Welcome to Ten Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrett. Dictionary.com recently shared their word of the year for 2026. The word is maxing. That's M A X X I N G. Now whether you're familiar with that word or not, you've likely encountered the phenomenon that it describes. Here's a definition. Maxing is a word that refers to the practice of pursuing an activity to the fullest or optimizing a certain aspect of your life. Maxing is all about more, making something bigger, better, faster or stronger. And it turns out you can live in the pursuit of maxing in pretty much any area of life. Consider just a few examples. There's looks maxing, where you perfect your physical appearance, your looks through the gym or through beauty products.
Then there's sleep maxing, where you optimize your physical surrounding and biology to arrange the most ideal night of sleep. Then there's dopamine maxing, where you attempt to extract the maximum amount of pleasure from every moment in your day. You can chase appearance, rest, or pleasure to the maximum level. All of these can be good things, but once you add that suffix maxing after them, they eventually become things that can master you. In the pursuit of optimizing my power and my priorities, I find out that my life is actually just all about me. I'm maxing my way through this endless journey that leaves me exhausted. It's as if our cultural moment is causing us to max ourselves to death.
But what happens when the culture of maxing, it infiltrates the realm of faith. If you could pursue the optimization and the perfection of your spiritual life through faith maxing, would that be a good thing? When our ambition is to maximize our faith, we aim for increasing the amount or the strength of our faith, a faith that's always on the trajectory of getting bigger and better every day. But is that what we need?
What if you're trying to maximize a faith that doesn't have the right substance? What if you're enhancing a faith that's out of alignment? Is it possible that you could go through the process of faith maxing? And that could cause you to miss the one you're putting your faith in.
In our maxing moment of ongoing optimization, the words of Jesus in Matthew chapter 17 cause us to slow down, to check our hearts, and consider how a rooted biblical trust in Jesus is far greater than anything faith maxing could give us. As we approach God's word together, let's slow down and ask for his grace to move through our time. Heavenly Father, we do thank you again for the gift of life and breath, for the gift of your word. You are so good to us. Thank you. We bring before you our joys and our sorrows, our anxiety, our excitement, our calendars and the things we have planned, but also our contingencies and the things that are just gonna hit us today that we did not plan on God, we need you in all of this.
Would you meet us in this space? Jesus, help us abide in you as we engage with your truth and Holy Spirit, we ask you by your grace to move in and through this time in Matthew's Gospel account. As we read your living word, may it read us and restore us to new life with you. In Jesus's name we pray. Amen.
All right, our passage today begins as Jesus comes down the mountain of transfiguration with Peter, James, and John, and he's gonna encounter the other disciples at the bottom of the mountain amidst a great crowd. We're gonna meet a man and his son in great need, but we also see the other disciples with a great need of their own. Let's pick things up in verses 14 through 18. And when they came to the crowd, a man came up to him, to Jesus, and kneeling before him said, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he has seizures and he suffers terribly, for often he falls into the fire and often into the water, and I brought him to your disciples, and they could not heal him.
And Jesus answered, Oh faithless and twisted generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me And Jesus rebuked the demon and it came out of him and the boy was healed instantly.
OK, out of the gate, this is a gut-wrenching encounter. There's this man who is in desperate need for his son to be healed from the power of demonic oppression. This is serious. He is suffering terribly. It sounds like a perfect occasion for the restorative reign of Jesus to flow through his followers to the people who need him in this moment. But when the disciples of Jesus who are there at the bottom of the mountain, when they try to heal this boy, they're unable to. Why? I mean Jesus himself rebukes the demon and the boy was freed and healed instantly. Why are the disciples so ineffective? Well this is the very question that they have for Jesus. Let's look at verses 19 through 20.
Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, Why could we not cast it out? He said to them, because of your little faith. 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. Now our first impression might be that the disciples there at the bottom of the mountain, they simply didn't have the right amount of faith or have a faith that was quite strong enough. I mean, Jesus explicitly says that they were unable to cast out the demon because of their little faith. We might be inclined to prescribe the disciples a dose of faith maxing to beef up their belief.
Some people even take this passage out of context and suggest that it's all about having the right amount of faith so that you can do anything on your terms. I mean, Jesus says that we can move mountains. If I just believe enough, if my faith can just be strong enough, then anything is possible for me. My power, my priorities, master faith maxing, move mountains and make my best life happen now. But is that what Jesus means here?
Not so fast. If we zoom out even just a bit, we start to see that Jesus isn't really addressing or critiquing the size or the strength of the disciples' faith. When he reveals their little faith in verse 20, he's actually trying to scan their hearts and reveal the roots of their faith, kind of like a spiritual EKG machine. And we know that because of the words of Jesus up in verse 17, we remember that he called the disciples, this is interesting, he calls them a faithless and twisted generation. Jesus scanned their spiritual status and found a major problem at the heart of things. In calling them faithless up in verse 17. Jesus, again, he's not critiquing the size of their faith, but the substance of their faith. Yes, they have a little faith, but the problem is not that their faith is too small or too weak. It's that their faith lies on the wrong foundation. It's rooted in the wrong place, most likely because they're trusting in themselves and in their ability instead of trusting in Jesus.
Even if they were able to max out this version of faith that they're living with, they would end up on an endless journey that exhausts them because they have the wrong kind of little faith that's based on the wrong person and taking them to the wrong destination. The problem lies in their hearts. As long as their faith is twisted and uprooted from Jesus, then functionally they don't have a faith that makes a difference at all. They're essentially faithless. Now in contrast to this twisted faith, Jesus describes the power of a true little faith. He says that the right kind of little faith, the faith that's rooted in a true trust and allegiance to him alone, that kind of little faith, a faith that's even as small as a grain of mustard seed, it is so great that it can move a mountain.
All because of where that little faith is placed in Jesus. Jesus is calling his first disciples and you and me today to reconsider who we're putting our faith in. He wants us to have a mustard seed faith that's in the right person, in him alone. And when that mustard seed faith is in the right person, it takes us to the right place, not to the self-centered preferences of maxing out our best life now, but to the Christ-centered purposes of God's kingdom for God's glory and the good of his world. Jesus's words about a mustard seed remind us of his parable back in chapter 13 of Matthew. Like a mustard seed that begins with seemingly tiny insignificance but grows into a great tree, that real living little faith will grow and flourish beyond anything we can possibly imagine as God's kingdom moves, even seemingly intractable obstacles like mountains.
will be no match for his reign. God's kingdom does not advance through people who are faith maxing on their own power and for their own agendas. His kingdom advances through people. Who have even a small faith that contains a sincere surrender to Jesus and his reign here and now. The culture of maxing puts the spotlight on us, but the good news of the gospel frees us from that endless, exhausting journey and puts the spotlight on Jesus. That's one of the biggest differences between a maxing faith and a mustard seed faith. One makes us completely obsessed with ourselves and what we can do. The other causes us to stand in awe of Jesus and what he has already done for us.
So consider how the Holy Spirit might be using this passage to scan your heart. How might you, like the disciples, be living with the wrong kind of little faith on the wrong foundation? A little faith that when exposed is really just a trust in yourself and your ability and your agenda for life. Are there ways that you might be playing the faith maxing game, exhausting yourself in the endless journey of being better and stronger on your own power? Perhaps you're even believing the lie that unless you really optimize your faith and get your life together, God will somehow withhold his love and withhold his affection for you. What would it look like for you to take one step away from a self-centered maxing faith to a Jesus-centered mustard seed faith?
Instead of maxing ourselves to death, we are summoned to surrender ourselves into life with the creator and the recreator of life. We have faith in the one who loves us, who gave himself for us, and empowers us to grow in his grace one day at a time, to go just one day at a time with a mustard seed faith in a masterful savior. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, would you continue to read and reorient our hearts so that our faith does not rest on ourselves but on you alone. Free us into the life and love of a mustard seed faith that makes much of you and the beauty and the goodness of your kingdom. We ask all of this because of your grace, for your glory, and in your bigger story in Jesus's name.
Amen.
