Potential

A farmer in Georgia won the National Corn Growers Association Yield Contest last year with a yield of 503 bushels per acre!
At several winter meetings this year, we were reminded of the following:
Corn has the potential to produce 500 plus bushels per acre with modern genetics.  That potential is already in the seed.  Nothing we do as producers adds any potential to the yield.  All we do is preserve and encourage what is already there.  Proper planting, tillage, fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, etc. doesn't add yield.  It just allows the seed to express a part of its potential.

I wonder if faith isn't similar.
The Bible teaches us that if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, we could pluck sycamore trees out of the ground or move mountains.  That powerful potential is already in that tiny seed of faith.  All of our efforts to serve, study, bring forth fruit, witness, obey, worship, and do good works doesn't add any help or power to that seed of faith.  It just allows the potential that God already put there to be expressed and exercised.
Hopefully, by allowing that potential to be expressed through our lives, our seed of faith will grow.  And in turn, our faith will affect the lives of others.

And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.
Luke 17:6