Help My Unbelief

Matthew 14:31b, “You have so little faith,” Jesus said. “Why do you doubt me?”

How do you deal with doubt? How do you handle this struggle of justifying your religion with you beliefs? We even sing during a lively worship service words like this:

            “And on that day when my strength is failing

The end draws near and my time has come

Still my soul will sing Your praise unending

Ten thousand years and then forevermore.”

But how do we really feel when our strength is failing? How do we deal with the questions about the Bible or God that we just don’t understand?

There are two different forms of doubt that I want to look at today. There is the defiant doubt that demands proof and there is the pleading doubt that desires reassurance.  These two types can be seen in Matthew 16:4 and Mark 9:24.

In Matthew 16 the religious leaders who gathered around Jesus demanded that he show them a sign. And Mark 9 tells the story of a man pleading with Jesus to heal his son. These two approaches to doubt can be an encouragement to us today as we deal with our own unbelieving spirit.

First lets look at the religious leaders. Here is a group of people who know a lot about the Jewish religion. They knew what they were looking for in the Messiah. Now there is a man who claims that he is the messiah but he does not measure up to what they were expecting. So their natural tendency is to doubt him.

What do we do when God does not measure up to our standards? What do we do with unanswered prayers? How do we deal with God when we ask for Him to prove himself to us and He doesn’t?

This kind of doubt comes from pride. It comes from a place similar to that of the Pharisees. They knew what they wanted out of a Messiah and Jesus was not delivering that. They wanted a king and a ruler to overthrow the Roman Empire and give them the throne of David. This man Jesus came teaching a much different doctrine. He taught that to become great you must become a servant. He taught that if you want to be first then put others first and yourself last. He taught that you need to love others and treat them as being more important than you are. He taught that serving others was more important than serving yourself. He taught forgiveness and grace. He taught humility and mercy. He taught something different than what they wanted to hear.

Doubt is the natural reaction to hearing inconsistencies. When we hear a teaching that goes against our natural tendencies we want to challenge it. We are naturally self-serving. We want what we want when we want it. Jesus teaches us something different. So we doubt His teaching. We don’t like to admit that we doubt it because then we look bad. We don’t look like the good Christian person that we are trying to portray. We want others to think we have it all together and that we have solid faith.

This brings us to our next example. The man who asked Jesus to heal his son told Jesus that he believed but then he asked Jesus to help his unbelief.  He wanted to see his son healed, but he knew that he did not fully believe Jesus and his teaching. The difference here is that he was willing to admit that he had doubts. Alfred Lord Tennyson once said, “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”

We can say the Christian creeds with our mouths but unless we search something out to know its truth then we will be left trying to support our unbelief on our own. That is where this man in Mark 9 was different. He asked Jesus to support his unbelief. He asked Jesus to help Him in his shortcoming.

Too often we try to prove ourselves worthy and end up falling short. Too often we try to lift ourselves up only to be humbled. This leads to more unbelief. If we can admit that we do not have enough faith then God can grant us more faith by reassuring us and supporting us when we are weak.

Jesus is the author of our faith. He perfects it for us when we can’t hold it up on our own. Faith comes from hearing from God. It is a gift from God. We start a process of salvation by believing in Him and He perfects that salvation through developing our faith. When we doubt and try to force God’s hand to prove Himself to us we falter in our faith, but when we genuinely ask Him to help us in our unbelief he can reassure us and build up our faith.

As Christians, how we deal with our unbelief will make or break us. How do you deal with unbelief?