The Pastor’s Piece – Pastor Kevin Cernek, FCFI Chaplain

August 22, 2026

In the Bible in Mark 11:22-23 we have these words from Jesus Himself: “Have faith in God … Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.’”

I was reading a story about a church in the Great Smoky Mountains that built a sanctuary on a piece of land donated by a member. It turned out that the sanctuary was so large that the building inspector would not give the church a certificate of occupancy because they lacked sufficient parking. The new building took up all the available space. The only unused part of the property was a mountain adjacent to the sanctuary. The Sunday before the new sanctuary was to open, the pastor called for those who believed that God could still move mountains to come to a prayer meeting that night. Out of a congregation of 300, 24 people came. After they had prayed for 3 hours, the pastor said he believed that somehow God would remove the mountain and they’d be parking there the next Sunday.

The next day a man knocked on the pastor’s door. He turned out to be a building contractor from a nearby county. They were building a shopping mall, he said, and needed some fill in order to level the construction site. Would they be willing to sell them some rock from the mountain across from the church? He added that if they could have the mountain immediately, they would be glad to make them a parking lot and pay for paving and striping it. The pastor readily agreed, and the new sanctuary opened on schedule the next Sunday. The person who wrote the story commented that there were far more members with “mountain-moving faith” that Sunday than there were the previous Sunday.

Years ago I heard someone say that Jeremiah 33:3 is “God’s telephone number” because it contains a very clear promise: “Call to Me, and I will answer you, and I will show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.” One time I was praying with some men and heard one of them say, “Lord, teach us to pray big prayers. So much of what we pray is just details.” I found that a helpful and challenging thought. It’s not that the details don’t matter. They do matter and God wants to hear about them, but sometimes our prayers suffer because our vision is so small. If we truly want to honor God, we will believe what He says and then act on that belief by praying prayers that require an Almighty God to answer them.

There was a recruiter talking to his football coach. The recruiter asked: “What kind of player are you looking for?” Well, the coach said, “There’s the guy when you knock him down he stays down.” The recruiter said, “We don’t want him, do we coach?” Coach said, “No, we don’t.”  But he said, “There is that player when you knock him down, he gets up and then when you knock him down again he stays down.” “We don’t want him either, Coach.” But the coach said, “There’s the man you knock down and he gets up, you knock him down and he gets up, you knock him down and he gets up.” The recruiter said, “That’s the guy we want.” But the coach said, “No, we don’t want him either. I want you to find the man who’s knocking everyone down, that’s the one I want.”

Now, we don’t want you knocking anyone down, other than the devil, and we don’t want him knocking you down either. We want you to be a force for God. Do you remember what Caleb said when he came back from spying out the land? “Let us go up at once and possess it: for we are well able to overcome it … the Lord is with us, fear them not,”(Joshua 14:9). The way of Caleb is the way of faithfulness.

Which way describes your life? Are you willing to follow the Lord faithfully, wholeheartedly, and courageously, recognizing who it is who moves the mountains?

(Kevin Cernek is Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin.)