To Encourage You

Mark 11:20-24 “As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said to him, ‘Rabbi, look! The fig tree that you cursed has withered.’ And Jesus answered them, ‘Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, “Be taken up and thrown into the sea,” and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’”

The passage above points back to the cursing of the fig tree. Because it was unfruitful at a time when Jesus was hungry, He cursed it. It was not fulfilling the purpose for which God had created it, and because of that, it was destroyed.

In context, this miracle is a shadow of the condition of the religion of the Jewish religious leaders at that time. Rather than truly worshiping and honoring God with their lives, they were seeking advantage for themselves by taking advantage of others. Jesus had just acted in anger and judgment on the behavior of the money-changers in the temple. He condemns them for using the temple, which was intended by God to be a house of prayer, as a means to acquire personal wealth.

It was immediately after Jesus had done this that the account above occurs. As the disciples see that the tree that Jesus had cursed the day before had become withered to its roots, they mention it to Jesus. And then he responds by teaching them about faith in God. He, in essence, tells them that the possibilities available to them by way of prayer were incredible, in essence contrasting this with the misguided and therefore worthless religious practices that were so common at that time. God could do incredible things in response to the prayers of those who truly had faith in Him. Among the truths that Jesus is revealing with this teaching is that living and acting in accord with His will is always the best path, by far, then any other alternative.

Again, this teaching followed Jesus’ condemnation of what the Jews had done with the teachings of God in the Scriptures. It was summed up in the fact that they had turned the temple and God’s purpose for it into a money-making operation devoid of true faith. They had substituted something else for what God had originally intended, and because of this, they were condemned.

You see, whenever we do this, i.e., whenever we substitute something else for obedience to the truth of God, the result is so far below what could have been possible that it’s hard to put into words. Whereas the temple and believing prayer that was to be done there could have made miraculous and eternal things possible, the Jews had substituted short term gain that would be burned up in the end. And it’s always that way. Every time we substitute our ways and our schemes and view them as somehow better than the ways God has ordained, we will be the loser, and the loss is greater than we might even be able to conceive.

Psalm 1 puts it this way, as it describes the way of the fruitfulness of the godly life with the chaff of the life focused on anything else:

“Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

“He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away

“Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.”

And as Jesus stated more than once in His teaching, “For to the one who has, more will be given, and he will have an abundance, but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 13:12). We can either glorify God when we eat, drink, or whatever else we do as God intends for us (1 Corinthians 10:31), or we can do just the opposite. But in the choices we make, we should consider the truth that God “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us” (Ephesians 3:20) as we walk in His ways. But to choose otherwise is to, in the end, go the way of chaff, a life that will end with absolutely nothing.