Help Me In My Unbelief, Pt. 2

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Have you ever tried to fix something yourself before finally and reluctantly admitting you needed help? We do it with cars. We do it with relationships. And if we’re honest, we do it with God. Pastor Nick Gatzke exposes some of the subtle ways we reveal our lack of belief in the power of God.

The temptation for self-reliance is so natural. It comes upon us so subtly. We get comfortable in our skill. We think we’re pretty good and we lose that sense of complete dependence on God to do the work of God. This can happen to the Sunday school teacher, the one who knows the lesson, who engages the kids and is loved by them, the one who can pull it off. But in the end, there’s no power. This can happen to the preacher. Maybe a preacher who has a good command of the English language, who knows to pull on the heartstrings of those who listen, who can hold the room together in his message. But in the end, he’s relying on his skill instead of God’s power.

This can happen to anyone who shares their faith with their friend or their coworker. You’ve memorized the two ways to live. You’ve gone the extra step of being able to draw all the boxes. You know the story of God’s reign and our rebellion and the kingship of Christ and his saving work through faith and judgment that will come and eternity that will follow. And you can communicate it well, but you rely on your memorization rather than Jesus’s power to save. You see, self-reliance constitutes a type of unbelief. And Jesus indicates this unbelief has no spiritual power, no matter how good your motives are. And so he offers a solution.

The solution is belief, and it’s a particular type of belief. The boy is brought to Jesus. The demon within him convulses in a display of power and intense hatred for Jesus. The thought of Jesus drawing him out and restoring the boy compels the demon to rage. The father’s anguish for his son as he witnesses this must be profound. The boy is again rolling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, and Jesus is not oblivious to the man’s pain. He doesn’t need further detail to do what he’s going to do, but he asks for the history from the man anyway. And he does so, so he can engage him right at the point of belief.

Look at verse 21. It says that he asks the father, “How long has this been happening?” And he said, “From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion and help us. And Jesus said to him, if you can, all things are possible for the one who believes. And immediately the father of the child cried out and said, I believe, help me in my unbelief. And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit saying, you mute and deaf spirit, I command you to come out of him and never enter him again.

The man proclaimed, “If you can do anything, help us.” I mean, the man took the boy to Jesus for a reason. He believed that he could do something to help them. That’s why he came in the first place. But now his faith was fragile. He had just witnessed the failure of the disciples to cast the boy out. He just heard the ridicule of the crowd and the scribes. The man’s faith was hanging on by a thread based on what he had just witnessed. It was fleeting. And now the thought had entered his mind, maybe Jesus can’t do this. Maybe nobody can. Jesus turns it right back around on the man very quickly. He says, if you can, all things are possible for the one who believes.

It’s as if he is saying that it’s not about my ability. Of course I can. It’s not if I can. It’s do you believe? And now we start to get to the point. Faith that Jesus can do anything leads him to accomplish what he has promised. Faith that Jesus can do anything leads him to accomplishing what he has promised. And if you’re not careful here, you can get in pretty dicey territory pretty quickly. Maybe some of us have been there before because this verse is probably one of the most abused verses in the New Testament. People in the word faith movement or certain charismatic circles or prosperity gospel circles have taken this verse to mean something a little bit more or different than it actually means. They tend to take it as something like, if you believe God enough, God will do whatever you want.

Or if you have strong enough faith, God will give you whatever you want. And just that little twisting has profoundly terrible consequences. A friend of mine once told me a story about the death of his mother. She wasn’t advanced in her years when she was diagnosed with a very serious but treated, treatable illness. And as she deliberated what to do, the pastor at her church quoted to her, Mark chapter nine, all things are possible for the one who believes. And so with the support of her church family, reinforcing the message, the woman decided that she didn’t need the treatment. She would just believe enough and then God would heal her.

Time went on. Her son begged her to pursue the treatment. That faith was not incompatible with modern medicine, with using our minds, with taking advantage of all the common graces that God has given to us. But the woman resisted. She insisted that she just needed to believe more and that God would come through. And finally, having the illness ravage her body, lying on her deathbed, still, seeking hope for her healing. She died. And a son needlessly lost his mother. And a woman died thinking that she didn’t have enough faith to be healed. That she wasn’t strong enough. She wasn’t good enough. She didn’t believe enough.

And that is what happens when this verse is twisted or abused. I can’t tell you how many of those stories are heard. Just in between services, I had somebody come up to me and say, I’m an epileptic, and I’ve had friends use this verse to tell me to stop taking my medication. It happens all the time. And so what’s the problem with that way of thinking? Why isn’t Jesus saying that? Well, the problem was that Jesus never promised the woman that he would heal her. His promises are found in his word. His promises are displayed in his interactions with people. And her expectation went beyond what he had promised to do.

And Jesus doesn’t explicitly promise to the father, I’m gonna heal this boy right now. But he actually does indicate that he is going to act through his words. The father is there, Jesus is there, he hears the father’s story and his words indicate that he’s going to act in a very simple phrase, bring him to me. Faith that Jesus can do anything leads to him accomplishing what he’s promised. And the tension is of course, that we know God performs miracles and we know that he performs miracles that he hasn’t foretold us in the scriptures. But God does give us clarity about the categories in which he will provide for people and for provision. He will perform spiritual miracles in saving people. He will perform spiritual miracles in revival. He will perform spiritual miracles by giving the gifts of repentance and faith. And he will do physical miracles that God actually does institute the casting out of demons and the healing of sick among them.

But he doesn’t always do them. He doesn’t tell us to whom he is going to do them for. So the question is the question of expectation as it relates to belief. And what Jesus is driving at is this. Do you believe that he can do them? Do you believe that Jesus can do whatever he wants? Whenever he wants. Do I believe that his power is sufficient to accomplish his purposes? That’s what’s being probed at. Do you believe he can do anything? That he really is that powerful. If so, then we trust that he will apply that power in the right way and in the right time to fulfill his promises and accomplish his purposes. And sometimes that means he’s gonna miraculously heal. And I believe he can. And other times it means that he’s gonna allow us to suffer.

And I believe in his divine plan that is actually for our good. What he’s getting at is the inverse. He’s getting at the struggle that we often have, that we’re tempted with to believe that Jesus can’t do anything, that he’s so far off and distant that he doesn’t care or that he can’t do it, that it’s not worth asking, that the task is too hard, that the disease is too advanced, that the person is too lost. Just as there’s a sin of over-application, there’s an even more common sin of under-application, but not for the man in the midst of the struggle. I love his response. It says, that he cries out, I believe, help my unbelief.

His fledgling faith was an honest faith. He was struggling based on what he had just seen, based on a lifetime of experience, based on meeting Jesus. He is struggling, but he lets the Savior know. And it’s important to recognize that In his response, we see that it was not a matter of the strength of his belief on a scale of one to 10. As if somehow, if he just got over the threshold of five, then the genie in the bottle would grant the wish. No, no, no. That was the case, the son would be lost. His faith wasn’t strong, but his faith was there. It was a matter of belief that Jesus could do anything.

Guys, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve prayed that very prayer in my own life. I believe, help my unbelief. There’s a battle that’s going on in here. I trust you. I believe you. It’s not lining up with what I’m seeing or feeling or experiencing. Help my unbelief. And he does. And he does. And verse 25 tells us that Jesus casts out the demon. The demon left the boy. Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up. The boy is restored. The crowd must have cheered. The vilified disciples were relieved. And Jesus is shown as all powerful yet again. Faith, belief that Jesus can do anything, leads to him accomplishing what he’s promised to do.

And there’s a connection with the gospel here because it’s that same type of faith or belief that Jesus has the power to cast out demons or has the power to heal the sick that is found in believing that Jesus has the power to forgive your sins and restore you to God. Do you believe that Jesus can do anything? That includes forgiving you and cleansing you and bringing you back into a relationship with the eternal holy God of the universe. No matter how far away from God you’ve wandered, no matter how terrible your choices have been, no matter how addicted you became, no matter how hardened or cynical you are, No matter what the depth of the evil is that you have secretly engaged and dabbled in, he promises to forgive those who put their faith in him and he has the power to do it. He has the power to restore you to God.

Do you believe he can do anything? He can. He can forgive even you. The lesson is learned. The boy is healed. The disciples are still confused. And it says in verse 28, that when they had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” And that might seem complicated at first, but it’s really not that complicated because prayer is an expression of dependence and belief. That’s what prayer is. The disciples were relieved, but they were deflated. They’d done what Jesus told them to do. They preached the gospel, they cast out demons, but this time there was no power. Why? Because they had mistakenly come to believe that they could control this ability to perform exorcisms without depending on God.

And prayer is the expression of that dependence and belief. They forgot to pray. God’s power is his. He can do anything. We can’t control it. But he does allow us to access it. And this happens through prayer. Self-reliance is the enemy of spiritual power. Complete dependence is the way that God allows us to access it. And so how is your prayer life? You wanna know how you’re doing in dependence on God? Just take a little temperature check on what you pray about, how often you pray. How often do you express reliance on God or do you fall into the trap like we all do again and again, again of self-reliance? If I just work harder, if I just do more, I’ll figure this out. It will all come together sooner or later.

Don’t forget to pray. Faith that Jesus can do anything leads to him accomplishing what he’s promised to do. You know, I’m told that if you are inside the cockpit of a departing airplane, just as it, took off from the runway, you would hear the co-pilot or the captain call out V1.

This is the phrase that represents that they’ve passed the point of no return. There’s enough lift in the airplane for the nose to come off the ground. And as the plane accelerates toward the end of the runway, the pilot must decide if the plane is moving fast enough and it’s safe to take off. And the speed is determined pre-flight based on… pressure and temperature and wind speed in the way to the airplane. And the pilot maintains a hold on the throttle as the plane approaches V1 speed so that he or she can abort the takeoff if something goes wrong. However, after V1, the plane must take off. I think as Christians, we should have that sort of V1 commitment in our walk with Christ.

That’s what Jesus is displaying to disciples. Once you’ve placed your faith in him, once you’ve started to follow him, once you believe that he is gonna forgive you of your sins as your savior, in one very wonderful way, you’ve reached the point of no return. We believe and we live in the belief that Jesus can do anything. There are no limits on his power. For the Christian then, We simply adjust our attitude, our perspective. We apply full throttle and there’s no return because faith that he can do anything leads him to accomplish the very things that he’s promised to do. So when it looks impossible, you know who to trust. Let’s pray. Father, we relate so often to the struggles of your disciples. We thank you for showing yourself strong and true yet again. We ask God that you would indeed bolster our faith, that you would help us out of self-reliance, that we would depend upon your power in all things.

And may we experience that power all the more as we do. Amen.

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This transcript was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and has been reviewed for accuracy. Minor discrepancies from the original spoken message may exist.