IF YOU CAN BELIEVE
“But if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us." Jesus said to him, "If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes." Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:22-24 NKJV).
Jesus
and three of His disciples, Peter, James, and John, had just come down from a
mountain where the Lord had been transfigured before them. Jesus’ raiment had shined with the glory of
God, and His heavenly Father had spoken from heaven saying, “This is My beloved Son: hear Him.” When they came down to join the other
disciples, they found them speaking with a crowd of people. The scribes were questioning this group about
something, and when the multitude saw Jesus, they ran to Him and greeted
Him.
When
the Lord then asked what was happening, a man came forward and said, “Master, I have brought unto Thee my son,
which hath a dumb spirit; and wheresoever he taketh him, he teareth him: and he
foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away: and I spake to Thy
disciples that they should cast him out; and they could not.” (Mark 9:17,
18). After reproving them for their
unbelief, Jesus told them to bring Him the boy.
When they did, the sight of Jesus caused the evil spirit to make the boy
fall down and wallow on the ground, foaming at the mouth. Jesus asked how long this had been going on, and
the father of the boy answered, “Of a
child. And ofttimes it hath cast him
into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him.”
What
this desperate father said next is interesting.
He said, “But if You can do
anything, have compassion on us and help us.” (Mark 9:22 NKJV). If
You can do anything! Clearly,
the man had heard about all the people that were being healed by Jesus and the
miracles that were being performed by this man from Galilee. Otherwise, he would not have brought his son
to see Jesus. However, something was
lacking in this man’s faith. Perhaps it
was the fact that Jesus’ disciples were unable to help his son that shook his
belief. We must understand that it is
never a question of whether Jesus can
do anything or not. He’s the Lord of
Glory, the I AM, the A to the Z, and the beginning and the end. He can
do anything! Jesus’ reply was
straightforward. He said, “If you can believe, all things are possible
to him who believes.” (verse 23 NKJV).
Jesus turned the father’s statement on its ear. It wasn’t a matter of Jesus being able, but of the father being capable of
believing. All
things are possible to the soul who believes. That’s because God’s grace and mercy are
unlimited. Jesus came in flesh and blood
to show us everything that is possible for us who are hindered by these earthen
vessels. We need only to trust in Him. We can overcome the sins and afflictions of
the flesh because Christ did, and we are in
Christ. The father then said to Jesus, “Lord,
I believe; help my unbelief!” We
may often find ourselves in this same dilemma.
We have faith enough to come to God for help, but we’re not sure that He
is willing to help us. We need a faith that will take us to the end
of our need!
The
great Bible teacher Watchman Nee taught about three steps of faith. He wrote, “Lay hold of these three steps: God
can, God will, God has.” The first step
is imperfect, but necessary. We must
believe that God can do
anything in order to set the stage for what comes next. Paul told the Hebrews that they who come to
God must first believe that He is, and then that He will reward them that
diligently seek Him. It would be useless
to expect rewards from a God we don’t believe exists. So, that is where we lay our foundation: on
the belief that He does exist and
that He not only can help us, but He is willing to reward us as we diligently
seek to know Him and to serve Him.
The
second step of faith is: God will.
In the Gospel of Mark, a leper comes to Jesus and says, “If You will, You can make me clean.”
(Mark 1:40, 41). Jesus responded with
compassion, touching the leper and saying, “I
will, be clean.” It is not always
clear to us what the Lord’s will is. We
may believe that He can do a
thing, but is He willing to do
it in our particular case? This step is
also inadequate, but necessary. It is
but one more step to get us to the final stage.
It is an important step, though, because once the Lord speaks to us and
says “I will,” we then have something
to anchor our hope and our faith to.
Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Lord’s Word to us.
The
third and final stage of faith is: God has. When we can see that all the fullness of the
Godhead dwells in Christ, and that we are complete in Him, we will know that HE
HAS. When we can understand
that through Christ we have full access by faith into this glorious grace
wherein we stand, then we will know that HE HAS. When we can begin to comprehend the breadth,
and length, and depth, and height of God’s great love toward us, and that we
can be filled with all the fullness of God, then we will know that HE
HAS! Our faith will then be emboldened
to proclaim what God has promised us in Christ and confirmed by His Word.
Our
God is a God “…who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as
though they were.” (Romans 4:17).
When God sat down and rested on the seventh day of creation, He
considered His work to be complete. The
entire plan of redemption was set in motion.
Christ had not been manifested in flesh and blood yet, and He had not
yet shed His blood for mankind; but the Father saw it all from the beginning
and considered it as good as done. We must
learn to trust less in the temporal and the visible, and more in the spiritual
and the invisible. We need to look less at what Christ could or might do, and more at
what He has done!
We’re
often crippled by our unbelief. Miracles
weren’t commonplace occurrences in the period right before Jesus began His
ministry. The Jews had slipped a long
way from faith. They had a form of godliness, but they denied the power thereof. They loved their own lives, and loved
pleasure more than they did God. They were
always learning, but unable to come to the knowledge of what was true. Read 2 Timothy 3 for a description of how
things were then, and how Paul declares that they will become again in the end
times. We can see that these things are
as true in our day as they were in theirs.
I
grew up in a large church in our city. I
went through the catechism, attended Sunday school, and served as a candle
lighter at the adult services. What I
never witnessed there, however, was someone being born again, someone being
prayed for and receiving a healing, or someone being delivered from sin. Later, as I grew old enough to make my own
decision about going to church, I decided that this was not for me. It was then that I discovered that the pastor
did not believe in the miracles of the Bible, or even in the virgin birth of
Christ! Without faithful witnesses of
the power of God to save, heal and deliver, the Church tends to languish in
unbelief. Scripture tells us, though,
that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God’s power never changes; it is only man who changes. I had to go outside the church to find the
living Christ.
In
the Book of Judges we read about Gideon and his miraculous victory over the
vast Midianite army. In the beginning of
his story, though, Gideon was not the model of courage and faith that he later
became. When the angel of the Lord first
appeared to him to tell him that the Lord was with him, he said, “Oh my Lord, if the LORD be with us, why
then is all this [trouble] befallen
us? and where be all His miracles
which our fathers told us of, saying, Did not the LORD bring us up from
Egypt? but now the LORD hath forsaken us, and delivered us into the hands of
the Midianites.” (Judges 6:13). We
could say the same things today: “Where are all the miracles?” It was because of their sins and unbelief
that Israel fell into such trouble in Gideon’s day, and it is for the same
reasons that we are often overcome by our
enemies in this current age. As in
Gideon’s case, God is always willing to raise up faithful witnesses who will
lead us back to repentance and real victory.
Even
Jesus was sometimes hindered by the unbelief of those around Him. When He came back to His hometown of Nazareth
to preach the Gospel, He was not well received because the townsfolk knew Him
and His family, and apparently had not seen anything that they deemed remarkable
or extraordinary out of Him while He was growing up. Yet now, He was telling them that He was
anointed by God to preach the Gospel, heal the broken hearted, and deliver the
captives (See Luke 4:16-19). Scripture
says, “…they were offended at Him.” (Mark
6:3). St. Mark goes on to say, “And He [Jesus] could do no mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few
sick people and healed them. And He marveled because of their
unbelief.” (verses 5, 6).
The
first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke provides a contrast between two very
different people. The one is Zacharias
the father of John the Baptist, and the other is Mary the mother of our
Lord.
The
archangel Gabriel was sent to Zacharias while he was performing his priestly
service in the temple. The angel told
Zacharias that his wife, Elizabeth, was to bear him a son in her old age. Zacharias doubted what Gabriel was telling him
and was, therefore, struck dumb by the archangel until the day that these
events actually came to pass. The
angel’s word was apparently not sufficient for this priest to believe. He expected further confirmation of some sort
or another, but what he got was something that would hinder his life and
ministry for a time.
Six
months after appearing to Zacharias, Gabriel was sent to a virgin named Mary to
announce that she would conceive and bear a son who would be called the Son of
God. Unlike Zacharias’ initial reaction,
Mary believed the angel of the Lord and said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be
it unto me according to thy word.” (Luke 1:38). Her faith was steadfast and
unwavering. She was prepared to trust
what the Lord said He would do. The impossibility
of her bearing a child without knowing a man did not move her. Gabriel also told Mary that her cousin
Elizabeth was with child. Later, when
Mary went to visit her cousin, Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost and
prophesied saying, in part, “…blessed is
she that believed [referring to Mary]:
for there shall be a performance
of those things which were told her from the Lord.” (Luke 1:45). When we are prepared to believe what God can do, He will then perform what He
has said He will. Paul wrote, “For
it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.”
(Philippians 2:13). God is working in us
to give us the desire to do His will,
and also the power to perform
it! We need only to believe.
Faith
comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. We need to do more than just read the Word
and memorize verses. We need to hear what God is speaking to us
through His Word and then apply
it to our life. In the Old Testament, God
spoke to the Prophet Ezekiel and said, “Son
of man, thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to
see, and see not; they have ears to
hear, and hear not: for they are a rebellious house.” (Ezekiel
12:2). We can look at things and never really perceive what is happening,
and we can listen to something
and never understand what is being said.
It isn’t until we open our hearts to the truth that we can truly be
transformed in Christ and be willing to let Him change us. He views anything less than that as
rebellion. We pray for many things that
are out of God’s will. If we would first
seek His will in all things, and then
pray according to what we hear
Him telling us, we will see much more success in our prayer life.
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