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Unbelief (re-post from August 2012) - Mark 9:22b-24


Re-post...and it's the long one!! I am reading Mark again and this passage again stopped me up so I needed a refresher! :) Another post coming tomorrow.

Scripture of the Day: Mark 9:22b-24

"...But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”
23 “‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for him who believes.”
24 Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”

A verse I have pondered over long and hard is Mark 9:24. It is a story most are familiar with, a father has a demon possessed child and is at the end of his rope. The father not only questions Jesus, he bring up belief and unbelief. How do those things work together? I think I understand what the man is going through because I go through it on almost a daily basis.

I believe that God created heaven and earth. I believe He can move mountains. I believe He can perform miracles.

The unbelief comes in because I don’t always believe he would do them for me! This father seems to be  in the same boat. He believes in God, I think he knows who Jesus is – and even that he can work miracles. I don’t think he can fathom that the Lord would step in and do those miracles for him – or he doesn’t dare to hope that much. I think that’s why he opens with “If you can do anything.”

He knows Jesus COULD, he just doesn’t know if he will…and therein lies my struggle with lots of thing. I don’t think he is questioning if Jesus CAN heal his child, he is questioning if it is in God’s will for it to be done. 

Because of belief and unbelief battling it out in my head, I pray conditionally. “God, please do ____ (the big thing). But if You don’t, please grant peace and comfort to ____ as they struggle.” At the bottom line most of the time, it goes back to that belief that he could do the healing/granting/relief/etc, but I have unbelief that He will, so I tone it down and then ask for a lesser thing. Mainly so I’m not disappointed when the big thing doesn’t happen.

How do I fix this dichotomy? This morning, God is telling me it all comes down to grace. As Scripture tells us in Ephesians 2:8-9, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.”

So grace, this getting of something amazing that I did not deserve, came about as a gift from God. If I believe my life (which is a very big thing) can be saved through grace, grace can also apply to everything I pray about. If we revisit the story in Mark, the disciples later ask Jesus why they could not drive the demon out and Jesus responds with, “This kind can come out only by prayer.”

We need to pray for the big things. We need to pray in belief that the Lord of all can grant our prayers. We need to get over the unbelief that he won’t answer prayers because we are not worthy of it or because he doesn’t want to.

In a weird way I am looking at this new of praying as “praying with grace.” It’s like saying, “Thank you God for saving me with grace. Because of this, I am going to pray to you for everything, regardless of what I think I ‘deserve,’ or what I think you will or won’t do to intervene in the lives of people down here. I am going to trust that You can do all things and show me what to pray for as continue to bring me closer to You.”

When you pray with grace, you pray big and you pray hopeful and you pray in faith that he can DO IT. When you pray with grace, you don’t place a “but…” or an “if not…” in your prayer. When you pray with grace, you pray with your whole heart because you believe in the God you are talking to. 

So let us thank God for the grace He has given us, grace in multiple ways, and let us get over our unbelief!

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