What do you find hard to believe?
In many ways, our culture values doubt over belief.
For instance, doubt is a fundamental principle of
science. Scientists are only meant to
accept or believe what has been proven by experiments, and not
just proven by one experiment, but it's supposed to be
replicated and confirmed by other experiments against.
The first experiment had some kind of weird error that nobody
caught and wasn't in the write up.
But that attitude of doubt can sort of migrate out of science
and become a basic stance toward all of life.
We often regard those who are skeptical as tough, rugged,
unafraid of the cold, hard truth.
In our society. You don't usually have to
apologize for doubting something, but you may have to
apologize for believing something.
Just ask professional scientists who also are Christians or at
least believers in God, how they feel about revealing their
personal beliefs to their fellow scientists.
Our culture regards doubt as strong and faith as weak.
Is it right to believe only what you can prove?
Can anybody actually live like that?
What would happen to your relationships if your basic
stance is doubt everyone until they prove trustworthy, what
would that do to your friendships?
What would it do to your relationships with your family?
Or if you're married, what would it do to your relationship with
your spouse? Can you prove with scientific
certainty? Can you prove beyond a shadow of
a doubt that your spouse really loves you?
What if they've been bidding their time for these 15 years
they secretly have a sinister plan?
Is doubt meant to be a defensive armor that covers your whole
self? This morning, as we continue our
series in Mark's Gospel with Chapter 9, verses 14 to 929,
we're going to center our focus on faith and doubt.
This passage challenges us to consider what strength we really
need, where it comes from, and what that has to do with belief.
If you don't have a Bible, you can put up your hand.
Someone will bring you on right now.
Maybe you just left your Bible at home.
That's fine. Maybe you don't have a Bible.
If you don't have a Bible, we'd be happy for you to take it,
keep it, bring it home with you. Last week we studied Mark
Chapter 9, verses 2 to 13. In those verses, Jesus took just
three disciples with him up a mountain, and He gave them a
unique vision of His divine glory to prepare them to endure
his suffering and to endure their own suffering.
Our passage shows us what happened right after Jesus and
those 3 disciples come down off the mountain.
Please follow along as I read Mark Chapter 9, verses 14 to 29.
And when they came to the disciples, they saw a great
crowd around them and scribes arguing with them.
And immediately all the crowd when they saw him, were greatly
amazed and ran up to him and greeted him.
And he asked them, what are you arguing about with them?
And someone from the crowd answered him.
Teacher, I brought my son to you.
For he has a spirit that makes him mute, and whenever it seizes
him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and
becomes rigid. So I asked your disciples to
cast it out, and they were not able.
And he answered them. Oh, faithless generation, how
long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?
Bring him to me. And they brought the boy to him.
And when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the
boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming at the
mouth. And Jesus asked his Father, how
long has this been happening to him?
And he said from childhood, and it is often cast him into fire
and into water to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have
compassion on us and help us. And Jesus said to him, If you
can, all things are possible for one who believes.
Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, I
believe, help my unbelief. And when Jesus saw that a crowd
came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit,
saying to it, You mute and deaf spirit, I command you come out
of him and never enter him again.
And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came
out and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them
said, He is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand
and lifted him up. And he arose.
And when he 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. Here's the point of our passage
in one sentence. Weak faith lays hold of an all
powerful Savior. Weak faith lays hold of an all
powerful savior. In this narrative, every
character or group shows us something different about faith
and unbelief. The story raises questions like
who should we believe? Why don't we?
And if we do believe in Jesus, what does faith get us?
We're going to walk through the story roughly in order.
But instead of tying my sermon points to particular sections of
verses, I'm going to tie them to four different characters or
groups. 4 characters, 4 points to the sermon point #1
unreasonable unbelief. Unreasonable unbelief.
Unbelief often likes to claim the rational high ground.
Oh, it's more reasonable not to believe it's more rational.
But I think our passage is going to show us how unreasonable it
is not to believe in Jesus. We see this unreasonable
unbelief in the scribes, the religious leaders who debate
Jesus's disciples. We see it especially in verses
14 to 19. Look back again at verses 14 to
16. And when they came to the
disciples, they saw a great crowd around them and scribes
arguing with them. And immediately all the crowd
when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and
greeted him. And he asked them, what are you
arguing about with them? Hear Jesus and the three
disciples come back off the mountain.
They arrive back at the base and they encounter A chaotic scene.
There's a huge crowd, there's the scribes who are the highly
trained religious experts of the day arguing with Jesus, other 9
disciples. And when the crowd sees Jesus,
they run up to him and they're amazed at him.
The text doesn't give us a reason for this amazement.
I think it's basically just a celebrity factor.
Jesus is the one. They're here to see Jesus
finally here. And there's a kind of electric
current that runs through the crowd.
Here he is. And so Jesus cuts through the
confusion. He asks what the argument is
about. Now the the text doesn't tell us
exactly who his question is directed to, but we know that
the dispute was between Jesus disciples and describes They're
the ones arguing, but they're not the ones who answer.
Instead, it's somebody else from the crowd who speaks up and
answers Jesus question verses 17 and 18.
And someone from the crowd answered him.
Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a spirit that
makes him mute, and whenever it seizes him, it throws him down,
and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid.
So I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not
able. Like so many people who come to
Jesus, this father is desperate. His son is suffering grievously.
He has a condition that bears a striking resemblance to the
medical condition we know as epilepsy.
His son's symptoms closely match those of grand Mao seizures,
where someone loses consciousness and their muscles
contract violently. But the passage tells us that
the source of these seizures was not a disease, but a demon.
Seeing these seizures as caused by an evil spirit is not the
Father's best guess. Instead, later in the passage,
Jesus himself addresses the demon, rebukes the demon, drives
out the demon. So this is not a case of pre
modern people ascribing to a demonic spirit.
What we modern scientific people really know is a brain
condition. Instead, there's an evil
spiritual power at work in the boy, harming the boy, trying to
kill the boy. As we'll see later, that power
at work in the boy is too strong for the disciples.
Now we have to remember that Jesus gave his disciples
authority to cast out demons. Mark 315 says that explicitly.
Mark 6-7 reaffirms it when he sends them out on a preaching
mission. Part of what they're doing is
casting out demons. So this is something that the
disciples should have been able to do.
It's not like a super hard test set for them that maybe they're
all going to fail. This is something Jesus gave
them authority to do, but they couldn't.
They were not able. You can even translate that
Greek phrase as they didn't have the strength.
The demon is too strong for them.
The reason for that we'll get to in the next point.
For now, we need to notice that this was the cause of the
debate. Jesus asks what the cause of the
debate was. The father answers.
I brought my son to get the demon cast out.
They couldn't do it. Now, why would that provoke a
debate between the scribes and the disciples?
The text doesn't tell us explicitly, but I think it
implies the answer. We have to remember how the
scribes have treated Jesus throughout Mark's gospel.
They've often witnessed his miracles, and they've
consistently been skeptical of them.
When they've seen him do miracles, they've attributed it
to Satan rather than to God. So there's been consistent
unbelief, consistent opposition, consistently explaining away the
things Jesus is doing so that they do not have to believe in
him. So here, when the disciples
can't cast out a demon, I think we're meant to understand that
the scribes response is basically, see, told you so.
Gotcha. You guys can't cast out this
demon. Yeah.
That's because you don't really have power.
Your master doesn't really have power.
He's kind of a fraud. This this proves what we've been
saying all along. You guys can't cast out this
demon. So Jesus is really nothing.
I think we're meant to understand based on the scribes
profile throughout Mark, that they used the disciples failure
as an excuse to justify their unbelief.
Now I think that implication or inference helps us make sense.
That of Jesus's shockingly stern reply in verse 19.
It's really harsh rebuke verse 19.
And he answered them. Oh, faithless generation, how
long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?
Bring him to me now. I think this rebuke is aimed
squarely at the scribes. It's possible Jesus includes his
disciples in this rebuke too, for their failure, but to me
that seems overly severe. I think it makes best sense to
see Jesus as specifically targeting the scribes, because
their unbelief is consistent. It's hardened, they're self
deceived, they're wilfully blind, they refuse to
acknowledge the truth about Jesus when it's staring them in
the face. I think that's what merits such
a harsh condemnation. Here, Jesus echoes the words of
God himself and speaks with the authority of God himself.
The passage we'll consider in our devotional tonight is
Numbers 1411, where the Lord rebuked his people's unbelief
after they refused to inherit the Promised Land.
That's the kind of turning point in the plot of the book of
Numbers as Michael's been walking us through.
The 1st generation refused, so they perished in the wilderness,
and here's how God responded to that unbelief.
Consider how closely Jesus words here in verse 19 echo God's
words there. And the Lord said to Moses, how
long will this people despise me, and how long will they not
believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among
them, In spite of all the signs. Israel's unbelief wasn't
rational, it was unreasonable. God had rained down plagues on
Egypt. God had part of the Red Sea.
God had fed them with bread from heaven, water from a rock, and
yet they still didn't believe their unbelief was against the
evidence God had given them. It wasn't a healthy skepticism
waiting for reasonable proof. It was a refusal to acknowledge
overwhelming evidence. And the same thing holds true
for the scribes here. Their unbelief was unreasonable.
Jesus had performed miracle after miracle.
If you're looking for replication in the service of
scientific confidence. He himself repeated a variety of
mighty works again and again. He healed people.
He cast out demons. He miraculously multiplied food.
And then he did it again. Same miracle twice.
No replication crisis when it comes to Jesus multiplying food.
What more proofs of divine authority could you ask for?
In their unreasonable unbelief, the scribes are a warning to all
of us. To refuse to believe in Jesus is
to reject overwhelming evidence, evidence that is more than
sufficient to warrant our belief.
People who don't believe in Jesus often say that they would
believe if only they had more evidence.
No, Maybe that's your attitude today.
If so, I want to challenge you. I want to argue that God has
given you more than enough evidence on three different
fronts. We're going to spend a little
time here. 3 fronts of evidence for believing in the God of the
Bible and Jesus in particular. First, God has made plain His
existence, His divine nature, and His power in creation.
Romans 120, the apostle Paul says, For his invisible
attributes, namely His eternal power and divine nature, have
been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world
in the things that have been made, so they are without
excuse. In other words, creation points
beyond itself to God. Creation proclaims that it did
not create itself. Creation leaves unbelievers
without excuse in the face of convincing evidence.
If you want to maintain atheism in the face of this creation we
all live in, I would suggest to you that you have to believe in
at least six miracles. Something from nothing, order
from chaos, life from non life, the personal from the non
personal, reason from non reason, and morality from
matter. I would submit that it is simply
more reasonable to believe in the God of creation than to
believe in those six miracles. Second, I would say that God has
given overwhelming evidence of the truth of who Jesus is.
You can find evidence in the gospels themselves.
The gospels are sober, trustworthy eyewitness accounts
of Jesus career and they were written within living memory of
those who saw and knew him. There's even abundant evidence
for Jesus resurrection itself. A few weeks ago at the study
center here on campus, I gave a talk on the historicity of the
resurrection of Jesus. I gave 40 minutes of dense
historical arguments for why the resurrection of Jesus really
happened. If you're a skeptic, I'd love to
send you a link to that talk and then get together and talk about
it. Or if you're willing to examine
the evidence that the Gospels are trustworthy, reliable
accounts of who Jesus is, I'd love to give you a great book on
the subject called Can We Trust the Gospels by Peter Williams.
I'll happily get you a copy, give it to you, You read it.
Let's get get together and talk about it.
A third front of evidence. There are abundant reasons to
believe in the Bible, the Scriptures as a whole as the
true revelation of a trustworthy God.
Here are just five that I find compelling, 5 evidences for the
trustworthiness of Scripture as a whole.
Number one, the Scriptures give an utterly convincing
explanation for how humanity got into the mess we're in.
They explain how each of us not only does wrong things, but has
wrong desires. We weren't made that way
initially. We've become that way through a
fall into sin and a sinful nature we've all inherited.
We all have it in common. The scriptures explain how this
world can be such a heartbreaking mix of beauty and
brokenness. Beauty because it's the good
creation of a glad and generous God.
Brokenness because we've fallen into sin and misery.
No other religious text or human philosophy has an explanation
for our problems and the origin of our problems that comes even
close to the explanatory power of the Christian doctrine of
original sin. Only original sin explains why
each one of us is so messed up and how we got to be that way. 2
The Bible provides penetrating insight into human nature, our
thoughts, our motivations, our desires, what makes us tick, why
we do what we do. This book reads your mind.
This book reads your heart. When you read this book, it
X-rays you. After 27 years of being a
Christian, I only find that to be more and more true to my
experience #3 the Bible also has power to bring about real
change. I've seen this in my own life,
and I've seen it in the lives of hundreds of Christians.
I've been privileged to know and see the work of God's Word by
His Spirit, changing them from within 4th or 4th evidence.
There's also the fulfillment of prophecy.
There's hundreds of prophecies about who the Messiah would be,
where he'd be born, what He would do, what would be done to
him. They're just too many and too
different and too diverse for any kind of conspiracy theory to
account for how it all came true in one person. 5th And finally,
there's an amazing unity in diversity in Scripture.
It was written over 1500 years in three languages by dozens of
authors on multiple continents and multiple cultures, and yet
there's remarkable harmony and consistency.
The fit is incredible. The better you come to
understand Scripture, the more you see it interlocking in a
beautiful and complex way, as if you're staring up at the ceiling
of a cathedral. In the face of all this
evidence, there's plenty more where that came from.
What's more reasonable? Faith or unbelief?
The harmony of Scripture? The trustworthiness of the
Gospels? The historical evidence for the
resurrection? Does that make it more
reasonable to believe in Jesus or to reject Him?
The testimony of our passage, and especially of Jesus's rebuke
in verse 19, is that unbelief is unreasonable.
To refuse to believe in Jesus is to reject overwhelming evidence.
So what should you do if you don't believe in him?
Repent and trust in Him to save you.
But even those who do believe don't always do so consistently.
Our faith often fails. How?
The disciples show us a very relatable example.
We see it especially in verse 18 and the explanation for it in
verses 28 and 29. So point #2 self reliant
failure. Self reliant failure.
Why did the disciples fail? Because they didn't depend on
Jesus. Look again at the second-half of
verse 18. So I asked your disciples to
cast it out, and they were not able.
Big fail by the disciples. Why?
Why couldn't they cast out the demon?
Well, the passage doesn't tell us just yet, but if we Fast
forward to the end, after Jesus heals, the demon takes the
disciples aside privately in the house.
Afterward he answers the disciples question about it,
verses 28 and 29. And when he had entered the
house, his disciples asked him privately, why can we not cast
it out? And he said to them, this kind
cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.
Now, does Jesus answer to the question imply that this was
some particularly difficult or powerful type of demon?
Maybe, probably. I think so.
I'm not really sure. And if you have all sorts of
follow up questions about that, I would just point out that this
is all the passage says. This is all it gives us.
This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.
OK, They needed to pray. They didn't pray.
More important than what it tells us about the demon is what
it tells us about the disciples. They failed because they failed
to pray. Jesus tells them their lack of
prayer caused their lack of success.
What does their lack of prayer reveal?
self-reliance? self-confidence?
Some kind of sorely mistaken illusion of self-sufficiency.
Some kind of attitude down in their hearts saying we got this,
we're good. self-reliance is a failure of faith.
To believe in Jesus is to continually trust him for
everything you need, especially to depend on him for strength to
overcome spiritual enemies, whether external or internal.
Self-reliance is a failure of faith that produces failure in
the Christian life. The single biggest evidence of
self-reliance in each of our lives is lack of prayer.
That might be a general lack of prayer, or it could be a lack of
prayer about specific issues. I've certainly had the
experience of pouring out a struggle, confessing something
to someone, talking about a certain difficulty in my life,
and person just asked, are you praying about it?
How are you praying about it? How often are you praying about
it? What are you praying about it?
Sometimes even if I am praying about it a little, I kind of
realized, you know what, I'm kind of praying for it for like
30 seconds tacked on at the end of my prayer time.
Maybe it should migrate to the front of my quiet times with the
Lord, read scripture, and then dive into this issue that I'm
really struggling with and is really bothering me.
I've been helped by council like that even recently.
What is going on here? What's my prayer response?
Prayer is faith at work. Prayer is faith in action.
Prayer is a declaration of dependence.
That's why prayer is the chief test of how much you depend on
God. Those who depend on themselves
pray little or not at all. Those who depend on God most
pray most. What does the disciples
prayerlessness show us show us? It also shows us that they
underestimated the power of evil in the world and overestimated
their own power. Prayerlessness shows you that
you underestimate your enemy and overestimate yourself.
Prayerlessness shows you that you underestimate your weakness
and overestimate your strength. Prayerlessness shows that you
underestimate God's love, God's goodness, God's power, and his
willingness and ability to help you in every single one of your
trials. That's what you're
underestimating when you don't pray.
As a theologian Herman Boving put it, prayer is the test and
thermometer of our spiritual life.
It's pulse and the best medication for it.
In the Christian life, dependence on self is failure
and dependence on God is success.
So often in trials we grow consumed with what we can't do.
Can I fix this? Can I change this?
What can I do to make it stop or get myself into a better
situation? What lever can I pull to solve
this problem? So often in our suffering, what
you can do is little, and what you can do is not even certain
to make things better. What you can always do in a
trial is rely on God. What you can always do in a
trial is call out to Him for help.
That's one of His purposes in ordaining trials for you, to
push you into a situation, to back you into a corner where
either you're going to fail or you're going to call out to Him
for help. Those are only two options.
From the perspective of eternity, what matters far more
than the external outcome of your trial is whether you relied
on God through it. What matters far more is not
whether your life gets better, but whether your soul gets
stronger. And your soul gets stronger by
continually calling out to God in prayer.
Through prayer, faith exchanges your weakness for God's
omnipotence. That's the promise of prayer.
In prayer, you exchange your weakness for God's omnipotence.
That brings us to .3. Weak omnipotent faith.
Yes, weak comma omnipotent faith for the theologically discerning
among us. Yes, I'm aware that omnipotence
is a divine attribute, not a human attribute.
The paradox is on purpose. We'll get there.
We see this paradox of faith's weakness and omnipotence in the
Father who brings this unto Jesus.
So we've considered the scribes, the disciples, now the Father.
We'll focus especially on verses 23 and 24 to get this point, but
verses 20 to 22 provide the context.
And they brought the boy to him. And when the Spirit saw him
immediately convulse the boy, and he fell on the ground and
rolled about foaming at the mouth.
And Jesus asked his father, how long has this been happening to
him? 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 on us and help us. In verse 20, as the Spirit
possessing the boy draws near to Jesus, it's as if it knows it's
time is short. And so the demon throws the boy
into another seizure. Why does Jesus ask the Father
how long this has been happening?
It seems like odd timing for a question like that.
I think it's for both the Father's benefit and the crowd's
benefit. Jesus question invites the
Father to open up to him, to trust him, to come to him as a
whole person and bring the whole situation to him.
He tells Jesus just how bad it's been.
How bad is it? It's been happening since
childhood, and the demon has done this in such a way as to
attempt murder on the boy repeatedly.
Whenever there's a body of water or a fire, he tries to get the
boy to fall into it. This demon is trying to kill his
son. That's how bad it is.
I think Jesus question is also for the crowd's benefit.
The better they grasp the severity of the situation, the
more they will learn from Jesus's solution.
Remember, it was Jesus himself who said in verse 19, Bring him
to me. Jesus has taken charge of the
situation. He is the attending physician.
He is calling the shots. He has the situation in hands,
and yet the Father's confidence in Jesus waivers.
Look at the end of verse 22. But if you can do anything, have
compassion on us and help us. This appeal mixes faith and
unbelief. The faith is evident in His
petition. Have compassion on us and help
us. Here the Father echoes the way
that dozens of Psalms appeal to God for help.
It's like what we read, what Ginny read to us in Psalm one O
8 earlier verse 12 O grant us help against the foe.
For vain is the salvation of man.
Vain is the salvation attempted by the disciples Jesus.
Grant us help against the foe. Help, have compassion.
So the Father does believe in Jesus, but he also disbelieves.
He trusts, but he also doubts. The doubt is evident in the
first phrase, But if you can do anything, can Jesus do anything?
The Father's not sure. And so Jesus throws his doubt
right back at him, verse 23. And Jesus said to him, if you
can, he just quotes his words back to him.
Then he says all things are possible for one who believes.
Here Jesus first acts as a mirror to reflect the Father's
unbelief back to him and make him consider it.
Are you right to doubt? Is that if really reasonable?
Is the problem in me or in you? And then Jesus gives him a
reason to believe and not doubt. All things are possible for one
who believes. A phrase like this can easily
become a kind of cultural Christianity slogan.
You see it on enough, you know, framed pictures in somebody's
kitchen. You hear it in enough post game
interviews. Or maybe it even gets used in a
more sort of prosperity gospel direction.
If you believe every disease will be healed.
If you believe every bank account will be full.
If you believe that house will be yours.
But verses like this, you have to kind of reclaim both from a
kind of sentimental cultural Christianity application and
from a prosperity gospel over promising, turning God into a
genie kind of application. What does this mean?
There's comfort here. We have to kind of do some
gardening and wedding to clear it off and get at the comfort.
Here's what Jesus means. Faith is an empty channel
through which God's infinite power flows.
Faith is an empty hand that lays hold of God's infinite strength.
Faith is the bridge between our utter insufficiency and God's
all sufficiency. All things are possible for one
who believes. Why?
How can that be true? Jesus gives us part of the
answer later in Mark's Gospel, chapter 10, verse 27.
With God all things are possible.
Faith is how you draw on the infinite account of God's power.
Then comes one of the most touching, realistic, comforting
verses of the whole Bible, Mark 9/24.
Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, I
believe, help my unbelief. We'll come back to all things
are possible in the next point here I want to focus on I
believe help my unbelief. The father of the demon
possessed boy is a picture of every Christian.
It's not just that some believers have weak faith.
It's all of us at different times in different ways.
No Christian has perfect faith. No Christian has bulletproof
faith. No Christian has faith that
never wavers or doubts in any way.
As long as we have the remnants of indwelling sin within us, we
will struggle with unbelief. Logically speaking, faith and
unbelief are opposites. But our hearts are
contradictory, Our minds are contradictory.
Both exist in us. In our experiences, Christians,
faith is always mingled with unbelief.
Everyone who believes is in a constant and lifelong battle
with doubt. If you're not a believer in
Jesus, do you resonate with the Father at all?
Do you feel any of that kind of inner conflict and pull toward
Jesus, but you're not quite sure how to get there?
Even if you're not a believer, has faith begun to make some
kind of sense to you? Do you want to believe?
If so, I think you can make an adapted version of this Father's
prayer into your own prayer. Maybe Christianity is starting
to make intellectual sense to you, but you find it hard to
commit. You find it hard to hand your
whole life over to Jesus. Ask God to give you a willing
heart. Ask him to overcome your
opposition. Ask Him for faith.
If you're a believer and you struggle with assurance, I hope
this is a verse you'll print off and frame and hang up somewhere.
I believe help my own belief. Nobody's faith is perfect.
As JC Ryle said, it is of the utmost importance to our comfort
to know that a true believer may be known by their inward warfare
as well as by their inward peace.
Weak faith is still faith. Imperfect faith is still faith.
Faith mingled with doubt is still faith.
When you examine yourself, don't only consider the presence of
doubt. Also notice the presence of
faith. Remember that the presence of
doubt is not absence of faith. Help My Unbelief is a prayer of
faith for faith. It's weak faith praying for
stronger faith. It's real faith praying for
deeper faith. If you're a believer struggling
with doubt, fix your eyes on Christ.
Don't let your doubts turn into a kind of vortex that sucks you
into this kind of spiral where you think about this question
and don't know the answer, and maybe you go chase sources and
competing views and all the while you're not really focusing
on Jesus. It is valid and important to
seek intellectual resolution for doubts and difficulties.
But we all could think of people who, whatever good answer they
would get, would come up with another objection right
afterward. You can have all your doubts
satisfied. You can have all your questions
answered, and you still won't believe.
Figure out how to fix your attention on Jesus.
Figure out how to engage your heart and mind with Jesus.
He does have good, solid, more than sufficient answers for our
doubts and our questions. But more important than getting
answers from Jesus is getting Jesus himself by faith.
This passage teaches us that faith is able to accomplish
anything because it relies on the God who can.
Even weak faith is omnipotent. How?
Not in itself. Not as if faith itself is a
magic power. Faith itself is not powerful.
Faith itself has no power. All of faith's power comes from
the God it relies on. And again and put faith to work
is in prayer. As Calvin put it, the first
foundation of faith is to embrace the boundless power of
God. And the first step to prayer is
to raise it above all opposition by the firm belief that our
prayers are not in vain. All things are possible to one
who believes. But that doesn't make God into a
cosmic vending machine. God is not a genie who exists to
grant our every wish. All things are possible to one
who believes, but that doesn't mean every desire of your heart
aligns with God's. All things are possible to one
who believes, but that doesn't mean everything you ask God for
in prayer is actually good, or that he'd be wise to give it to
you. Faith also.
Trains our hearts to. Ask for what God promises.
Faith also trains our hearts to desire what God desires.
All the same. God does promise to answer
prayer. 2 truths we have to hold side by side, even though it's
hard. Prayer is not about performing
spiritual magic tricks, and God promises to answer prayer.
It's a mystery. It boils down in part to the
tension between God's sovereignty and human
responsibility. I don't have all the answers for
it, but scripture teaches both. Prayer is not a magic trick and
God really answers prayer. Whatever in your life looks
impossible, ask him to do something about it.
Weak faith lays hold of an all powerful savior.
And what? Does Jesus?
Do with his PowerPoint #4 Almighty, compassion almighty.
Compassion. That is what faith gets from
Jesus. That is what Jesus puts to work
for the good of all who believe. We see this especially in the
healing itself in verses 25 to 27.
Look first to verse 25. And when Jesus saw.
That a crowd came running together.
He rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, You mutant deaf
spirit, I command you come out of him and never enter him
again. Here Jesus casts out the Spirit
by a simple word of command, and to assure the Father and
ultimately the Son that this would never happen again, He
commands the demon never to come back.
Jesus's command accomplishes what it demands.
Jesus command demonstrates His sovereign supreme power over all
spiritual forces in this universe.
His compassion is almighty and His omnipotence is perfectly
compassionate. There are two.
Main reasons. Any of us could fail to help
somebody. You could have a.
Failure of ability. Or of will you could be unable.
To help. Or.
Able to help, but unwilling. To help, you could lack power or
lack compassion. You need both in order to do
anybody any good. If you lack either one, you're
of no help at all. In verse 23, the.
Father questions Jesus's ability if you can, and Jesus proves
more than able. Jesus is perfectly willing and
perfectly able to help you in all the deepest ways you need.
Jesus is infinitely willing and. Infinitely able.
To heal the sickest parts of your soul.
If you were there that. Day you might not have thought
that Jesus word was instantly effective.
Look at verses 26 and 27 and. After crying out and convulsing.
Him terribly. It came out and the boy was like
a corpse. So the most of them said he is
dead, but Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up and he
arose. When the demon came out of the
boy, it says he's like a corpse. He looked dead.
No movement, no apparent life. The majority of the crowd
concluded that Jesus's healing attempt misfired and resulted in
the boy's death. Spiritual malpractice.
The physician made the cure worse than the disease.
Imagine you're the boy's father. Thanks Jesus, where the.
Demon. Failed to kill my son.
You have succeeded. Great job.
Jesus apparently made things worse before he made them
better. At least that's how it looked to
the crowd. That's how it looked to the
Father. And that making things worse
before he made them better. It's one of the main reasons why
this passage comes where it does.
This passage comes right after a saying of Jesus in verse 12
where he refers to his being foreordained to suffer in order
to save us. Look at verse 12.
How is? It written of the son.
Of man that he should suffer many things and be treated with
contempt. This is the puzzling piece of
God's promises that Jesus is trying to get into his disciples
minds. I'm going to suffer to save you.
And right after our passage in verse 30, we see that Jesus
began to teach again. Look at verse 31.
The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men,
and they will kill him. And when he is killed after
three days, he will rise. The message of Jesus to his
disciples that he's teaching them again and again and again
in this section is it's going to get worse before it gets better.
That's all part of the plan here.
He's giving them a picture of what that looks like in
practice. How does Jesus save us?
By dying, then rising from the dead.
And so his treatment of this boy is a picture of how he saves us.
And it's a. Picture of the path.
Of discipleship for all of us. The boy's helplessness.
Is a picture. Of our own spiritual.
Condition. Before Jesus saves us.
We're in bondage to power stronger than us.
There are forces at work in us that are trying to kill us
eternally, and we can't liberate ourselves.
We can't fix ourselves. Only someone stronger can.
Only someone who has divine power can.
And that's what God sent Jesus into the world to accomplish.
He sent him, his Jesus puts it to bind the strong man, to
demolish Satan, to destroy his power.
And Jesus did that by dying on the cross and paying the penalty
for all the sins of all those who had turned from sin and
trust in him. Then after that, after dying for
the sins of all who would believe, he rose from the dead
on the third day. He destroyed death.
He defeated death. He himself entered into a new
kind of life that death couldn't touch.
And that's the promise he holds out to all who turned from sin
and trust in him. It gets worse in order to get
better. Jesus suffered the worst in
order. To offer you the.
Best, that's the message of the gospel as we've seen over and
over again in Mark's gospel cross then resurrection is Jesus
path of saving us and it's our path of following him looking at
verse 27. Jesus took him by.
The hand and lifted him up and he arose.
It's just like what he did to the girl who actually was dead,
Gyrus's daughter back in chapter 5.
It's just like what he's going to do to himself in rising from
the dead. It's just like what he's going
to do to every single person who believes in him on the last day.
He will, as it were, take you by the hand, lift you up, and you
will arise, never to fall again. That's the promise of the
gospel. That's what Jesus is picturing,
even in the way he saves this poor demon oppressed boy.
That's the good news of what he came to accomplish.
If you're a believer in Jesus, it is safe in various ways to
expect things to get worse before they get better.
There's no way into the Kingdom except through the cross.
Expect to suffer. Expect to struggle against sin
as long as you live. Expect.
To endure. Trials that you didn't ask for
and that you wouldn't wish on an enemy.
God has good purposes in and through all of those.
God has good and wise reasons for making it worse.
Before he makes it better. God is testing you, purifying
you, sanctifying you. 1 crucial way he does that is by making
things worse before they get better.
So keep trusting Jesus. Trust his power, trust his
compassion. Trust that He is perfectly
willing and perfectly able to give whatever help you need.
Brothers and sisters, if it's normal that some things get
worse before God makes all things better, then we shouldn't
be afraid to share our suffering with each other.
We shouldn't be afraid to share our struggles with each other.
We shouldn't be afraid to confess our sins to each other.
When someone does share a struggle or something they're
suffering with you. The best thing you can do is
point them to Christ's person, Christ's work, and Christ's
promises. No matter how bad things look
for you right now, if you trust in Jesus, keep trusting in Him
and keep hoping in His almighty compassion.
Keep your eyes fixed on the day when, coming soon, Jesus will
exercise that almighty compassion perfectly toward you
and toward the whole creation. There is a day coming when
Christ will completely remake you and completely remake this
universe. There is a day coming when
Christ's almighty compassion will expel all sickness, all
suffering, all sin, and everything that could diminish
your enjoyment of His infinite goodness.
No. Matter how weak.
Your faith feels. Remember that your Savior's
compassion is omnipotent. Your Savior's mercy is almighty.
Weak faith lays hold of an all powerful Savior.
Though Satan should buff it, the trials should come.
Let this blessed assurance control that Christ has regarded
my helpless estate and have shed His own blood for my soul.
Let's pray together. Heavenly.
Father, we pray for those who don't believe that they would.
We pray for all. Of us who do believe that you'd
help our unbelief, we pray that you would.
Grant us. To trust you with and trust you
for those things that look impossible.
May we see your. Omnipotence at work in our lives
through faith we pray in Jesus name, Amen.