“‘If you can’?” said Jesus. “Everything is possible for one who believes.” Mark 9:23 NIV
In this chapter of Mark, the account of Jesus healing a boy from a demon is recorded. The father had come to the disciples to heal his son but they tried and couldn’t. When the father came to Jesus, he seemed to have tried everything. The father told Jesus that the demon had possessed his son since the boy was a child and it would send the boy into convulsions anytime it wanted. The father looked like he had no hope left.
The father said to Jesus, ‘But if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.’. Clearly the father had no idea Who he was talking to because Jesus can do anything. In the 23rd verse Jesus says to the father, ‘If you can?’, acknowledging that the father is not aware of Who he is standing in front of and Who he is asking to help him.
Jesus tells the father and everyone around them that ‘everything is possible for one who believes’. The father then said to Jesus ‘I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!’ The father was willing to admit that he had unbelief, which I feel is from all the time he spent trying to solve this problem on his own. Jesus then casts the demon out of the boy.
There are times in our lives when we also feel like we have tried ‘everything’ and nothing has worked out or at least not the way that we have planned for it to work. We have thrown every idea we can think of at a situation or problem and every tactic we have to hopefully make the ‘plan’ go the way we wanted, but they all fail. There are times when we feel like we have no hope. There are times when we have unbelief.
The difference between us, followers of Jesus, and the father, is that we know Who we are asking to help us. Yet there are times in our lives when we do what the father did, we try to solve a problem all by ourselves. We throw everything at the situation and hope something sticks. It is usually when nothing works that we turn to Jesus finally and say ‘if You can’ as if we don’t know that He can.
The devil is very crafty and he will fill our minds with doubt, doubt that God has time for some small problem we have going on, doubt that God loves us enough to listen to us and possibly resolve our situation, doubt that God can fix our problem because it is so big that no one can fix it. If we listen to these doubts then we end up turning to Jesus and saying “If You can?”
As Jesus says in the end of our verse for today, ‘Everything is possible for one who believes.’ The challenge we face is how long we want to try and resolve, solve, fix, deal with our problem or situation on our own before we turn to Jesus for the help that only He can provide. If you are a follower of Jesus, you already demonstrated your believe in Jesus when you accepted Him as your Savior. Whatever the situation that is occurring that has you momentarily believing that Jesus cannot deal with it, now is the time for you to exercise that original belief you placed in Jesus and go to the One who can help you.
So the question is ‘Do you have unbelief?’ If so, what are you going to do about it?