knowing what prompted it and what they got back.

The request comes straight after the hardest instruction

Read what is said immediately before the request, because it explains the request completely.

Take heed to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him. And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith. (Luke 17:3-5, King James Version)

And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.

That is not a general request about spiritual growth. It arrives in direct response to being told to forgive the same person seven times in one day, and it is the reaction of men who have just heard something they do not think they can do.

Which is worth knowing, because it means the conclusion at the top of this article is the apostolic reaction. They heard the instruction and immediately concluded they lacked the equipment, and they said so out loud to His face.

You are having the reaction the apostles had to the same instruction. Luke 17:5 comes immediately after the seven-times-a-day sentence, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:26, who helps our infirmities, that a person prays anything at all in that condition.

He does not give them more

And He does not answer the request. That is the striking part.

And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you. (Luke 17:6)

As a grain of mustard seed. He does not increase anything. He redirects the question from quantity to something else entirely, and the image He picks is the smallest seed anybody in that audience handled.

The implication is not that they need very little. It is that the amount was never the operative variable, and that a request framed as a quantity problem has been framed wrongly.

That is genuinely good news for somebody who has been asking for years and receiving nothing, because it means the nothing was not a refusal. It was an answer to a question that had a false premise in it.

You are not short of a quantity, and He declined to treat it as one. Luke 17:6 answers a request for more with the smallest seed available, and it is by the Spirit, Galatians 5:22, whose fruit is longsuffering and gentleness rather than a volume a person accumulates.

The tree is chosen for its roots

The picture He uses has a detail in it that most people skip, and it is agricultural and it is precise.

This sycamine tree. And the instruction is be thou plucked up by the root.

The sycamine, or black mulberry, was known for a root system that was extraordinarily deep and extremely difficult to remove. It was the standard example of a thing that could not be shifted; there were rules about how far from a cistern one had to be planted because of how far the roots traveled.

So the thing being addressed in this illustration is not a small obstacle. It is the immovable one, chosen deliberately, and it is being addressed by speech from something the size of a seed.

Which is exactly the arrangement of this whole site. A small thing said out loud, to a thing with deep roots, and the size of the speaker is not the operative variable.

You are addressing something with deep roots and the size was never the issue. Luke 17:6 pairs the smallest seed with the least movable tree, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that a person is strengthened with might in the inner man rather than by an accumulation.

The honest prayer in Mark is a contradiction

If the request for more has stopped feeling honest, there is a better one in Mark and it is self-contradictory on purpose.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. (Mark 9:24)

Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

Those two clauses cannot both be true in any tidy sense, and the man says them in one breath, with tears, and he is not corrected and he gets what he came for.

That prayer is available to somebody who has concluded she cannot do this, and it is more honest than asking for more. It says: something in me is doing this and something in me is not, and I am not going to pretend the second half is absent in order to qualify.

You are able to say both halves at once, and the man who did was not corrected. Mark 9:24 has both clauses in one sentence with tears, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:26, who makes intercession when a person does not know how to pray as they ought.

Where the strength is described as showing up

Paul asked for something three times and got an answer that reframed the request, which is the same move Luke 17 makes.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Made perfect in weakness. The strength is described as being completed rather than replaced, and the location where it is completed is the weakness rather than in spite of it.

Which means the sense of not being able is not the obstacle to this. It is the place the thing operates.

I would not say that to somebody as a comfort if it were only a sentiment, and it is not; Paul goes on to say he will glory in his infirmities, which is a strange sentence unless the mechanism is real.

Nothing here asks anybody to contact anyone, or to raise anything with somebody it is not safe to raise it with, or to do any of this on a schedule. If what happened is still happening, or if you have got to the place where you do not want to be here, say it out loud to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust, and in the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour.

You are in the location where the strength is described as being completed. 2 Corinthians 12:9 says my strength is made perfect in weakness, and it is by the Spirit, Ephesians 3:16, that the strengthening in the inner man is done rather than by a person's capacity.

What the seed does not have to be

One more thing about the picture, because it is easy to misread as a smaller demand.

A seed is not a smaller amount of a tree. It is a different kind of thing altogether, and what it has that a quantity does not is life. It does not work by being big enough; it works by being alive and being planted.

So the question is not how much a person has. It is whether the thing they have is alive, and a person who is still asking, still troubled by their inability, still turning up to be bothered about this after six years, is not describing a dead thing.

The trouble she has been treating as evidence against herself is the exact evidence that something is there.

You are not looking at a dead thing when you look at your own trouble about it. Luke 17:6 uses a seed rather than a measure, and it is the Spirit who searches all things, 1 Corinthians 2:10, in a knowing about a person that their own conclusions cannot reach.