Jesus teaches us about faith and doubt today in our reading from the One Year Bible. The reading is from Mark 9:1-29. First, a man comes to Jesus and asks Him to heal his son, who is possessed by a demon. The man says, "Please heal him if you can."
Jesus, as only Jesus can, asks, "What do you mean, if I can??" And the man replies with one of the greatest confessions of faith in the Bible: "I believe! Help my unbelief!"
And then the disciples wonder why they can't cast out a particularly nasty demon, and Jesus tells them that it only goes out "by prayer".
These two stories together tell us something very significant. First, as Paul Tillich points out in the pic above, doubt is not the opposite of faith. It's an element of it. Even when Jesus appeared bodily to the disciples, the men who had lived with Him for three years, day in and day out every single day, some of them still doubted when they saw Him after the resurrection. They struggled to believe... and they had to overcome their doubts in the process.
The man who asks for Jesus's help has faith. Clearly, or he wouldn't have asked Jesus to help him. But he doubted, too. And he does with his doubt THE BEST thing that we can do with our doubt - he brings it to Jesus and asks for His help in overcoming it.
That's what Jesus is telling us with the story of the demon, too. The disciples couldn't cast it out because even though they had faith, they also doubted. And that's why Jesus's answer makes so much sense - when you have doubts, you bring them to God. He alone can enable us to overcome them.
So the take home message today is - you will have doubts in your life. When you do, you should take them to God. Lift your doubts up to Him in prayer, and He will help you overcome them.
God, thank You for not turning us away when we doubt, but teaching us how to overcome our doubts with faith in You.
1 comment:
Amen
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