Help My Unbelief
When in Doubt.........Pray!
"I believe, help my unbelief!"
Mark 9:24
Webster's 1828 dictionary defines unbelief as weak faith. Given this definition, I believe that all the brethren can relate to having unbelief in their lives. We can't be strong all the time, especially if we're trying to survive in our own strength. Circumstances, environment, and even the general culture will beat us down and we'll find ourselves having doubts about many things pertaining to our Lord. We'll doubt His goodness, His Love, His power, etc. How many of us, at some point, haven't thought, "If God were truly loving, merciful, good, all-powerful, all-knowing, etc., He wouldn't have let this happen." We typically feel like we're failing our God because we have these fleeting doubts. But I argue that faith and doubt (belief and unbelief) are 2 sides of the same coin. If we have faith, we will have both strong faith and weak faith, that is, faith that has been already strengthened by God, and faith that we haven't yet asked God to strengthen. Until we come to see Jesus face to face, we will likely always have some element of weak faith mixed within us. It isn't desirable, and we should always be striving to cultivate strong faith while weeding out the weak, but if we're being honest with ourselves and our humanness, we'll see that we'll likely always have the potential for stray doubts that creep in from time to time.
In scripture, we see many examples of believers who have struggled with these seasons of weak faith (unbelief). We have read about Abraham who doubted a promised son (Genesis 15:2-3), Zechariah who doubted Gabriel's announcement of his coming son (Luke 1:18), John the Baptist had some fleeting doubts that Jesus was the Messiah (Matthew 11:2-3), and of course who could forget "Doubting Thomas" who doubted the resurrection of Christ until he was shown physical evidence (John 20:25), among others.
One of my favorite examples is when Peter walked on water. I'll paraphrase: Peter, seeing Jesus coming to them, walking on the water calls out and asks, "Lord, if it's you, tell me to come to you on the water." Jesus tells Peter to "come" and Peter gets out of the boat and begins to walk to Jesus on the water. He starts to see the wind (he loses his focus on Jesus) and starts to become afraid and begins to sink. He cries out to Jesus, "Lord, save me!" And there we have it. The answer to our doubt. We need to cry out to Jesus to save us from our weak faith, and He promises to strengthen our faith. (Mark 11:24, James 1:5, Psalm 37:4, John 14:13, Luke 11:9-13, Jeremiah 29:12). In the Scripture above (Mark 9:24), we see another example of a man who is struggling with unbelief. He desperately wants his young son to be set free from the evil spirit that has indwelled him, and when he brings his son to the disciples and they can't cast out the spirit, he starts to lose faith. Jesus acknowledges and rebukes the man's wavering faith, and the man immediately (and some translations say with tears in his eyes) cries out to Jesus, "I believe, help my unbelief!" Again, we have our answer. To immediately cry out for Jesus to help our weak faith. So, how do we deal with unbelief? PRAYER! We pray, and we pray, and we pray. And then, we pray some more.
So, in the end, these moments of our unbelief don’t have to be our downfall. It's true that if we decide to set up camp and live in this doubt, allowing it to grow unchecked in our hearts, it can be our undoing-it's dangerous! However, if we recognize our doubt and we cry out to Jesus to "help our unbelief!" then we have allowed it to do some good work in us, and our faith through our prayers to Jesus will be increased, bringing us closer to God. In this way, our fleeting doubts will help us to grow in our faith, and this is what our goal for daily living should be. So, let's not wallow in our weaknesses, but allow our God to use these moments of unbelief to grow us into the strong, passionate, loving Christians Christ desires us to be.