I am Convinced that Faith Works

Mark 9:14-29

It was shortly after midnight, New Year’s morning, 1994, and we were broken down on the shoulder of I74 between Champaign and Danville, IL. We were on our way home from Urbana 1993, an amazing missions conference, where we had been for the past several days. The songs from the amazing New Year’s Communion service we had just celebrated were still dancing in our ears, the amazement of God’s tangible presence in the midst of 17,000 college students, all celebrating Communion together. Cars, vans, and buses rumbled by endlessly, all of them coming from the same incredible missions conference we had attended, and nobody stopped.

As I walked to the next exit, the wind gave way to a rainy snow, and still nobody stopped. We spent the rest of a sleepless night at a truck stop, waiting for my dad to pick us up. In a few short hours, I went from an incredible mountaintop experience to the valley.

The same happened in today’s scripture. Immediately before what I read today, Jesus and his closest friends, Peter, James, and John, were up on the mountain, where Jesus was transfigured. His clothes became dazzling, unbelievably white, and Moses and Elijah showed up, and God’s Shekinah showed up and God spoke in an audible voice.

Peter wanted to build some shelters up there – he wanted to stay on the mountain in God’s presence. I wonder if he had some kind of notion that something was going to happen once they left. And when they got down, they walked right into the middle of it. I am convinced that Satan works overtime when we’ve been to the mountaintop with Jesus.

Have you ever had one of those experiences? You’ve met with Jesus. You are encouraged, excited, blessed, full of joy. Maybe it was after a conference or a camp. Then Satan attacks. Jesus comes down to find his disciples in the middle of an arguing crowd.

There is a man whose son is tormented by a demon, and the disciples haven’t been able to do anything for him. This has to be frustrating for the disciples; after all, we read a few weeks ago how Jesus sent them out, two-by-two, with authority over evil spirits, and Mark 6:13 tells us that They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them. But they’ve run into a brick wall this time.

Has this ever happened to you? You know God has worked in such and such a way in the past, that God has honored your requests, that you’ve gotten through, and suddenly you’re faced with something you can’t do anything about?

The disciples are reduced to helpless bystanders in this passage. They can’t do anything, and they’re left to argue with the religious leaders. The boy’s father is at the end of his rope, and most of us who are parents can relate to that: there’s nothing worse than seeing your child suffer. Which reminds me of this: ⁶Satan doesn’t fight fair. When we take a firm stand for Jesus, he will attack, and he doesn’t limit his attacks to just the one who is standing firm against him. He will attack our families and loved ones.

And it can be overwhelming.

Jesus ministers to the father, who tells Jesus what the evil spirit is like. It tries to kill his son and has done so since he was little. This is Satan’s character. He comes only to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10). The father is grasping at straws here. As any parent might be. If there’s anything Jesus might be able to do, it’s worth asking him. His disciples haven’t been able to do anything, but maybe he Himself can.

Before I get to Jesus’ interaction with the father, I recognize that some of you have been suffering with various afflictions for a long time. I can’t imagine going through what some of you have gone through for years. There are times when it can be easy to get frustrated and angry with God over times when it seems like he is ignoring you, when you’ve asked for healing or for a situation to be cleared up, but it hasn’t happened. There are times when God actually allows us to be afflicted, and he has a reason for it. The Apostle Paul talked about that in his second letter to the church in Corinth: To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. (2 Corinthians 12:7-8) You’ve been there, haven’t you? Satan torments you. We don’t know what Paul’s “thorn” was, but many of us can relate. There’s some area where Satan is driving you crazy. Maybe it’s something physical. Maybe it’s an addiction. Maybe it’s a person or group of people who just won’t leave you alone. Maybe you’re the victim of bullying or gossip.

Did you notice Paul’s attitude about it? He had pleaded with God to remove it, to take it away – we’re not talking about a simple, “Hey, God, if you don’t mind…” but a true pleading. And God didn’t. But Paul took it as a way for God to keep him humble. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9a).

I wonder if this might shed some light into the verdict Jesus gave the disciples about their inability to drive out the demon, that This kind can only come out by prayer.(Mark 9:29) Some manuscripts also include “and fasting” here; fasting especially is all about focusing on God and relying on Him for absolutely everything. I wonder if the disciples had forgotten where their power came from. Exorcism had become easy. Healing was easy. And they forgot to depend fully on God for everything.

It can be easy to pile on the disciples, who Jesus calls an “unbelieving generation” or “faithless people.” I find myself shaking my head at how dumb the disciples are, but when it comes down to it, we often find ourselves in the same spot. We as a church have been a faithless generation.

We have coasted. We have allowed a couple of people to carry us spiritually. We have relied on our own strength instead of Jesus’. We have been more concerned with keeping ourselves busy with things that don’t glorify Jesus than with things that do. We have confused busyness for godliness. We have left evangelism to “other people” and to programs. And we haven’t prayed.

This is the same thing that Jesus rebuked his disciples for. In their eagerness to do what Jesus sent them out to do, they forgot whose power it was. I remember being in a healing prayer service and someone asked me to pray for him. He had various physical ailments, not least of which was a shoulder that was extremely sore after he had slipped and fallen on ice earlier that week. I prayed for him. A week or so later, we went to lunch and he told me, “You don’t have the gift of healing. My shoulder feels worse than ever.” But then he was talking about what he had done over the weekend; that he spent all day on Saturday with a post-hole digger, digging fence post holes! Hmmm. Sounds like someone got healed…

But I’m glad that he told me I didn’t have the gift of healing, and I accept that comment itself as a gift. Why? Because now if I pray and someone is healed, all of the credit goes to God, because “I don’t have the gift of healing!”

OK, I told you we would get back to the father. He had every right and every reason to doubt that Jesus could deliver his son. After all, his disciples, who were sent as extensions of himself, had been unable to do it. Would Jesus be any different? So he’s hedging his bets. “If you can do anything…”

Jesus responds that everything is possible for the one who believes. Listen to what Jesus later tells his disciples.  “Have faith in God,” Jesus answered.” I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” (Mark 11:22-24).

The very fact that we all struggle with this scripture demonstrates our faith levels. So I love the father’s response: Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). Are you willing to express the same sentiment?

I remember a few years back when I was betrayed by some people who were close to me – I thought they were my friends, and I’d shared a lot with them, and they used it against me. For literally a year and a half, I had weekly nightmares about them, but during Lent that particular year I was doing a 40 day prayer exercise, writing down my prayers. I was honestly getting a little bored praying the same things every day (which I realized I was doing when I took the time to write them down), so one day as I was running, I was asking God what I needed to pray about, and I felt like He responded, “You need to forgive those people.”

You may be someone for whom forgiveness comes easily, but I often find it hard, and in the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t want to forgive them. I felt justified in my righteous indignation against them, and, after all, they’d hurt me. But I knew that God was right; I needed to forgive, even though I didn’t want to, and I had to first want to. So I prayed that God would help me want to want to forgive. Wouldn’t you know, God did it. And I haven’t had a single nightmare about those people since.

That paralleled how the father responded to Jesus. I do believe. Help me overcome my unbelief! Can this be our prayer? Most of us here believe in God. We believe in Jesus. We believe in the Holy Spirit. We believe in the Bible. But do we believe believe?

You should know that I am praying that God will do something here in Millersport that only He can get credit for. Do you believe that He can? Do you believe that He will? We are uniquely situated where we can do amazing things for Him, but we cannot do it in our own strength. We cannot be of two minds. We cannot focus on all sorts of other things when He is calling us to do one thing. Think about it this way: we as a church are called to be the Bride of Jesus Christ. Can you imagine a bride coming down the aisle, focused on everything but her groom? Sure, there are lots of people you haven’t seen in a while and would like to reconnect with, but can you imagine stopping on your way down the aisle to chat with them? That would be ridiculous. If we’re not totally focused on Jesus Christ, then we’ve lost our true calling. But if we focus fully on the Trinitarian God, Father, Son, Spirit, I am convinced that faith works, and that God will do amazing things right here.