Seriously? Like I think about that one word and the ways that we use it, it shows so much truth, just an hour and an inflection of it. I'm gonna say it again, I want you to think about when the last time you said this was it. Seriously?
It speaks about exasperation, doesn't it? Like it's just, I'm sure you're laughing. You're probably thinking of situations where you've said that. If you have small children, you probably say that a lot.
I saw Chris and Randy Korten just like, oh, yes, I know that word very well. Like, how did you come up with this? You know, we say that word and what's so interesting about it. I thought about that a lot this week, but it was just like what the character of exasperation is.
You know, it's really tough to get, and I've talked about this a lot, quint his scene evidence of this before. Like I talk about, sometimes I don't like driving on 165, because I have a little bit of road rage. Like it's different, because you don't know who that person is. Like there's a different level of exasperation there, but like seriously, it's like, you can only get to that place when there's someone you know well.
Like, and this is also not a new situation. Like this is, okay, we've had a conversation about this and this is still going on. It's frustrating because like it's breaking the relationship you have a little bit. It's also breaking like your trust in your face and this person is like, really?
Like this is going on? And this is not a new emotion, this is not a new thing. This has been going on since time began. And today we're going to look at a situation in the Bible that's about exasperation.
It's like a holy version of seriously, because it's there. It's been happening for a long time. The last few weeks we've been in a series called Good Talk Bro about tough conversations Jesus has with people. We've asked ourselves the question, what happens when we let Jesus get to the bottom of our mess?
And the answer to that question is, if he asks us to truly live. And so the very first week we looked at the woman at the well in John chapter three, and what we learned was the truth, only has one maker. And last week we went back to chapter in John three, and Jesus' interaction with a man named Nicodemus. And inside of that interaction, we learned that our can'ts or his starts.
We learned about placing limits on Jesus. We kind of began a conversation about faithfulness. And this week we're going to continue that. But what we're seeing is this is a situation when people should know who Jesus is.
And what we're going to learn today is that the greatest indicator of our faithfulness is actually our prayerfulness. And that's what we're going to think about today. But this is a conversation. But it's about a situation that should have been very different for the people involved.
So let's open up our Bibles. We'll be in Matthew chapter 17. You can read in your Bible. You can read it on the screen behind me as well.
And so let's listen to these words today. At the foot of the mountain, a large crowd was waiting for them. A man came and knelt before Jesus and said, Lord have mercy on my son. He has seizures and suffers terribly.
He often falls into fires or into the water. So I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn't heal him. And Jesus said, you faithless and corrupt people. How long must I be with you?
How long must I put up with you? Bring the boy here. Does that make an exasperation a little bit? Then Jesus rebuked the demon and the boy and left it.
And from that moment, the boy was well. Afterward, the disciples asked Jesus privately. Why couldn't we cast out that demon? You don't have enough faith, Jesus told them.
I tell you the truth. You had faith as small as a mustard seed. You could say to this mountain, move from here to there and it would move. And nothing would be impossible.
So what's the character of God like when he gets exasperated? We just saw it. And we believe Jesus, fully God and fully man. We see his seriously going on right here.
We think about it. Like what is making Jesus so frustrated here? But the short side of it says, as though he's saying to them, you've got so much ability. You should have this down by now.
And actually a few chapters before, we see Jesus released the disciples into their own ministry and give them the power to literally do this exact thing and then spend a season of time doing this thing, healing people, casting out and expelling demons. They have done this before. And we see just this deep moment of exasperation in Jesus. But let's think about it.
What are we doing when we exasperate people? What is happening there in that? No, typically we know what we're doing. We tend to think that we know better.
And so we're kind of willing to risk the relationship at that point to kind of try things out differently. Like we're being a little hard-headed. That's what's going on. We think about specifically God.
These moments where we might be willing to get to that point we're causing frustration. As we're sitting there, we're saying, you know, I prayed for this. I didn't get the answer. I liked.
I didn't get the answer. I wanted to. I'm going to do it. I want to do this time because I'm not the one who's at fault in this situation.
Clearly, you're the one that's at fault. I think I might know better than you. Or I think I've got this down. I don't necessarily need you as much in this situation as I think I might.
The story actually, though, shows up in Matthew, Mark, and Luke all across the Gospels. And I want us to look at the way the story ends in the version. It ends in the way that Mark tells it because it kind of gives us a little bit of a peek of what might be going on. So Mark, chapter 9, also be on the screens behind us.
This is what we read from chapter 9, just 28 to 29. Afterward, when Jesus was alone in the house with the disciples, they asked him, why couldn't we cast out that evil spirit? Jesus replied, this kind can only be cast out by prayer. So Matthew, he's speaking to their faithfulness and Mark, he's speaking to their prayer life.
A conversation about faith is a conversation about possibilities. It's about what we believe might could happen, about what we believe Jesus might be asking or wanting to do. But it's the space between or it's the space of intersection of prayer and faithfulness where where big things begin to happen. It's that space right there where faithfulness and prayerfulness intersect to where impossible things begin to happen.
And Jesus' exasperation with the disciples is because they should have known this by now. But they're still just kind of acting out in their own ways. As I said, we want to talk about today is the greatest indicator of our faithfulness will be our prayerfulness. And really just to look at two questions, two things that help us understand what those places are for us.
But the disciples have a poverty of faith. They have a fundamental imbalance in their faith. They think they have it, but they think that their faith is something they own. Their faith is not part of just that larger story of God.
What we see just reading this story, seeing this is that faith is not this measurable commodity. A lot of times we think of faith existing on this linear pathway, like I have faith today, I have more faith today. It's this line that we can easily draw out, it's a line that we can control. It's this way that we can make this make sense in our own world.
But faith is an immeasurable commodity. Faith is a relationship and a relationship achieves results through prayer. The prayer brings about this disposition shift in our life. This story talks about it.
Jesus, if you had faith as small as a mustard seed, that you would be able to move mountains. We also sang about that earlier today. This is a common expression among Judaism at this point in time. This is a way to say God can do the impossible.
Jesus actually shows up several different points in times in Matthew that faith that can move mountains. Another way that we see this worked out in Scripture as one of our core values here at Foundry is that we want to have eyes to see in ears to hear. Zachariah, Old Testament prophet in chapter 4. We read this from verse 7.
This is nothing. Not even a mighty mountain will stand in Jerusalem's way. It will become a level plane before him. That not even a mountain can stand in Jerusalem's way.
It will become a level plane before. In the prophet Isaiah, we read this multiple times where he says, prepare the way of the Lord, make the mountains flat, raise the valleys, straighten out the crooked road. We talk about how God does these things for us. The terrain that troubles us in life, it gives us problems that God is making a level for us to have a clear path back to him that faith in prayerfulness are about quality, not quantity, the disciples.
By this point in time, we thought that we've been doing this long enough. We don't need him anymore. There's also exasperation as father when he comes to Jesus and says, your guys could not take care of this. They're supposed to be able to do this.
Can you fix it? If you've ever had folks that work underneath you or do things underneath you and there's problems and you don't have to fix those problems, you don't know what I'm talking about? The first time I learned this lesson, I was working in a guitar store in high school and I reached around 15 guitars wrong. Then my boss had to fix it for me.
I learned that day to never restring guitars wrong ever again because the boss had to fix it for me. You should know how to do this by now. There's these multiple points. I said two questions just for us to think about this morning.
This is the first one. What if we ask too much about what's too little and not enough about what's exactly enough? What if we're frustrated in our faithfulness because we spend our time in prayer asking for what's actually too little? Focusing on the wrong things.
They're not asking at all. They're not asking enough about what really matters to God and what really matters to us. See what if I perceive failures in prayer? I know that we've all had them.
I mean, honestly, when I was working on this message, I'm kind of nervous to talk about this because it means we have to confront the fact that when we think prayer isn't working or we feel distant or we feel confused. What if those are going on not because God is failing because we are failing and we're just so far off the line from where he wants us to be or from what he's asking of us that we don't even see it and understand it. A.W. Toes are somebody that I love and respect.
Tremendously, he has this quote. Suito faith always arranges a way out to serve in case God exits it. Real faith knows only one way and gladly allows itself to be stripped of any second ways of makeshift substitution. I give pseudo faith.
It's like when we really don't have faith but we're going through the motions so we can feel self-justified about the decision that we made. We might pray about it for like three seconds in the shower so we can say we prayed about it. It might have happened. It might be a really, really big decision we're making and we're walking into the space to make that decision public.
I'm like, oh, I did not pray about that. Jesus. Please help me know what I'm supposed to do. Yeah, I made my decision.
Like, that's pseudo faith. Or we say, hey, if you do this, I'll know I'm supposed to start putting these quantifications in front of God. Real faith does not see a second way out. But we don't get to that level of faith without exercising prayerfulness and faithfulness to get to that point.
Jesus, in his moment of exasperation, he says, you faithless and corrupt people. It's kind of weird to see Jesus kind of have a little bit of a verbal outburst, isn't it? Is that kind of odd to anybody else? We think he never got mad.
No, right here. He did. He says, you faithless and corrupt generation. He's making just like broad generalizations out of frustration, something that we all do when we get mad.
Think about your seriously conversations. You never do anything right. There's stuff, I mean, just think about how we go. We see Jesus and his full humanity here acting like a human.
He says, you faithless. He's not talking about, he's not saying that you don't have enough faith. He's saying, you don't have faith at all. Like, it isn't absent.
Like, this is the same idea of you don't believe in me whatsoever at all. You corrupt generation. You're twisted. You're distorting what you call is truth.
Older translations will say perverted right here. Like, you have taken this so far from what actually is truth. No longer can exist in the same category anymore. And it first seems really harsh, but then we think about it.
Like, you know, sometimes we want things to be our own way so much. We might create a version of God in our head that simply just matches with our own feelings. That matches what we think we want in life or what we think we should be doing. We're willing to put our faith and our trust in that.
But it's so far from God. It's not even resembling it. And that way we can be a faithless people. Believing in what's not a clear picture of who God is and what Jesus came to this earth to show us is clear picture of who God is.
It's a faith that never exists. A faith that leads away. I think what scripture shows us here is the answer is not to focus so much on what we feel like we want or we need, especially when we're in a situation where we might have a lot of wants and needs. But instead the healthiest thing for us to do is just to focus on a clear picture of Jesus, a clear picture of knowing Him better.
We're instead of spending our time and prayer, I need you to pull all these things off for me, man. I got myself in a pickle. So you got to fix it. It's instead saying, I'm at the end.
I don't either. There's an external circumstance in my life right now that I can't control whatsoever at all. And I'm terrified. So please do this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this.
And what Jesus is actually saying is I really want to blow your mind, but I can't because you're limiting me right now. And what we do in that situation instead is just focus on knowing Him better. What would happen if the singular point of our prayer, especially in these crisis moments, if the singular point and focus of our prayer was simply for God to build a bigger vision of who He is in our eyes to increase our faithfulness in that way. The greatest indicator of our faithfulness will be our prayerfulness.
Now we have our failures in faithfulness. But and this is that second question, but how have our failures in faithfulness resulted in the lack of benefit for others? Now we see this this this this father interacting with Jesus and Mark and this other second layer of the story in verse 24, he says this to Jesus, he says, I do believe, but help my unbelief. I think about that.
Jesus comes and says, I can heal your son if you believe and the father's responses, I do believe, but help me in my unbelief. That's a strong statement. One way he's saying, I believe this is where I recognize where I am at. I recognize who you are.
And I recognize where we are right now. But he also says, but help my unbelief. The father recognizes that he is deficient in his faithfulness. That's a pretty bold statement.
I believe, but I also don't believe in saying, I've gotten to a certain place, but I need you to take me to a new place inside of that. Saying, I believe and I know where you have gotten me today, but now from where I stand at this point, I see new things that are insurmountable in my way. And sometimes we can only see the mountains that are in front of us from the level planes that we are standing on today. We can get ourselves freaked out because we know what might be coming 10 or 15 days from now are years from down the line.
And we're unable to see how Jesus is working our own life to put us on that level queer past today where we stand. Faith isn't linear, it's not static. Faith gets worked out every single day. If we don't allow our faith to get worked out every single day, we will become exasperated with God because we will be unable to see him working because we've twisted who he is.
It's a really good thing God isn't dependent on us, isn't it? Disciples couldn't do it, but Jesus could do it because the Father's belief. And closing, I want to tell you all about one of my worst fears. I want to tell you about the more I think and read about things like this.
There's a newer fear in my life that I've had for the last couple of years. Not a silly fear, but a lot of you all know Chad's scared of fish. If you don't know that, have a good laugh at me right now. It's really funny when you see it actually happen in real life.
I got a goldfish one time that died on the floor after it jumped out of the bowl. But this is a real fear. And this is it. The more, that's a stupid fear.
The more I read things like this though. And I think about it. And the more, we're going to have a message on judgment in a few weeks. The more I look at the gospels and what it says about that, I'll tell you what I'm nervous about now and scared about is that.
I do have full confidence and full assurance of my relationship with Jesus. I'm not scared about that. What makes me nervous is that judgments begin to look a little bit different to me. What if when something happens when I don't and I go to heaven?
I'm not so worried about Jesus letting me know all the bad things that happen in my life because I know that I know there's a lot of them. But I'll be on the side of the fence where we're cool. But what I'm nervous about is what if he shows me all of the things that I missed out on because I did not have enough faithfulness. And it's a good thing.
God doesn't depend on me. But what if I see the things and the people and the situations that I could have had in my life, but I didn't because I did not exercise enough faithfulness. That's my genuine fear now. But also, relax easy because I know that God does not depend on me.
So my response inside of that is to slowly not worry about so many, I need you to do this. I want you to do this. Can you take care and you can exist for me? But instead just for joyce and the fact that where I am today is a level, there's a level place because he is made it that way for me.
And knowing that mountain or that valley that's in the future, he can take care of that because he's taking care of the place where I'm standing today. And he wants to do that for all of us. For us to not exaggerate Jesus is simply a matter of us rewising where we stand today and that he's going to take care of us and where we need to stand tomorrow. Let's pray.
Lord, we thank you for your faithfulness and its efficiency. And God, as we do that, as we thank you for that, Lord, we also pray to grow in what's coming tomorrow. Pray to grow in the ways that we need to. God, we pray for the growth places that we have that we're fully aware of.
God, we pray for those situations of faithfulness that we don't want to deal with right now. We might not even know about right now. But God, more than anything else, we pray for the queerest picture of who you are for where we are right now. And listen, if your son Jesus, we pray, stand together and stand.