Sermon Notes / Transcript

Mark 11:22-25 — Have Faith in God

Speaker: Daniel Coughlin
Date: 2 August 2026

Well, as you've heard, we spent our week down in Missouri, and several of you were like, I wonder what of this week's gonna make it into the sermon, right? So I don't want to disappoint anyone, and so I'm gonna give you a picture. Ren, you ready for this? Because you come into the story here.

So we're taking this trip, and the float trip is a big part of it. Most people have their own kayaks, but Michaela's there and she's got her double kayak, and she's got one of her two kids there. Then I'm in a canoe, a big old canoe. I've got my youngest Autumn, who's how old are you?

Four. Four.

And then either Wren or Cruz, they kind of took turns who got to be with mom for a minute and who had to be with Pastor Daniel. Just to give you some idea of the physics of what happens in a canoe when there's, you know, a 45-year-old man in the back and two tiny little girls in the front: the canoe rode like this the whole way, right? And so that's how we went down the river.

For the most part, you know, it's Missouri. It's not whitewater rapids. It was just a fairly calm, enjoyable little float. Until the end, where we came around this curve, and I got used to seeking out the deep water, right? Because I wanted to, you know, I didn't have to get out of the canoe and push it. And so, you know, I shot for the deep water.

It turns out at this one particular bend, as the water was deep, there was also a log just wonk right in front of it, just below the surface. And so what happens when you hit a log, you know, the canoe came along it right up against it. Because I was weighing us down, we couldn't get over it, we couldn't get around it. And so if you would have seen Wren's face, she was not terribly, you know, my canoe Uber rating was really low. She was not at all convinced that this was going to end well.

As opposed to Autumn. Now, Autumn was just sitting there like this was just any normal day, and things were going swimmingly. I mean, part of it might just be that Ren knew the risk of what was about to happen. But I think a bigger part of it was that Autumn was in a canoe with her dad. And she had faith that she was gonna be okay. Like this is just, this was good. Ren needed some experience to learn that it was going to be okay.

And we were okay, right? We made it through. Everybody's here. We're good. You didn't even get wet.

I mean, that's how good it went. I got wet. They didn't get wet.

But the point is not my heroics or my poor canoe skills. The point is it's a picture of faith. And it is a picture of how we should feel with God.

A Picture of Faith

Okay? Because Jesus used pictures of the things around him. Let me be more particular with that. Jesus used pictures of the things around him. He used examples. He used real things. They lived life together, and they saw and experienced the same kinds of things.

That's what our scripture reading is today. It's a picture. And it's a picture that follows the picture of the fig tree that we talked about last week, right? The fig tree was there. Now it was there intentionally. Jesus knew, you know, the fig tree was there. And we talked last week about how the fig leaves were significant, right? That was what Adam and Eve used to try and cover the shame of their sin. And here Jesus uses this picture of a fig tree and the cursing of a fig tree to show the problem with Israel, the problem with the temple.

The temple, instead of being a house of prayer where the nations could gather together and pray and worship God and learn about the Creator of the universe, the temple had become this place of commerce, this place of money changing, this den of robbers. Wasn't at all what it was meant for.

So Jesus curses it. And the fig tree withers, but doesn't just wither like, you know, when the Japanese beetles get at your trees. It withered from the roots up. And so it was dead dead.

That's not the only picture though. Jesus, explaining what was happening, says to the disciples:

Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain,

Now you have to place yourself there. He's talking about like a particular mountain, right? They're seeing a mountain, and he's talking about that.

Whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and cast into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you.

Not Name It and Claim It

Now this passage is abused. And so we can't avoid talking about the modern abuse of this passage. There is a prosperity gospel, there is a name it and claim it teaching that says, You, Chris, you, Ian, whatever you want. You name it and you claim it, you believe that you have it, and God will give it to you.

Is that what Jesus is saying here? He's not, right?

You're not God. God is the one who says, let there be light, and what happens? There's light. Daniel Coughlin does not get to say let there be light and there's light. I don't get to say let there be a Porsche outside and there's a Porsche, right? The name and claim it thing is false. It is a false promise. It is something to puff you up and make you feel like you're a little God.

No, Jesus roots his instructions from the beginning as requiring faith in God.

Faith in God. Have faith in God. It's a command. It's an imperative. Have faith in God.

Not have faith in Daniel Coughlin, not have faith in Deb Hurst, not have faith in who you are and your desires and your wants and that those are the things that you should have. Have faith in God.

Also, not have faith in your faith. This one's a little trickier, right? You can kind of see not have faith in yourself. But the other thing that we tend to do is we tend to reduce faith to having faith in our faith, like I need to believe. And if I just believed more, then things would be better. If I just believed more, we wouldn't have this sickness. If I just believed more, I would, you know, I would get the things I want. The person that you are evangelizing, they would come to faith. You know, your husband, your wife would change their ways, they'd put their socks in their hamper, or, you know, they would come to faith or they would love you or they would come to terms with hardships and sacrifice of normal life, normal married life.

Jesus looks at the mountain and says, Whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and cast into the sea. Do they want to move the mountain? Why offer that?

Right? I mean, you can see, hopefully you can see, that when you walk with your children, when you talk with your children, when you canoe down a river, when you're having people over for dinner, everything becomes a testimony of faith. Everything becomes a teaching opportunity.

• Did the gravy spill? Well, you know, we don't have to cry about spilled gravy.
• Did the canoe get stuck? Well, have faith. We'll get through it.
• Have you ever tried to move a pile of dirt? Like a big pile, like somebody drops a big old trailer full of dirt in your yard. It's a lot of work to move a pile of dirt.
• A pile of stones, have you ever tried to move a pile of stones? It's a lot of work.
• How about a pile of wood chips, right? Even wood chips, not very heavy, but it's a lot of work to move.

So, you know, you look at a mountain, you're like, oh yeah, that wood can't just move that very easily, right? As we were driving down to Montauk, you know, they were driving through the hills of Missouri, right? And did you notice how many times they had to carve out the hills so that the highway could go through?

And you see those steep embankments on either side to show you. I mean, like somebody did a lot of work to that, to move a tiny little bit of that mountain. And they probably used, you know, big bulldozers and excavators and, you know, explosives. I don't know what else you use to move a mountain like that, but like serious equipment.

Interestingly, King Herod the Great did something like that right around the time, just a few years before Jesus would have been walking through there. He built his fortress, his Herodian fortress, and in order to build the fortress, he had slaves move a mountain. Like they extended this base so that his fortress could extend out over the mountain. And apparently, really cool. So I just imagine that as Jesus was walking with his disciples, he saw that and was like, oh, you know, here's this is faith.

Faith to move a mountain. Faith, not just to move it, like, you know, 40 feet this way. Faith to throw it into that ocean over there. Faith to do that just with a word.

That's something only God can do.

Moving Mountains in Scripture

And if you know your Old Testament prophecies well, which there's a lot of them, and so this is an easy one to overlook, Zechariah prophesied this:

Behold, the day is coming for the Lord when the spoil taken from you,

This is Old Testament, right? This is hundreds of years before Jesus.

When the spoil taken from you will be divided among you, for I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle and the city will be captured, and the houses plundered and the women ravished, and half the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city.

Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as when he fights on a day of battle.

In that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem on the east, and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north, and the other half will move toward the south.

You will flee by the valley of my mountains, for the valley of the mountains will reach to Azel. Yes, you will flee just as you fled before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah, King of Judah. Then the Lord my God will come and all the holy ones with him and listen.

And the Lord will be king over all the earth. In that day the Lord will be the only one, and his name the only one.

Listen, fig leaves have significance through scripture. Moving mountains has significance in scripture. And if we don't, if we're not aware of the Old Testament, if we haven't read it and have it seeped in our mind, this is why we have the reading plans out back, these images should come to mind. For the disciples, these images came to mind. Moving mountains is significant.

Moving mountains is cosmically significant of establishing God's kingdom here on earth.

Just like the fig tree, just like the fig leaves. That was no accident that Adam and Eve were the ones sewing fig leaves to cover their shame, right? Fig leaves, moving mountains. Jesus is using the very things right around them. Herod moving mountains to build his fortress, to build his little earthly kingdom. Jesus is using these images, these illustrations, just like the picture of the canoe with the two little girls in there. These are all images. Images that we should see, pictures of faith, pictures of real spiritual things.

Listen, from the fall all the way to the King coming in glory, at all times God remains in power. God remains the heavenly Father. Jesus exhibited some of this power by cursing the fig tree and showing the judgment coming on the Jews for the rejection of the Son of God when he came to his own people and they rejected him. And now Jesus tells his disciples what this means for them and what this means for the church.

Have Faith in God

Right? It sounds so simple. Have faith in God. Have faith in God. But have you ever spelled a word so many times that it started to look wrong when you looked at it? Like you start to look at such a simple thing and you're like, that can't possibly, like what does that mean? That's the kind of phrase have faith in God means.

It's easy to say. It's easy to put it on a slogan. We could put it on that little, it's not corkboard, but you know, whatever that little letterboard is out front of the church, right? Have faith in God. That'd be a nice little slogan. And probably if you told all your neighbors, have faith in God, what would they say? Yeah, that sounds all right.

Have faith in God.

But if you really think about that phrase and you see how Jesus starts to explain it, it's a lot more difficult than that. You must believe in God. You must believe in God even when life is tough.

• What happens when the canoe starts to tip? Do you believe in God?
• What happens when the cancer diagnosis comes in? Do you believe in God?
• What happens when the man or woman you marry turns out to love himself or herself more than he loves you, she loves you, or she loves the Lord?

Listen. Faith is the expectation and full assurance that God will provide whatever you need. Whatever you need.

Believers, you must have confidence in God's power, in His wisdom, in his desire to do good for you, and his ability to carry that out. This is what it means to have faith in God. It means to trust God. No matter the circumstances, you choose to trust that God is in control. No matter how lonely you are, how scared, how angry, you trust that the Good Father is working all things for the good of those who believe in him.

Now, there are plenty of times we don't easily see God working all things for our good. In fact, there are some times where we decidedly are convinced that God is not working for our good. He's working against us.

So we ask:

1. What's my problem?
2. Do I not just believe enough?
3. Am I asking wrongly?
4. Is God absent?
5. What's going on?

And part of our problem is we don't ask, or we ask with wrong motives. James 4 talks about that. Here though, Jesus instructs his disciples and us that we must ask in faith, in believing faith. You must believe God is who he says he is, you must believe that God is able to do all that he pleases, and that he will faithfully give what is according to his good will and for your good.

This is why Jesus starts with have faith in God. Not have faith in yourselves, not have faith in your desires, not have faith in your faith. Right? The power is not in us. The power is in the God who is to be believed.

Jesus doesn't say that you get whatever you want as long as you ask for it in Jesus' name, some formula. He's not a vending machine where you put your prayer in and you push the specific button of the thing that you want and it comes out. The foundation is having faith in God. And the privilege is that as a child of that God, as a son, or as a daughter, you get the good benefits of that.

God is a good father. This is the comfort of riding in the canoe, knowing that your good Father is there, that you trust, taking you along with you. He's caring for you, protecting you, saving you, making you holy. This is life, right? Life isn't easy. Life is getting slammed into a tree. Life is hitting rocks and dragging and having to get out and walk alongside, right? Life is hard and complicated and full of suffering and full of trials.

And that's the Christian life. It's also the non-Christian life. It's just that you don't have hope of a good father who's working all those good things for your good. We have the comfort of knowing that even weak faith saves because our salvation does not depend on the strength of our grip on God, but God's ability to work in our lives despite our weak faith.

It is God's faithfulness that we trust in, not our own faithfulness.

Pray for Good Things

Now, we can also look and say, are we asking for the right things? Because God doesn't give us our wicked, selfish desires. No, he's a good father.

And just like your earthly father wouldn't give his young son a hand grenade to play with, right? And I say that, and you laugh, but I mean, how many of our kids have cell phones that can access things even more deadly than hand grenades? How many of us carry those things around and don't keep the pin in the slot. I don't really know how hand grenades work, but that's my assumption. It's something to do with pins, because I watch movies.

Good fathers don't give their children things that kill them. And we should be careful what we give our children. So too, our heavenly Father is not going to give you your wicked desires.

On the contrary, if you want to grow in grace and in the knowledge of your Lord Jesus Christ, or if you want to make progress in your religion and become a strong Christian, independent young man in the faith, not a baby in spiritual matters, then pray daily for faith and watch your faith with jealous watchfulness, right? I mean, there are things we can work with diligence to improve ourselves by the power of the Holy Spirit, according to God's word.

If you want to see faith multiply, if you want to see the nation come to repentance, if you want to see revival in our area, well, pray daily for the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Pray. Ask God. These are good things that God can give, will give, that we should pray with belief, asking for. Right?

God is faithful. God is powerful. You do not have the strength in your belief. Your strength is the strength of God according to the character of God.

Faith and Forgiveness

But faith isn't the only problem here with our asking. Another problem is our lack of forgiveness. Faith is essential, so is forgiveness. You must remember that you stand before God only because you've been washed clean by the blood of Jesus Christ. Otherwise God does not hear your prayers.

In Christ you've been forgiven. You've been forgiven your many trespasses, your many debts, your sins of words and thoughts and actions, your sins before you were a believer, and your sins once you profess faith. And Jesus warns of this absolute necessity that we have a forgiving spirit towards others, especially when we come to the Father and ask for things.

We have no right to look for mercy from God if we're not ready to extend mercy ourselves to our neighbors, to our spouse, to our children, to our parents. This is how Jesus taught us to pray. Do you know it?

Father, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

Or maybe you learned it:

Father, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Or maybe you learned it:

Father, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Do you see the connection? Whether it's debts or trespasses or sins? It's forgive us as we forgive those who sin against us.

If you've been forgiven much, and if you've been forgiven, you've been forgiven much. If you've been forgiven much, then you must be quick to forgive others.

Do you know what it is to have a forgiving spirit? Can you forgive the hurts and slights and injuries that you receive from people, especially the ones that you love, the ones who are closest to you because they're always the ones that we're stepping on the toes of, right? They're always the ones when you're crammed in the backseat of a car for a six, seven hour trip and you know you're in the middle seat, the worst seat. And there's all this elbow poking and it's the ones that we're closest to that we always end up hurting the most.

They're the ones that we need to have the grace to forgive, the ability to forgive. Can you pass over a transgression? Can you pardon an offense? Can you see someone sin against you and not be self-righteous? If not, where is your Christianity? If you cannot, why should you wonder that your soul does not grow in holiness?

Listen, Jesus moved immediately from teaching about prayer and faith to forgiveness because unforgiveness reveals a heart that has forgotten the grace that it has received. If you truly trust in God, you can see your desperate sinful condition. You know how much you've been forgiven, how much forgiveness you need, because you see how you fail to love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your strength on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis.

You know you're not good. You know you're not good enough. So stop carrying on the pretense. Stop making a show of your righteousness and thinking that the other person is the only one at fault.

I mean, how many times have you gotten in a fight, in a quarrel, and you can see with perfect clarity the wrong the other committed, and you know all the reasons why you were right in what you said and what you did. How often do we flip that on its head and we listen to the feedback of the people around us who observe us. Of all the ways we fail, of all the ways we misspeak, of all the ways we're selfish without even seeing our own selfishness.

I mean, you know how much you've been forgiven, if you know how much other people have to overlook problems in your life, in your behavior, with your words. Well, then all of a sudden it's a little bit easier, a little bit easier to forgive others when they make similar mistakes, when they commit similar transgressions and sins.

God's free forgiveness is our only entitlement to eternal life in the world to come. God's free forgiveness in Jesus Christ is the defining characteristic of the Christian religion. We are a religion of scandalous grace, scandalous mercy. It is by grace that we've been saved, not because we cleaned ourselves up, but because Jesus washes us clean. Because it's not because of our own righteousness, it's that Jesus' righteousness is credited to our account.

After teaching the disciples the Lord's Prayer, you know what Jesus says afterwards? He doubles down on this truth. He gives this promise:

For if you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly father will also forgive you.

And then he gives this warning:

But if you do not forgive others, then your father will not forgive your transgressions.

You must heed this warning. You must remind yourself, express gratitude and value the forgiveness that you've received from God. You must see that your faith in God is appropriate. He is not only your creator, he's also your redeemer, he is the good Father. He knows how to give you what you need to make you suitable for His eternal heavenly kingdom.

This is so much more than your own desires, your own wants. He knows better for you. He knows your groanings. And even when you think you know what you need, when you think you know what you want, he knows better. What you really need, what you really, you really need to be ready for his kingdom.

This is because God is a good Father. The same Father who sent His Son to die for your sins, the same Father who forgave your unpayable debt, the same Father who hears your prayers, the same Father who's working all things together for the good of those who believe in him, so trust him.

Or said more simply, have faith in God. Have faith in God. Pray to him. Forgive as you have been forgiven. And rest in the care of your heavenly Father, who knows exactly what you need and never fails his children. Never.

Men fail. Women fail. God does not fail. He is worthy of our trust. Let us learn to grow on that.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, I pray that we would remember how much we've been forgiven, and that we would forgive others, that we remember your goodness, your faithfulness through all the generations, and that we would have faith in God.

This sounds like such a simple thing, and yet our faith is so easily upset, so easily thrown off balance, so easily tipped over and dunked in the river. Father, as a church, let us see in each other this need, this need for forgiveness, this need for knowledge of who you are and your goodness and your mercy and your faithfulness.

Father, draw us close to you and strengthen us. Strengthen us for this work. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.