God Desires Fruitfulness
- Mark wraps the stories together
Zechariah 9.9 "Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout in triumph, Daughter Jerusalem! Look, your King is coming to you; he is righteous and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey."
Micah 4.4 “Each person will sit under his grapevine and under his fig tree with no one to frighten him.”
1Kings 4.25 “Judah and Israel lived in safety from Dan to Beer-sheba, each person under his own vine and his own fig tree.”
Joel 1.6-7 says, “A nation has invaded my land, powerful and without number; its teeth are the teeth of a lion, and it has the fangs of a lioness. It has devastated my grapevine and splintered my fig tree.”
Micah 7.1-2 "How sad for me! For I am like one who— when the summer fruit has been gathered after the gleaning of the grape harvest— finds no grape cluster to eat, no early fig, which I crave. Faithful people have vanished from the land; there is no one upright among the people."
- The withering of the fig tree was a sign of judgment on Israel.
Mountain Moving Faith
Possible meanings of the faith that moves mountains saying:
- The mountain metonymy referring to the Temple. Judgement
Or
Zech. 14.4, 6-9 "The Mount of Olives will be split in half from east to west, forming a huge valley, so that half the mountain will move to the north and half to the south… On that day there will be no light; the sunlight and moonlight will diminish. It will be a unique day known only to the LORD, without day or night, but there will be light at evening. On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half of it toward the eastern sea (the Mediterranean) and the other half toward the western sea (the Dead Sea), in summer and winter alike. On that day the LORD will become King over the whole earth—the LORD alone, and his name alone."
- A reference to the age to come.
- The challenge to mountain-moving faith is not a just a challenge to audacious prayers but to pray for the Kingdom of God to come.
Believing Prayer
- 'Whatever you ask for' needs to be understood in context
- Are we believing for God's agenda or ours? The age to come or this age?
- (God pronounced judgment on a fruitless nation)
- When we seek the things of the Kingdom in prayer we can have great confidence
- Resentment and bitterness make our prayers ineffective. United prayer is powerful.
