Luke 17:5-6

QUALITY RATHER THAN QUANTITY

Luke 17:5-6. “And the apostles said to the Lord, Increase our faith. And the Lord said, If you have faith as a seed of mustard, you said to this sycamine-tree, Be thou plucked up and planted in the sea, and it obeyed you.” The apostles, heating and considering His weighty and straight deliverances on offenses and forgiveness, feel convicted for entire sanctification, which they received two months from that date, when Jesus, from heaven, poured on them the sanctifying baptism of the Holy Ghost. Under this conviction they pray for an increase of faith. Jesus notifies them that a greater quantity of the justifying faith, which they then had, is not what they need; but a purer and move efficient quality of faith. Though it may be very small, like the mustard-seed, since faith is the hand of the soul by which it takes hold of God, the power has nothing to do with the size or strength of the hand, because it is not in the hand, but in God. Touch the galvanic battery with the end of your little finger, and you get as big a shock as if you took it in your arms. We need no great amount of faith for entire sanctification; but we do need faith, definite and straight, for that very thing, and so condensed and concentrated that every vestige of doubt has been eliminated, and there is nothing left but actual, real, and genuine faith. Now with that faith, though small like the mustard-seed, touch heaven's battery, and you will receive a Pentecostal shock. Take hold of the Omnipotent Savior for entire sanctification, and the old up as-tree of inbred sin will leap up out of your soul's soil, and root and branch, pursuant to the Divine toss, light in the sea of forgetfulness. These bold metaphors about the “tree” and the “sea” symbolize tremendous spiritual truths. The sycamine in Palestine is the mulberry-tree, and not the sycamore, as some have supposed, Which is the Egyptian fig-tree.