“He put another parable before them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” – Matthew 18:31-32 (ESV)
“For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, Move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” – Matthew 17:20 (ESV)
Why a mustard seed?
Because Jesus wanted to make a big point.
The mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds. They average 1-2 millimeters in diameter. That’s tiny. Yet a mustard seed can lead to this:
That’s more than 1-2 millimeters.
So many times we go through our days thinking we barely have the strength to get through the day. We trust that God is there and that He has our best interests in mind. That no matter what we face God has a plan for all of it.
Yet there’s so many of us who won’t allow God to grow the mustard seeds we have in us when that plant might be our hopes and dreams.
What would happen if you planted your mustard seed and asked God to give it the growth? There’s no guarantee that your seed would sprout to the size of the tree in the picture but what if it was in a figurative sense half that size? A quarter? An eighth? What kind of difference would that make in your life?
That’s the essence of this year.
In the summer of 2010, I spent a month doing what I called “The Pete Wilson Challenge” after the lead pastor at the church our family had attended at the time. Pete has many little sayings that I’m not sure he realizes he uses as much as he likely uses them. One of those phrases is “what would you do if you absolutely knew that God was with you?”
That’s a bit of a whopper, isn’t it? Absolutely KNEW that He was with you?
The thing is…He is with us. When I spent that month keeping that as a focus in my life I found that even when the challenges came along they were easier to handle. I found God moving in ways that I didn’t stop to look at because I was so busy looking at the bigger picture where God didn’t seem to be (even though He was always there.)
After that month…things crashed badly and the rest of 2010 was quite the time of painful stretching, learning and growth.
Toward the end of the year, I began to reflect on my “word for the year.” Just like the previous two years, God worked through my life with a “theme” that didn’t always seem obvious when I was working through the year but made great sense in hindsight. Unfortunately, those “words” always seemed to bring them a great deal of discomfort and outright pain. So I had decided that I was going to end the three year streak of praying for a “word” for the year.
And that’s when God decided to step things up a notch.
The month I spent seeking Him in the summer kept coming back to my mind. I would read blogs all over the place talking about faith as a mustard seed. I heard sermons from various pastors across the USA talking about overcoming our fear and stepping into what we felt God calling us to do. It didn’t seem I could turn around without God putting some part of this master plan in front of me.
And so I asked myself…”if I planted my mustard seed…the feeling inside me God wants to use me to write and to speak…and truly believed He was with me guiding my steps, what would happen?”
That’s what the Mustard Seed Year is all about. The seed has been planted. God will bring any growth.
