"Lord I believe; help my unbelief!"

"Lord I believe; help my unbelief!"

In the Gospel recorded by John Mark we find a story about a man who had a son that was demon possessed. Hearing that there were some guys running around Galilee that were in the demon casting out business, he brings his son to the disciples to be healed. The Scripture doesn’t tell us where they went wrong but we do discover that they could not cast it out. When Jesus arrives and discovers their failure, He calls out the “faithless generation” and in the course of the conversation the father cries outs, “Lord I believe; help my unbelief!” It is this seemingly illogical sounding contradiction of terms that brings me to my question, can doubt be a part of the Christian experience?

In the 1997 movie, Soul Food, Momma Joe, the matriarch of the family encourages her family not to worry about her failing health by telling them, “If you’re praying, you’re not worried and if you’re worried, you’re not praying.” These sounded like pearls of wisdom to my spiritually immature ears. I would spend many years repeating this mantra to people that I would encounter that were having a crisis of faith. I now know that I need to track down each and every one of those people and personally apologize.

Friends, let me help you to be set free by assuring you that the presence of faith does NOT mean that there is an absence of doubt or vice versa. You can absolutely, 100% know and believe that God is able to do a thing and be completely at a loss on if He actually will…and it’s that not knowing that gives you the sick feeling in your stomach, that keeps you up at night, and that sends you to your knees crying out like King David asking, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1-2)

The father in the story obviously believed that his son could be healed, which is why he brought him to the disciples in the first place. But after the disappointment of not seeing results it’s easy to see how doubt crept into his heart. You can almost feel the pain he must have felt when he said to Jesus, “if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”

The truth is, it doesn’t matter how many Scriptures you memorize or if you can quote the Bible front to back in both the original Hebrew and Greek, doubt is a human emotion and the Scriptures tell countless stories of men that, in one verse are called righteous and upright, and in another are filled with uncertainty. Abraham and Sarah, Job, David, even John the Baptist, after spending his life declaring that his cousin Jesus was the Son of God, began to doubt if Jesus really was the Messiah as he sat in prison about to be beheaded.

Instead of quoting a line that makes for good Hollywood cinematics but bad theology, I’ll now say it’s okay when we find ourselves in places of doubt in our mind as long as we believe the truth in our hearts.