Help My Unbelief (Mark 9:14-32)

We are going to be in Mark chapter 9.

Mark 9 · chapter mention

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We're going to be reading out of the CSV translation.

And Brian's got them there if you guys need any.

We're going to be Mark uh chapter 9, starting in verse 14.

But before we jump in there, last week, I want to bring us uh a little context.

Last week we talked about the transfiguration, where Peter, James, and John got to see Jesus in his glorified state.

And then Elijah and Moses show up.

And then God speaks to the disciples through his own voice to Peter, James, and John.

He says, This is my son.

Listen to what he says.

And today we pick up with Jesus, Peter, James, and John coming down the mountain, and they're joining up with the rest of the disciples.

And that's where we're going to pick up right here in Mark chapter 9, starting in verse 14.

Mark 9 · chapter mention

So would you please stand with me for the reading of God's word if you're able?

Starting in verse 14, it says, When they came to the disciples, they saw a large crowd around them, and scri and scribes disputing with them.

When the whole crowd saw him, they were amazed, and they ran to greet him.

He asked them, What are you arguing with them about?

Someone from the crowd answered him, Teacher, I brought my son to you.

He has a spirit that makes him unable to speak.

Whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes rigid.

I asked your disciples to drive it out, but they couldn't.

He replied to them, You unbelieving generation, how long will it be How long will I be with you?

How long must I put up with you?

Bring him to me.

So they brought the boy to him.

When the spirit saw him, it immediately threw the boy into convulsions.

He fell to the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth.

How long has this been happening to him?

Jesus asked his father.

From childhood, he said, and many times it has thrown him into fire or water to destroy him.

But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.

Jesus said to him, If you can, everything is possible for the one who believes.

Immediately the father of the boy cried out, I do believe, help my unbelief.

When Jesus saw that a crowd was quickly gathering, 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.

Then it came then it came out, shrieking and throwing him into terrible convulsions.

The boy became like a corpse, so that many said, He's dead.

But Jesus, taking him by the hand, raised him, and he stood up.

After he had gone into the house, his disciples asked him privately, Why couldn't we drive it out?

And he told them, This kind can come out by nothing but prayer.

Then they left that place and made their way through Galilee.

But he did not want anyone to know, for he was teaching his disciples and telling them, The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men.

They will kill him, and after he is killed, he will rise three days later.

But they did not understand this statement, and they were afraid to ask him.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

We thank you for this text.

But I pray that you would open our eyes and our minds and our ears and our hearts.

Lord, just all of us.

We want to surrender it to you and to say, Lord, through your word, through your authority, would you change each one of us to make us more and more like you?

Lord, I pray that we would stand before you just with a healthy fear and a healthy reverence of who you are and the authority that you have, yet recognize at the same time that you desire the most intimate and deepest of relationships with each one of us.

Lord, let us be clay in your hands here this morning.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

So a theme that we've talked about a few times as we've been going through the book of Mark is that God is never limited.

He can do whatever he wants.

But our faith, or maybe I should say our lack of faith, can limit what God does in our life.

And we're going to see that theme in our text here again today.

Now, a second theme that we've been seeing as we're going through the book of Mark is, and it really started in chapter 8, is Jesus really honing in on preparing his disciples for what he's going to suffer on the cross and what he's going to suffer leading up to the cross.

So keep an eye out for those two themes and how they're going to play into the story that we're in here today.

Now, the last thing about this text before we jump in is we need to be willing to say, I don't know, in a few different places in our text here this morning.

There are some things in this text that go unexplained.

And you can read commentaries all day long specifically on this text, and you're going to get a bunch of different explanations on the same exact thing that's happening.

And my take on things like this is if God wanted us to know, he would have told us.

We could speculate, we could think about what the different options, you know, might be, but in reality, it's really hard on a few of these details, as you'll see, to say this is exactly what's going on, and this is exactly what's happening.

There's just a couple spots where we're just gonna say, we don't know exactly, and we're just gonna move on.

So let's jump in to verse 14.

Look at it with me.

It says when they came to the disciples, they saw a large crowd around them and scribes disputing with them.

So Jesus, Peter, James, and John, they walk up from the transfiguration, they walk up to this crowd, and there's already some chaos going on.

There's this argument that's already taking place.

Verse 15.

So there's two schools of thought here of why this crowd was amazed.

The first is that Jesus may still have a residue of his shining glory still in his countenance from the transfiguration.

Kind of like when Moses would meet with God, uh, like we see in Exodus 34, you know, his face would shine, and it says the Israelites were afraid to come near him, so he would put a veil over his face when he was shining in that way.

Now, the problem with that association is that God's glory would shine on Moses and his face would shine.

Uh, Jesus, on the other hand, his glory was shining from within because he is God.

Now, the other problem is that Jesus didn't want anyone to know about his transfiguration.

Remember, he told the disciples, don't tell anybody about this until after I'm raised from the dead.

Um, so it doesn't make sense that Jesus would come down glowing when he could have just masked it as he had been all along.

Now, the second school of thought of why the crowd was amazed is that you know the disciples and the scribes are arguing and all of this stuff's going on, and the disciples can't cast out this demon.

And maybe that they were amazed that Jesus just showed up right on cue, like just in the middle of everything that was going on, Jesus came just perfectly at the right time to kind of settle everything down.

But it says that the crowd was amazed, and the word amazed here it means to throw into terror or amazement, to alarm thoroughly or to terrify.

So, really, when I look at those two options that you, you know, the kind of the two schools of thought, I don't think anyone really satisfies my curiosity.

I think both of those things have holes in them.

So this is one of those cases where it doesn't say why.

Um, so anything that we come up with is gonna be speculation.

So all we need to know is that the crowd was amazed for whatever reason.

And we can just, you know, we can picture whatever we want in that situation, but the truth is we just don't know.

Let's move on to verse 16.

He says, uh, I said, he asked them, What are you arguing with them about?

So basically, what's going on here?

Someone from the crowd answered him, Teacher, I brought my son to you.

He has a spirit that makes him unable to speak.

Whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes rigid.

I asked your disciples to drive it out, but they couldn't.

So this boy has a demon that not only has restricted him from ever speaking, but is also trying to kill him.

You know, and I I love David Guzik's commentary because he brings a great historical context into this.

I want to read you an excerpt from his commentary.

He says, in the eyes of contemporary Jewish exorcists, this was a particularly difficult, if not impossible, demon to cast out.

This was because they believed that you had to learn a demon's name before you could cast it out.

And if a demon made someone mute, you could never learn his name.

So in the eyes of the people, a demon that made someone mute was impossible to cast out.

Does that make sense?

And who knows, but this may be what led to the disputing that Jesus walked up on.

You know, the scribes may be arguing that you can't cast out a demon from somebody that can't speak.

You know, who knows?

That's speculation as well.

But it's interesting to know that this was looked on as an impossible task in this day and age of Jesus in Israel.

Now, for a moment, I want us to think of this from the parents' point of view, from the father's perspective.

You know, in Luke's account, we learn that this is the man's only child.

It says it's this man's only begotten son.

The same word that's used in John 3.16 to explain God's relationship to Jesus.

It's the same wording that we see in Luke's account.

So not only would this man be heartbroken for his only child and what the son is going through, but think about this from the father's perspective.

He can't take his eyes off of this kid for a moment out of fear that he's gonna be thrown into a fire or he's gonna be thrown into a pool and he's gonna drown.

The father is living in this constant state of stress over his only begotten son, afraid to leave him alone for any length of time whatsoever.

So, not only is this spirit torturing the child, but I really think it's torturing the father as well.

And you can really sense as we're reading through this the sense of desperation that this father is feeling.

So this guy hears about Jesus, this father, or maybe he witnessed a miracle that Jesus had done and he went and grabbed his son and tried to come back and find Jesus.

And he's probably just thinking, maybe this is the guy that can finally do something.

You know, who knows?

This guy could have already tried going to other religious leaders, could have tried going to who knows what else, just anything that he could find to help his son.

And it just gets this huge sense of desperation.

Maybe he's even gone to some of the religious leaders that are in this crowd in the past, and maybe they were even unable to do it.

Again, speculation.

But this father comes and it seems like he has this glimmer of hope.

He arrives, and then he finds out that Jesus isn't there.

So the disciples jump in.

And, you know, we know that they've had the ability to cast out unclean spirits from when Jesus sent them out in twos in chapter 6.

It says that's one of the things that they were doing.

So the disciples, you know, this guy comes, he presents them the sun, and they think, you know, let's give it a shot.

But this time it doesn't work.

And he's waiting right there, and um sorry, and the scribes are waiting right there to pounce.

They're just waiting for something to go wrong, anything.

And we see that multiple times throughout the Gospel of Mark, and they're just ready to pounce and to start an argument and to cause a ruckus.

And then the whole scene, after the disciples can't do it, it turns into this chaos, turns into this arguing.

And at this point, still from the perspective of the father, I'm wondering if maybe he starts to doubt.

You know, will my son ever get better?

Like, I thought that there was a chance here, but this obviously is not working.

And I'm wondering if he's thinking, you know what, maybe I should have just never brought my son here in the first place.

Because my life has been chaos, but now I brought my son.

Now look at all the chaos that's ensuing now with this crowd and with the scribes and everything that's going on.

And I'm just wondering if right now the father's just being filled with doubt.

But then Jesus shows up.

And the dad explains everything to him, everything that has gone on.

And Jesus responds in verse 19.

Look at it with me.

He replied to them, You unbelieving generation, how long will I be with you?

How long must I put up with you?

Bring him to me.

Now the question that has been debated is who is Jesus talking to right now when he says this.

And you could read four different commentaries and get four different answers of what Jesus is talking about and who he's talking to specifically.

And I think if it's not specified, then he's probably talking to all of them.

You unbelieving generation sounds like Jesus is speaking about the larger picture to a larger uh group in this context.

And it sounds like Jesus is experiencing, and rightfully so, some righteous frustration, you know, with this crowd as a whole.

Because he says, How much, how long must I put up with you?

And I want you to think about this.

Everything that Jesus has done has been perfect.

Everything he's done as a discipler has been perfect.

Every teaching, every interaction, every conversation, every response to every religious leader that he ever came across was perfect.

And the people still aren't getting it.

They've had the perfect discipler, and the people as a whole are still just not getting it.

Even his closest disciples, as we just saw, they're still just not getting it.

He doesn't give up on them.

And he still has compassion on this boy that has the unclean spirit in him.

Look at verse 20 with me.

So they brought the boy to him.

When the spirit saw him, it immediately threw the boy into convulsions.

He fell to the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth.

How long has this been happening to him?

Jesus asked his father.

From childhood, he said, and many times it has thrown him into fire or water to destroy him.

But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.

So this gives us the impression that this boy's probably been this way for a while.

The father says, you know, he's been like this since childhood.

He doesn't say, you know, oh, it's been about a month, or it's been a couple months, you know, that we've been dealing with this.

He says, since childhood.

And that gives me the sense of that the father's maybe has kind of lost track of time.

It's been that long, where it's like, yeah, it's been a long time.

It's been since childhood that my boy's been like this.

But regardless, the point is, it's been a long time that they've been going through this as a family.

And the father says in verse 22, and this is a key part of this verse, but if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.

If you can, you know, that's not really a statement that exudes a lot of faith, is it?

It's more just like, you know, if you can, like if there's any possibility, I've tried everything to this point.

If you can, can you be the one?

You know, can you help us with this?

And Jesus already calls them an unbelieving generation.

And I think this statement only confirms it.

Because this guy's looking at the face of Jesus and saying, if you can, would you help us?

And who knows what else the father, as I spoke about earlier, has tried to this point.

How many times he's taken him to someone else with no results whatsoever.

And I just imagine the father saying, If you're the guy, Jesus, if you're the guy, can you just please help us?

We've tried everything.

If you can.

Jesus, please just do something.

And who knows where this father is in terms of what he knows about Jesus.

But he's not showing the faith of the woman with a flow of blood that we saw just last month.

He's not showing the faith of the Roman centurion.

So Jesus addresses the father's faith in verse 23.

And notice that Jesus addresses something that the disciples had not.

So look at verse 23 with me.

It says Jesus said to him, If you can, everything is possible for the one who believes.

Immediately the father of the boy cried out, I do believe.

Help my unbelief.

So Jesus sees and addresses the issue of unbelief.

And then we see the father say, I do believe.

And in my mind, as I'm seeing this all play out, I feel like there's a big pause right there.

I do believe.

And then I just picture the father just kind of thinking about what he just said and then thinking about the true condition of his heart.

And then he realizes that he does have some doubt.

But he does the right thing.

He turns to Jesus and he says, Help my unbelief.

And I think that that is a prayer that every one of us should become very familiar with.

When we think that God will not provide, when we think that God doesn't care, when we think that God doesn't see us or our circumstances, that's the prayer that we need to be praying.

God, help my unbelief.

Just like Jesus was perfect in every way with his disciples, God has been perfect in every way in our walk with him.

Yet it's so easy to find ourselves in a place of unbelief when things start to get really hard.

And it's so easy to doubt God when he's not working in the way that we think he should be working.

It's in those moments that we need to pray the same prayer that this father of this boy prayed.

And that is, Jesus, help me with my unbelief.

And that is what Jesus responds to in this story.

Of when the father finally comes to that point of Jesus, help me with my unbelief.

Look at verse 25.

It says, when Jesus saw that a crowd was quickly gathering, 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.

So as we've mentioned many times, Jesus' miracles were not to entertain crowds.

It wasn't to gain this huge following.

It was to back up his words.

It was to show that he had authority over everything, so that everyone would know they should listen to the good news that he was bringing.

So as more and more people gathered, he gets to work pretty quickly, and then he casts out this demon, as we'll see in verse 26.

Then it came out, shrieking and throwing him into terrible convulsions.

The boy became like a corpse.

So that many said, He's dead.

But Jesus, taking him by the hand, I love that image, raised him up and he stood up.

In the eyes of the crowd, Jesus did the impossible.

So we're talking about the historical context of this.

Jesus did he cast out a demon and didn't know the name of the demon.

Or at least didn't let on that he knew the name of the demon.

And then so he casts them out, and the spirit came out.

The authority of Jesus is on full display right now among all these people that have gathered.

But remember how Jesus called them all a faithless generation?

Well, they prove it again in verse 26.

The demon comes out and it says, Many.

So a good chunk of this crowd said, Jesus killed him.

He's dead.

Proving their faithlessness.

So what does Jesus do?

He takes them by the hand, he pulls them up, and the boy stood under his own power, and the unclean spirit is gone.

Proving even to the faithless that he has all authority to do whatever he wants.

And something that we need to realize today, when we're doubting, when we're going through those situations, is if he had all authority then, he has all authority now.

That has not changed.

So my prayer for us is that if Jesus showed up today, that he wouldn't have to rebuke us for being a Faithless generation.

You know, he's given us everything that we need and more to trust him in every moment, at every turn, and in every season of our life.

And I know that personally, I have no excuse to be called faithless after all that Jesus has done.

After he's proven that greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world.

After knowing that he has never left us and that he has never forsaken us and that he never will.

Now it's my prayer that we would all be found with a ready yes on our lips when Jesus asked us to do anything.

Whatever that might be.

And then after that, yes, then having a wholehearted belief that he's going to do what he said that he's going to do.

Look at verse 28 with me.

After he'd gone into the house, his disciples asked him privately, Why couldn't we drive it out?

And he told them, This kind can come out by nothing but prayer.

Like I mentioned, Jesus had already given them authority to cast out demons in Mark chapter 6, verse 7.

Mark 6:7

And it seems as if the disciples were relying on their past experience to drive out this demon-possessed boy that they were just confronted with.

And I've heard this verse wrongly explained and promoted as legalism so many times.

Like the disciples were on some sort of a point system with God where they could earn these holy credits or something like that because they didn't pray or fast enough.

You know, something kind of like, well, if you fast ten times, you know, in two months, you can cast out, you know, the lower ranking demons.

But if you fast 20 times in two months and you pray eight times a day during that time, then you can cast out the high ranking.

I've heard it almost preached, you know, in that way.

And that's not it at all.

And I think Warren Wearsby describes it the best, and he puts it like this He says, The authority that Jesus had given them was effective only if exercised by faith.

But faith must be cultivated through spiritual discipline and devotion.

When Jesus says, you know, this kind can come out by nothing but prayer, he's saying this can only be done through prayerful devotion to God.

It was the nearness to God that these disciples were lacking in this time.

It was the discernment of how to exercise their faith that was lacking at this time.

Now, and you're gonna have to hold with me here as I as I kind of unpack this next part, but I think it's safe to assume that if the disciples wanted to cast out this demon and be successful at it, that they should have done exactly what Jesus did before he showed up.

You following me?

Like they should have done the same order, the same words, everything that Jesus should have done.

That's what God wanted to do in that moment.

So if they wanted to be successful, they should have done exactly what Jesus did when Jesus did finally show up and cast the demon out.

So hang in there with me.

So Jesus shows up, and it's obvious to him that God wanted to address the issue of unbelief in the father of the son.

And it wasn't until the father had the faith in Jesus and asked for Jesus to help with his unbelief that God allowed for this demon to be cast out of the sun.

You guys following?

No?

Silence?

Okay, okay.

You can nod, that's okay.

Um, so it wasn't until the father had the faith in Jesus and asked for Jesus to help with his unbelief that God allowed for this demon to be cast out of the sun.

So we're going back to that theme of God never being limited, but he can be limited in our life by our lack of faith.

So I think that is what we're seeing in this father.

A lack of faith limiting what Jesus could do for this boy.

Now, admittedly, this is my theory.

I'm not teaching it as doctrine, but I think if God healed this kid through the disciples and never addressed the issue of unbelief, that it would have been pointless.

This kid gets healed, but the father's faith in Jesus, it's not established and it's not strengthened.

He may go home ecstatic about his boy, but his faith would not have been affected.

And if that was the case, what's to keep that demon from coming back into the sun?

In Luke, Jesus addresses this Luke 11, uh verses 24 through 26, and I'll just read it to you.

And he's explaining what happens after a demon is exercised out of a person.

He says, When an unclean spirit, and this is Jesus speaking, goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest and finding none.

He says, I will return to my house from which I came, and when he comes, he finds it swept and put in order.

Then he goes and he takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there.

And the last state of that man is worse than the first.

So I personally think that if the disciples healed this boy and didn't address the issue of faith in the father, that this kid would be a sitting duck for that spirit to come back and not only come back but bring his friends with him.

And I really think it was the faith that this father would grasp and then pass on to his son that was going to keep this spirit from coming back.

Jesus says right here in verse 25, come out of him and never enter him again.

Jesus was looking beyond the present circumstance.

He didn't want to just get this demon out.

He was looking into the future of this boy.

You see, I think the reason of why the disciples couldn't cast this demon out is because the disciples missed a step.

They didn't recognize the unbelief or that God wanted to address that unbelief first.

And they jumped right into the healing process of this boy, and it just didn't work.

And I really believe what Jesus is saying is that if you pray more, if you draw nearer to God, walking step by step with him, that you would have had God's eyes to see what this guy and his son really needed before addressing the demon possession.

So this isn't a point system that we're on with God, where we calculate our prayer times and our times fasting and we acquire these holy points, you know, so to speak.

This is a relationship that God wants us to engage in lockstep with Him.

And if we do that, like Jesus lived his whole life, then I don't think we're gonna miss any steps along the way like the disciples did.

Then we won't miss the heart of what God wants to do at every moment, at every turn in every season.

I don't see Jesus' answer to this to be at all a call to legalism or to have legalistic quiet times.

I see this as a call to draw nearer to God, to know his heart, and to walk with him in a deeper relationship.

That's what I think is going on here.

Like I said, that's my opinion.

That's that's how I see it.

I can't preach that as doctrine, but I really think that's what the heart of this situation was.

Jesus is encouraging them to draw to a deeper place.

Now, Jesus is gonna switch gears here as we move into verse 30.

So look at verse 30 with me.

Then they left that place and made their way through Galilee, but he did not want anyone to know it.

So Jesus at this time, he was really wanting to pour into his disciples.

He's trying to get through to them what to expect of him as the Messiah.

And so far as we've seen, they're not getting it over and over and over.

And as you may have noticed, Jesus is not concerned with gathering huge crowds and gaining popularity.

So we see him multiple times trying to not be noticed, to move through places without drawing crowds, because this is really a time, chapters eight through ten, of Jesus with his disciples to really just prepare them for what's to come.

For Jesus to help them to see more clearly.

Look at verse 31.

It says, For he was teaching his disciples and telling them, the Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men.

They will kill him, and after he is killed, he will rise three days later.

But they did not understand this statement, and they were afraid to ask him.

So Jesus is continuing on to tell them of the suffering he will endure.

And they just don't get it.

Even though Jesus is plainly telling them, I will be rejected by the religious leaders.

I'm going to die on a cross, and I'm going to raise again three days later.

And they're sitting there like, hmm, I wonder what this parable means.

And Jesus is like, no, it's not a parable, guys.

This is face value.

Just believe me.

Like, hmm.

I feel like he's trying to tell us something.

Jesus is like, no, I just told you.

Just believe that.

And I just picked the disciples like, well, I don't understand.

You ask him.

No, no, no.

You ask him.

No, but oh, whatever.

Do you got anything to eat?

I just kind of see that all going down like that.

And I really do feel bad for the disciples.

They're so easy to make fun of, but they didn't have the Holy Spirit living inside of them.

And we as believers, we don't know what that's like.

We've never had to experience that before.

But that is what they're going through.

They didn't have the counselor living inside of them explaining these things and giving them a deeper understanding.

And these poor guys have had the traditions and the legalism of the oral tradition of Israel at this time driven into their heads ever since they were little boys.

There was so much undoing that Jesus needed to address in each one of them.

And it's taking a really, really long time to sink into these disciples' heads.

And then they had a lot of piecing together to do.

And I imagine even years down the road, they're like, oh, that's what he meant.

You know, as they started to remember all the teachings and all the things that Jesus had taught them.

It took a while for them to piece all of that together after his death, burial, and resurrection.

So please don't miss that Jesus was so patient with these guys.

And praise God that he has that same patience with us as well.

Now, I think the number one thing that we need to glean from this passage this morning is this that God desires nearness with each one of us.

He doesn't desire a certain number of minutes in prayer and Bible study each day.

He desires us.

We the church are called the bride of Christ.

One of the main goals of marriage is to continue the process of becoming one with your spouse.

Jesus desires that we become one with him.

Think about that.

That we become one with him.

Where people can't tell where Jesus begins and we end.

That's the goal.

In the sweetest, closest relationship that you could imagine.

You know, if we treated our friends like we treat spending time with Jesus, I don't think our friends would be as patient with us as Jesus is.

Let's see here.

Can I pick on you, Austin?

Is that okay?

I won't embarrass you, I promise.

But what if, what if I treated my relationship with Austin like this?

You know, um, I kind of feel like we should hang out.

I don't really don't want to today, but I feel like we should, you know.

Um I probably feel like we could spend a couple minutes together, and I kind of feel like I should probably find something out about you.

So um what's your favorite color?

What's your favorite color?

Blue.

Okay, blue, okay.

Blue.

Austin's favorite color, blue.

Okay, got it.

You know, I'm short on time.

Oh, wait, one more thing.

Um, my car's in the shop, and I could use some extra funds for that.

Can you can you maybe help me out with that?

Okay, I really gotta go though, okay?

We should do this again tomorrow.

Okay?

That's it.

Could you imagine if we treated our friends like we treat our choir times?

Like it's some chore, or like we just, you know, I just need to learn something about you real quick, and then you know, maybe I'll talk to you tomorrow.

You know, that wouldn't work.

Austin would never want to hang out with me.

Like, that's just not how relationships go.

But I think that's how we treat time with God so often.

God wants conversation.

He wrote us a really long letter in the Bible.

He loves us perfectly, and so often we can treat that with such a lack of seriousness.

My encouragement to each one of us today, myself included, is to take advantage of that relationship that God offers for no other reason than that we love God.

To spend time in conversation, to pray without ceasing, to pour over our Bibles daily, not because we feel like we have to, but because we love God and we can't wait to spend that time with Him.

You know, if we do that, then I don't think we're gonna miss a step.

We'll know the heart of God and what He wants to do and what He wants to address in every single situation.

God's calling all of us to go deeper, not for points, or not so we feel better about ourselves because we opened our Bible for the day, but just because we love God so deeply.

Will you pray with me?

Lord, that really is the desire of my heart.

I pray it's the desire of all of our hearts to know you in a deeper, more intimate way, to not treat you like a MasterCard, or to not treat you, you know, like we gotta find out what your favorite color is.

Lord, but to to want to know you in the deepest way, to pray without ceasing, to constantly just have the acknowledgement that you are present and with us and that you love us so deeply.

Lord, and it blows my mind to think that you are the God of the universe with all authority and power to tell spirits what to do and they have to listen.

Lord, you're the one that spoke all of this into existence.

Yet you care so deeply about every individual.

Lord, you know the number of hairs on our head, and we want to take that seriously, Lord, to realize what a privilege that is that you've given to each one of us through the work of Jesus on the cross to be in this relationship.

Lord, help us daily to become one with Jesus, to become more and more like Him.

Help us in this, Lord, create an awareness like we've never had of your presence in our life.

And let us take it full advantage of what you've given us.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.