Help My Unbelief (Mark 9:14-29)

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

Mark 9:2–13

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.

Mark 9:14–29

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.