So grand gestures don’t make good relationships, despite what the movies tell us.  If you missed it you can read all about it here.  The thing is, we tend to believe what the movies tell us, weather it’s true or not.  And so, sometimes, we live for the grand gesture.

Our faith is no different.  Have you ever made promises or commitments to God that you didn’t keep?  Me too.  Most of the time, I’ve noticed, they tend to be the big over the top ones, the grand gestures of faith, that I fail at.

You know the story.  We meet God.  God showers love, mercy, and grace on us.  We want to show the same level of love back to God, and makes huge, unrealistic commitments.  Things like I will read the entire Bible, cover to cover, every week, for a year.  We fail.  God gives grace.  We have some kind of encounter with God again, a retreat, conference, or prayer time.  God loves, and we promise.  Maybe to pray, for 4 hours everyday, although we don’t currently pray for 4 minutes everyday.  Why?  We love grand gestures.

But I’m not sure God does.  Don’t get me wrong on his end, everything is a grand gesture.  The earth, the sky, the sun, moon, and stars, life, your life, grace, his love, Jesus, all of it is so far over the top it is beyond what we can imagine or deserve.  But then again so is God.  For him the grand gesture is just him being faithful to who he is.  For us, not so much.

But in Matthew 13:33 Jesus tells a parable.  He says “the kingdom of heaven is like leaven (or yeast) that a woman takes and mixes into three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.”

Have you ever watched yeast work.  It is an incredibly boring process.  You put a little bit in the dough mix, cover it and wait.  But if you come back in a few hours the dough looks different.  It seems to fill the bowl more than it used to.  Give it another couple of hours and it has swelled so that it is sticking up above the rim of the bowl.

The point is that yeast takes time to work.  Jesus seemed to be saying that the spread of the Gospel would be like that, starting small but eventually impacting everything.

So as citizens of that Kingdom, I can’t help but wonder if the same thing may be true for us?  Maybe God working in us to shape us into the kind of citizens that are fitting for his kingdom will be a slow process.  Maybe living faith isn’t about a grand gesture but faithfulness in the small every day things.

As good as the grand gestures sound, that is not how yeast works.  It starts small and grows.  Living out our faith should be the same.  Rather than a grand gesture to read the whole Bible every week, we should start with just being faithful to read and reflect on it regurarly.  Learning to say a simple prayer for those we see in need or offering thanks for everyday blessings goes further towards shaping us than making a promise to pray 4 hours a day and keeping it for 2 days before we quit.

Maybe we should give up the grand gesture.  Instead, like yeast, we can start to let God shape one small area of our lives, then another and another, as we gradually start to fill and eventually overflow the bowl he has given us to live in.