daily java

Daily Java:

Jesus said, “How can I describe the Kingdom of God? What story should I use to illustrate it? It is like a mustard seed planted in the ground. It is the smallest of all seeds, but it becomes the largest of all garden plants; it grows long branches, and birds can make nests in its shade.” (Mark 4:30-32)

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of John Glenn’s space flight in which he orbited the world three times. A Russian, named Yuri Gargarin had flown into space less than a year before, and Alan Shephard had followed him within a couple of weeks. John Glenn went for three orbits and the space race was on.

But what would make people do this? What would make them reach out beyond the planet and try to do something so seemingly impossible?

In  1962, President John F Kennedy said:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

The space race, the orbits in space, and the final landing on the moon in 1969, were the result of people pushing themselves further than they even thought possible.

Jesus said that if we had faith like a mustard seed. I am not familiar with mustard plants, but I know that the seed is tiny and the end plants is quite large, almost a small tree in size. A similar analogy in our time would be an acorn and an oak tree. The acorn is quite small and the oak can grow to amazing size.

Jesus tells us in this parable that if we had faith like these seeds we could do amazing things ourselves. Just like we did in the space race, we could accomplish wonderful things for God if we would allow ourselves to believe we could.

Of course, faith is not a magic bullet. It is not true that if we think it, God will make it so. And sometimes our faith is finished in a different way than we ever thought before.

But the key is recognizing that we cannot do it ourselves, that it takes the power of God working through us.

America reached beyond this world to the moon in less than ten years because they had faith in their ability to do so. Unfortunately, America doesn’t have that same faith today. The space race is, at least for the moment, finished and we sit hunkered down on our planet trying to survive.

Our faith can make a difference. If we believe, we allow God to work in our lives and to do great things through us. The thing is, we have to believe or God will not do it.