Daily Devotion #2

Help Our Unbelief

"But you haven't believed in me even though you have seen me."  John 6:36 NLT

I think about the man whose son was possessed and got discouraged when the faith of the Disciples could not heal his son.  In Mark 9:24 the story notes 'Immediately the boy's father cried out and said, "I do believe; help my unbelief."'  Help my unbelief.  Sometimes I experience blessings and I will thank God for them.  Then the next challenge that arises, I immediately forget and sometimes I allow doubt to enter my mind.  Among other things, the enemy has been attacking me in my faith and in believing the things God has told me.  But as the Word says, Faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ (Romans 10:17). 

I'm sure you are familiar with the old saying, "Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear," right?  I actually wrote a devotion about this before, and I realized that we are so conditioned to not believe what we hear.  We instantly doubt.  It took the man in Mark to actually bring his son to Jesus before he believed his son was healed--not only because he doubted, but the Disciples doubted as well.  If we do not believe in our own confessions, we waste God's time asking Him to move on our behalf.  We in turn negate our own faith and allow the perverted faith, or fear to rule in that situation.

The mobs and the Jews only believed in Jesus' miracles that they actually saw Him perform.  Even sadder is the fact that many still doubted who He was, worse yet some accused Him of being demon-possessed!  God wants us to believe in Him.  Believe that once you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior and asked for the forgiveness of your sins, that it was done.  You instantly became the righteousness of God through your faith in what you professed to believe.  Believing that God will do what He says is one thing, but believing that God will do what He says in your life is a whole different concept.  Why?  Because it forces you to activate your faith for yourself.  It is easy to trust God for someone else.  But when you have to wait patiently for God to move on your behalf, righting some wrong or restoring to you what you lost, it requires you to remember His Word and His promises and truly trust that they will produce a harvest in your life.  It requires that you enact the kind of faith needed to move mountains...and according to Matthew 17:20 all that takes is mustard seed-sized faith!!  'And He said to them, "Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.'  So maybe you have microscopic-sized faith, and it is time for you to tell God the same thing, 'help my unbelief' so that you can grow.


And Jesus said to him, "'If You can?' All things are possible to him who believes."  Mark 9:23 NASB