Help Our Unbelief (Mark 9:14-29)

One of the things that um I don't know is is part of fall.

You know, in the summer you get to get away, and in the fall you end up staying uh at home a whole lot more, and I don't know, from my money, there's not a whole lot better than getting to go somewhere fun and exciting with somebody that you love.

I think most of us would agree that's not a very controversial take that getting away is great.

But is there anything worse than coming back Sunday night on the heels of a great vacation?

Is there anything worse than Sunday night at 8 p.m.?

Well, sometimes you come back and then there's disaster waiting for you.

Has this ever happened to you?

I can remember early on in our marriage, Melissa and I got away, we had come back Sunday night, the sun is down, we'd barely gotten our bags on the ground, and we sort of looked at each other and asked, what is that sound coming from under our house?

And I wasn't very familiar with my crawl space at the time, but I peered down and it's just a lake that the sump pump wasn't working.

And so now not only do I have to come back to planet Earth from vacation, I have to get down in the mud in the dark as well.

I've come the only time I've had food poisoning was on the heels of a great vacation.

I roll back into town and it's like, ugh, I'm not feeling so good.

Coming back from a great vacation is hard enough, but sometimes disaster is waiting for you.

And I think in our passage, we actually see something of Jesus being able to connect with this idea.

Now, to be clear, Jesus has not been on vacation.

But if you remember, last week he's just been transfigured before James and John and Peter on the mountain transfiguration, that Moses and Elijah are there, and that for the first time he is really seen for who he is in all of his glory.

And now he comes back down the mountain, back into the full flower of a fallen world, and we actually get to see him weary.

He's weary.

Let's read this passage.

Look at what makes him weary, and see the hope of the gospel that is offered for us as well.

From Mark chapter 9, verses 14 through 29.

Mark 9:14–29

And when Jesus and James and Peter and John 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, O 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 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.

And Jesus said to him, If you can, all things are possible for the one who believes.

And immediately the father of the child cried out and said, I believe, help 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's 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 couldn't we cast it out?

And he said to them, This kind can't be driven out by anything but prayer.

The word of the Lord.

Let's pray and ask God's help.

Father, we thank you that you have preserved really a wild story for us that your word tells us it happened.

Where we see Jesus' compassion and his weariness.

And Holy Spirit, what we ask is that you would dig out for us ears to hear him, that you would dig us eyes to see him, the one who speaks with compassion, the one who blesses faith.

And we ask that you would even strengthen our faith this morning.

We pray these things in Christ's name.

Amen.

So I want to look at this passage under three headings, and what I want us to see is the vibe shift, and then I want us to see uh the situation and the solution.

So the vibe shift, the situation, and the solution.

Okay, what do I mean by the vibe shift?

Well, I mentioned this just a few moments ago, but but think about this.

Immediately preceding this passage, Jesus is transfigured on the mount.

That he is seen very clearly for who he really is, that the Father speaks and says, This is my beloved Son, that Moses and Elijah, they see him, that James and Peter and John, they see him, that Jesus is very clearly for the only time in his human life pre-resurrection, seen for who he really is.

And he's still a part of this transfigure, this fallen world.

But what we saw last week is that the transfiguration, the language in verse 1 of chapter 9 says that they get to see the kingdom of God coming in power.

It's as if the fall retreats from them at that moment.

And so you've got that scene, then you've got this scene.

That's a shift.

That when James and John and Peter see Jesus, they, there can be no mistake, this is God.

This is the Son of God that we have not seen very clearly who he really is.

And Moses and Elijah would have looked at Jesus and said, This is the God that we have always always known, we've already spoken to, and he's man.

That everyone sees him from a different angle, the God man in glory as the Father says, listen to him.

Listen to him.

We had just seen the week before last, Jesus receives for the first time from Peter a title.

He says, You are the Christ, the Son of God.

And Jesus receives that for the first time.

But then Peter misunderstands what that means because Jesus goes on to say, the Son of Man is going to suffer, and he's going to be rejected, and he's going to be crucified, and then he will be raised again.

And Peter says, No, it can never be that way.

And Jesus rebukes Peter and says, Get behind me, Satan.

You're thinking as a fallen human.

You don't understand what I've actually come for.

And you too, if you would find your way to glory, if you would follow me on this road to glory, you're going to have to die to yourself as well.

So here we see on the Mount of Transfiguration, the only righteous, perfect human shown for who he really is.

That for the first time we see that humanity and the unmitigated presence of God belong together because Jesus has done for human nature what has never been done before.

And now he steps aside from that glory and he goes back down the mountain.

That from eternity past the Son of God enjoyed glory with the Father, and he lays that aside to become a human.

And now this human has done what no human has done before, has earned the presence to be in the presence of God, and now as a human, Jesus lays aside that glory as well.

That Jesus is the Christ, he is the king, but he has come to serve, to lay it all aside that he might bring us with him.

And so from here on out in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is making his way intentionally to Jerusalem.

And that journey begins down the mountain into this scene.

And we read that when he came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them and scribes arguing with them.

Glory to a crowd that is just in the midst of a massive argument.

Glory to chaos.

Glory to a dumpster fire.

And we can relate on some level.

You've been to a men's or a women's happy hour, and you've come back home, and it's a dumpster fire that awaits you.

We've all had that moment.

So there's whiplash.

That's a vibe shift.

So what's the situation?

Well, the situation, you've got crowds, disciples, and scribes.

The scribes have come from Jerusalem, and again, they're suspicious.

They're spying on Jesus.

They're looking for a reason to say there's something wrong with you.

They're antagonistic and argumentative.

We've already seen this.

And once everyone's gathered around Jesus, this great argument, this chaos, Jesus is trying to get some sort of order here.

In verse 16, he asks, What are you arguing about with them?

And you'd expect the scribes to say, Well, here's why we're arguing with the disciples.

You'd expect the disciples to say, here's why we're arguing with the scribes, because that's really the heart of the argument.

But neither speaks.

Instead, somebody from the crowd addresses Jesus.

Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he is the 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.

So we have quite a situation on our hands.

We have a demon-possessed boy whose life is regularly threatened.

That we just read a few moments ago, that the father goes on to say that this demon has thrown him into fire and in water.

He has tried to destroy him.

Surely he's disfigured in some way, scarred from a life of this sort of possession.

And you know, you read about demon possession from 2026 in America, we don't see that a whole lot, and yet this we are supposed to read this as something that happened.

And maybe we don't see this everywhere we go today.

But the scriptures are very clear that there is more to reality than meets the eye, that there are forces at work in this world that we cannot see and we can't particularly measure.

And you see it front and center.

They seem to really come out when the Son of God walked around Nazareth, that all the forces of evil stopped hiding and they knew demons for what they really were.

And we see this demon, the source of this boy's torment.

And that's a major part of the situation.

You have a demon-possessed boy, and they're powerless against him.

That's a major part of the situation.

But here's the other part of the situation.

I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.

Listen to what we did.

So Jesus and his A-team are up on the Mount of Transfiguration.

You still got nine disciples who have some experience with this.

But they couldn't do it.

And I don't know if you've been in a situation where you go somewhere to someone who's supposed to have expertise in something that you don't have, and you expect that they're going to be able to do that.

And you don't find the competence that you expect.

I mean, I don't know if I'm the only one.

Surely not.

You go to get blood drawn, and someone just keeps trying and poking.

And have you have you ever done this before?

How long is this going to take?

You know, get somebody else in here.

You all bruised for the whole week.

This is painful for this family to endure.

It's embarrassing for the disciples.

I don't know.

What did it look like?

Thomas like pulling everything out of a bag.

Have we tried all of the essential oils?

What do we do here?

And with Jesus away, the scribes seem to smell blood.

And they've likely jumped in to say, you have no business trying this anyway.

You're not authorized by the temple.

Who are you to try to do something like this?

This is likely the kind of argument that they're having.

You shouldn't be trying.

Clearly, you can't do it.

And Jesus returns to an argument that has gathered a crowd.

Welcome back from your transfiguration, Jesus.

Listen to Jesus in verse 19.

O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you?

How long am I to bear with you?

Jesus is not saying I don't love you.

Jesus is not saying I've not come for you.

Jesus is not saying I'm going to give up on you.

But I do think that we see Jesus in his humanity, even, feeling the weight of what he has come to do.

He's making his way to Jerusalem.

He's making his way to the cross.

And his this path is hard for him.

Here's what I think he's saying.

Not only must I set aside my glory for you, I must take upon my own shoulders the weight of your faithlessness.

This is a task that he willingly signed up for.

Praise God.

But it was not an easy task for him.

There's plenty of unbelief to go around.

The scribes are causing trouble.

The disciples are unable to do what Jesus has equipped them to do, and the crowds are eating it up.

He's walked into a situation and faithlessness abounds.

And I think Jesus is speaking to everyone as the solitary and only righteous human who has ever existed.

Who is never faithless a moment, a millisecond of his life.

And I think that Jesus feels alone in this.

It really is only Jesus who has come to be the savior of sinners, the refuge for sinners.

And the weight of the task that he has come for is resting more and more squarely upon his shoulders.

That's the situation.

What's the solution?

Jesus says, bring him to me.

I mean, Jesus is the solution, right?

Bring him to me.

And by saying this, he's showing his intent to do for this boy what nobody else can do.

The demon recognizes Jesus immediately, again terrorizes this poor child.

And in what reads like compassion to me, Jesus asks, How long has this been happening?

How long have you guys been dealing with this?

Since he was little?

And the desperation of the father, I think surely we could understand this in a room like this.

He feels helpless.

His journey has gone on and on.

He's weary, he's tired, he's beginning to be hopeless.

He's been dealing with this for years.

It's scary.

And he's brought his boy to the disciples that he's heard rumors of.

There's hope.

They can heal him.

And they've been less than helpful.

And Jesus calls for him and says, Bring him to me, and the demons flare up.

Here we go.

And I want us to imagine like this if this is your child, this would have been hard to watch again.

And so I suspect that the father is panicking a little bit.

I suspect that he has to be.

This is why he says, if you can do anything, would you have compassion on us and help us?

He's desperate.

Because the disciples couldn't do anything.

And maybe they can't.

And maybe the rumors that I've heard have been exaggerated, and maybe you can't.

But if you can do something.

And it seems to me that as compassionate and as tender as Jesus is, he lets this man know that he's crossed a line.

Jesus may have set aside his glory.

He may be walking intentionally to the cross, but he's not set aside who he is.

And he's not set aside what he's come to do.

He doesn't answer this man any more.

He doesn't answer to this man any more than he answers to us.

You can come in your helplessness, but you cannot come questioning who I am, what I've come to do.

If you can, all things are possible for the one who believes.

That what I've come to give you is yours, but you must believe me for them.

What I've come to do is impossible humanly speaking, but I've come to do it for you.

So just that if it just if to we're keeping score, in the span of about 30 seconds, Jesus has said, O faithless generation, how long am I to bear with you?

All things are possible for the one who believes.

There's an inherent tension.

All things are possible for the one who believes, but you are a faithless generation.

And I think the good news for us here is that Jesus is showing us that faith and unbelief are not mutually exclusive.

That within his people, that within those who cry out for mercy, there will always be an element of unbelief.

It's part of what it means to live in fallen bodies, to deal with residual sin.

And yet the faith that God gives can still receive the promises that he offers.

So this man cries out one of my favorite lines in all of Scripture.

I believe.

Help my unbelief.

I see in you, Jesus, what I really need.

And I believe that you alone, Jesus, can provide for me what I'm asking for.

And so Jesus acts and he commands the Spirit to leave this boy, which it does, but after convulsing some more.

And most people thought that the boy was dead.

And again, in his compassion, Jesus walks over and he takes him by the hand and he lifts him up.

And when the dust settles from this, and Jesus and his disciples find themselves back inside in the privacy of a home, they ask him, they take the opportunity, what in the world just happened?

And why couldn't we do this?

And Jesus says, This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.

I don't think he's saying there are some kinds you don't need to pray for.

He's just saying, you didn't pray.

You were not dependent.

I think what Jesus is saying is at the heart of all prayer is a cry, I believe, help my unbelief.

And the disciples try to act on Jesus' behalf without acknowledging their own unbelief.

And without asking for help in their own unbelief.

And we tend to think, you know, faith makes us strong.

Think about the compliments we talk about.

She's such a strong woman of faith.

We tend to think faith strengthens us, and there's a sense in which that's true, but only so far as we receive alien strength.

You know, the scriptures say over and over again, the Lord is our strength.

It never says you grow in your own strength.

That the more and more that we walk with Jesus.

I mean, I'm raising three humans.

And the point of me raising three humans is I want to raise them into independence.

That as you grow as humans, you need me less and less.

But this is not what it looks like to be a child of God.

That God does not raise us so that we need Him less and less.

I've taught you how to do this, you know how to use your blinker, go get them.

To be a child of God is to grow more and more in your awareness of your ever-present, ongoing need and dependence upon him.

And so that as you spend a life with Jesus, hopefully you become more aware of your dependence upon him, not under the illusion that I've grown more independent.

We really don't, we don't understand this.

And it's football season, which means that we're going to hear a lot of people use the word believe.

They believe in the way that Ted Lasso believes.

And you're going to see some post-game interview.

Maybe some of you are up late enough last night to hear someone say, we always believed.

What did you believe?

That we could do it.

We always believed that we had what it took.

And it sounds like it's the same language that Jesus is talking about here, and it is the it's the wrong idea altogether.

Christian belief is, we never believed in ourselves.

I believe, help my unbelief that you can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

And I think that's what the disciples got wrong here.

They mistook Jesus commissioning them to be able to cast out demons as saying, we got our certification.

We know what we're doing.

Let's do it.

We believe we can do it.

And Jesus says, it was never about your certification.

It was never about getting enough experience.

It was never about becoming more and more independent.

It was always about learning to be dependent upon me.

And you forgot that.

And you didn't pray because you didn't feel dependent, and you see now how powerless you actually are.

You tried without prayer and without dependence.

And you should have been crying in that moment when that poor boy was standing before you.

One of the things that this passage teaches us is that Jesus promises to do things that are humanly impossible when we come to him in weakness and dependence.

But I do think we've got to be real careful about how we apply that.

Here Jesus indicates he had every intention of healing this boy.

Bring him to me.

What else is he going to say?

Is he going to say, like, ha, no.

He's always intended to heal him.

Bring him to me.

But you can read a passage like this, and some of you can look back over things that you have prayed for independence.

And why didn't God answer that?

And maybe you've been in seasons where you've been like, I believe, help my unbelief, save my child, save my father, save my friends, save my marriage.

Maybe you have been in a season where you're like, I felt dependent and helpless, and I said, I believe, help my unbelief.

And God didn't act the way that I asked him to.

This passage doesn't teach us that life goes the way that we think it should go if we just have enough faith.

And we have to be really careful.

I mean, that's sort of the waters we swim in.

God is so faithful.

We talk about God being faithful.

God is faithful to the promises that He makes.

That God keeps His word to the promises that He makes.

And we're not allowed to put promises in His mouth.

This passage is not meant to make us the main characters.

And when we make our dreams the goal, I believe, help my unbelief to help me achieve my dreams.

We make ourselves the main characters.

And we don't realize Jesus is the main character.

And his plan is perfect, and his vision is the way that things should go.

And so it's good to pray in all things.

I'm praying for this job, or I'm praying for this house, or I'm praying for this spouse.

Like, pray for these things, but we don't have the license to say, God, you promised me these things.

Remember, the whole point of this section of the gospel of Mark and where it's headed is that the path to glory leads through death.

And that when Jesus calls us to pick up our crosses and to die, that a lot of what we're dying to is our own vision and our own dream for our own life.

The success that we think would fulfill us, we're actually being called to die to.

Because even in the deepest awareness of our dependence upon God, God might simply just want something different for us.

Jesus Himself had to learn this.

In chapter 14, I mean, listen to the similar language, Abba Father, all things are possible for you.

Remove this cup from me.

Yet not what I will, but what you will.

There has never been a human who lived a more righteous, faithful, dependable life than Jesus.

There's never been anyone who depended upon his Father more than Jesus, and even he didn't get everything that he asked for.

And yet God was always for him.

For by his stripes we are healed.

Instead, the scriptures teach us to pray boldly for the things that God has promised us.

What is he promised?

In transfiguration, we're told to listen to Jesus.

In this scene, we're taught to talk to Jesus.

What are we listening to?

His promises.

We're not to put promises into his mouth.

He has promised that by faith in his name, he will not hold our sins against us.

I believe.

Help my unbelief.

He has promised that by faith in his name, he will give us the life-transforming Holy Spirit.

He has promised us a life that requires us dying to ourselves.

He has even promised that persecution will be a regular encounter for Christians.

And he's promised to never leave us and to never forsake us.

And we naturally want health and wealth and wisdom, right?

Health and wealth and prosperity.

But what he's promised us is something better.

And Presbyterian types, we're good at listening.

We're good at not putting words in Jesus' mouth.

We sort of laugh when someone says, I'm trusting God for a new car because he's faithful.

Show me the reference for that.

Presbyterian types are really good at that.

But we end up being a lot more like the disciples.

I know it.

I've heard it.

I know this story.

I've learned that lesson.

And it doesn't naturally lead us to being the kind of people that pray more earnestly because we know I believe help my unbelief.

That the amount of unbelief that still resides under the surface is more than we can handle, and we need someone to help us to believe even gospel 101 kind of stuff.

God might not promise to change our health, but he has promised to grow all of us who cry out for mercy in his name in patience and in self-control.

I believe.

Help my unbelief.

And God might not give us the success that we crave, but he's promised to make us salt and light.

That others will give glory to God because of his work in us.

And the question is, do we see the value in these things enough?

To know that we are dependent and we cannot accomplish them by ourselves.

And so we're invited to pray, to continue to come back to Jesus again and again in a renewed dependence, in a sanctified dependence that always comes to a realization that we're more dependent than we already thought was possible.

That we can come knowing that he will be faithful to us as we ask him to help us in our unbelief.

We believe.

Help our unbelief.

Let's pray.

Father, we come before you now, the one who makes good and perfect promises to us.

And what we ask is that we would see that your promises are perfect.

And that your answer to all of your promises belongs to us already in Jesus.

And that if we have Him, we have everything that we need for life and death, for this life and the life to come.

And so would you strengthen us by your presence and your promises.

Help our unbelief.

Amen.