Help My Unbelief (Session 1) - Women's Retreat 2024
Below is the audio recording of Teaching Session 1 from our 2024 Women’s Retreat, taught by Andrea Hoglund.
Sometime last year I was praying for God’s direction for the topic of this retreat and what he laid on my heart was this phrase from Mark 9 – “help my unbelief.” And my goal for us, my hope for us in the next two days is simple: that we would believe God more. That we would believe him completely. And that our deep trust in God would be evident in our daily lives. We’re here on this retreat, but all of us have a bigger context in the background – everything going on in our lives and in our hearts, joys and sorrows, confusion and uncertainty in our life. My hope is that in the next 24 hours or so, we would bring it all to Jesus in a deeper way, like the father in Mark 9 brings Jesus his son, and we would cry out, not “Solve my problems! Make my life easy!” but “Help my unbelief! I don’t need a change of circumstances, I need a change of heart.”
Who here has read all the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis? I know some of you are working on it. Raise your hand if you’re working on it? If you haven’t read them, I encourage you to make that your summer reading project – not just because they are brilliant stories worth reading over and over, but also because it will greatly increase your ability to understand all the references to them in the teaching at Cities Church!
At the beginning of The Silver Chair, Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb, (who was really a good kid in spite of his name), are called to Narnia and given a mission from Aslan. Their task is to seek the lost prince, Rilian, until they’ve found him and brought him home, or died in the attempt, or are sent back to their own world. But before sending them on this journey, Aslan teaches Jill four signs for them to follow. Aslan knows they need these signs. Following these signs will guide them rightly. And the signs will give clarity when they are faced with uncertainty and doubt. This is what Aslan says:
“First, remember, remember, remember the signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs. And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.” (27)
Up on the mountain, in Aslan’s country, things are clear. But off the mountain, down in Narnia, the air is thick and it's easy to get muddled. And that’s where we live. It’s where the disciples lived. And it's where the father in Mark 9 lived.
We’re going to look at 3 reasons to believe God from Mark 9:
Believe God, because we live in a faithless generation
Believe God, because with God, all things are possible
Believe God, because this is the deepest answer to our problems
Believe God, Because we Live in a Faithless Generation (Mark 9:14-19)
Much like Jill and Eustace in The Silver Chair, in verse 14, Peter, James, and John have just come off the mountaintop with Jesus. On the mountain, Jesus was transfigured before them. They saw Jesus’s glory more clearly than they had ever seen it. They saw the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). And in this glimpse of Jesus’s glory, they are seeing reality. They are seeing his real majesty so clearly, so much more clearly than they normally can see it, that verse 6 says, “They didn’t know what to say, for they were terrified.”
But by verse 14, they’re off the mountain, and the air is already getting thick. When Eustace and Jill get off the mountain and into Narnia, they muff the first sign within 5 minutes – they miss it. And that’s not unlike what was going on when Jesus, Peter, James, and John joined the rest of the disciples again.
Off the mountain, things are chaotic. The disciples are surrounded by a huge crowd, arguing with the scribes, after failing to cast out a demon. Then the crowd runs to Jesus and he hears what’s been going on, and the first thing he says is, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you?”
When Jesus calls out the characteristics of the generation, he’s not usually giving a compliment. And here in Mark 9 he says the generation is “faithless.” When he says “faithless,” he’s talking about their response to him.
Up to this point in the book of Mark, Jesus has been steadily revealing himself to be the Messiah that the Jews have been waiting for for centuries. Jesus teaches with a new authority. He heals and casts out demons. He calms storms and walks on water and feeds thousands. He cleanses lepers and raises the dead. These are things that never happen apart from the prophetic work of God, and they’ve never happened to this degree. So what do all these things mean? We find the answer in Mark 1:15—It means “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” and the right response is to “repent and believe in the gospel.”
Pastor and author Eugene Peterson says,
“The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world. It is a renunciation of the lies we have been told about ourselves and [God] and the universe….the usual biblical word describing the no we say to the world’s lies and the yes we say to God’s truth is repentance…it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth.”
The call to repent and believe is a call to come out from an unbelieving generation by responding to Jesus in faith.
And this is a call to us, in our generation, just as much as it was in Mark 9. How we respond to Jesus is the single most important characteristic about us. Once we were faithless, but now we trust Jesus as our Saving Lord. Who we are today all goes back to how we answered the question that Jesus asked Peter, “But who do you say that I am?” And that is still the most important question of our life, every single day. What we think and say and do on a daily basis is shaped by our response to Jesus.
That means that one way to get honest with ourselves is to ask, “Who does my life say that Jesus is?” If you’re like me, you might start to squirm a little bit. Does my life on a daily basis tell a faithless generation that Jesus is my Lord, Savior, and supreme Treasure? Like they said of the disciples in Acts 4:13, would people today recognize that we have been with Jesus?
One of the ways I think unbelief works on us is that although we trust God when it comes to salvation, we don’t believe him in our daily dilemmas. Like, yeah, God can handle my eternal destiny, but I can’t trust him for today. That’s different.
It’s kind of like telling the surgeon who just performed your heart transplant that you don’t trust him to put a bandaid on your finger.
When this happens, we start to look like a faithless generation. We’re skeptical, like the Pharisees. We’re fickle, like the crowds. We trust Jesus more or less, depending on what’s going on in our life that day. We’re like Peter in Matthew 14. He took a few steps on the water, but when he saw the wind, he was afraid. Then Jesus took hold of him and said, “O you of little faith! Why did you doubt?”
Why do we doubt? What if we trusted Jesus in all circumstances? How beautiful would that be?
And this is the kind of faith I think we all want. We want to grow as strong in faith as believers this side of heaven can. Like Aslan told Jill, “Whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the signs.” We want to be women who let nothing turn our mind from trusting Jesus. Is anything in your life turning your mind from trusting Jesus right now? O women of little faith, why do we doubt?
There is a phrase from the Jesus Story Book Bible that I often repeat to myself. It reminds me of what it means to be a woman who trusts Jesus with everything in her life. And Mary believed God more than what her eyes could see. You can put your own name in there. And Andrea believed God more than what her eyes could see.
A godly woman believes God more than what her eyes can see. In the midst of a faithless generation, we want to be women who believe God.
Believe God, because with God, All Things Are Possible (Mark 9:20-27)
The second reason to believe God is because with God, all things are possible.
In Mark 9, in the middle of the crowd, there’s a man with his son – Luke 9 tells us it’s his only son. And his son is suffering from an evil spirit that “makes him mute. And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid.”
He says, “I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” Here’s this desperate father, who's watched his son suffer “from childhood.” When Jesus says, “Bring him to me,” all the father has left is a small sliver of hope. He says to Jesus, “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”
What does “if you can” reveal about the father’s faith? We know he’s not totally faithless, because here he is, bringing his son to Jesus. But the “if” reveals that he has some doubts. He’s not certain what Jesus can actually do. That’s clear in the way Jesus responds: “If you can! All things are possible for the one who believes.”
This isn’t the only time someone has brought an “if” to Jesus. He’s been “iffed” before.
By Simon the Pharisee, in Luke 7:
“If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman was touching him.”
It’s a skeptical “if.”
By Satan in the wilderness:
“If you are the son of God, command these stones to be bread…if you, then, will worship me, all this will be yours…if you are the son of God, throw yourself down from here.”
These are manipulative “ifs.”
By his brothers:
If you do these things, show yourself to the world (Jn 7:4).
It’s a testing “if” – “prove yourself.”
By the crowds at the crucifixion:
“If you are the son of God, come down from the cross”(Mt. 27:40, Mk 15:29-30).
It’s a mocking “if.”
By Martha, after the death of Lazarus:
“If you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11).
And I think this is one of the “ifs” that we can relate to the most. It’s the “if” of possibilities that didn’t happen. At Cities Church, we’re strong on the sovereignty of God. We know that God can do anything. We don’t typically struggle to believe he can do anything, like the father in Mark 9 does. But sometimes we struggle with the question: why won’t he do anything? We think that possibility implies obligation— “If you can, then you must.” So when God doesn’t do what we know he can do, we have this nagging feeling that he has been unjust. Have you ever felt that?
The truth is, just because God can do everything does not mean he must do anything.
Listen to the London Baptist Confession of 1689: Jesus, as the second person of the Holy Trinity,
“is alone the fountain of all Being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things, and he hath most sovereign dominion over all creatures to do by them, for them, or upon them, whatsoever himself pleaseth.”
There is nothing that he must do for us, but he has done infinitely more than we could ask or imagine, and “all of free, and absolute Grace, without any condition foreseen in us to procure it.” In other words, we’ve never deserved any of it.
So what do we do when we feel this “if” of unanswered possibilities growing in our hearts? I think we can learn from Jesus’s own “if” in Gethsemane.
In the Garden, Jesus prays:
“Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matt 26).
This is perfect, 100% pure, undiluted, certified organic, non-GMO surrender and faith. Jesus isn’t questioning God’s ability. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The gospel of Mark (Mk 14) makes this even more explicit: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.” He’s showing absolute faith that with God, all things are possible. At the same time, Jesus knows it is not divine possibility, but divine sovereignty that will direct him – “not my will, but yours.” He trusts God with the possibility and the outcome.
We can summarize Jesus’s response of surrender and faith with three words: cast, leave, and receive. We cast ourselves upon the infinite possibilities of God. We leave the results in his hands. And then we receive the outcome with faith and trust, not bitterness and doubt. Cast, leave, receive.
Ultimately, God answers our “why” questions the same way he answered Job. The answer is himself: the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. And I am here. Always. Even to the end of the age (Ex. 34, Matt. 28).
So what about the father in Mark 9? With his “if you can,” he assumes a small possibility of success, but Jesus says the possibilities are unlimited. Because I’m here. But your faith doesn’t match who I am. Down here, in the crowds, in the conflict, in the suffering, you don’t even know who you’re talking to.
“If you can?” Can a fish swim? Can a bird fly? Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his nature and the revelation of his plan of redemption from before the foundation of the world. He heals true blindness, he satisfies our deepest hunger, he raises the dead, he sets the captives free – with Him, everything is possible, everything sad comes untrue, and all of this comes to us by faith alone.
That’s why the father’s honest response has been a comfort to believers ever since – “I believe! Help my unbelief!” We’re right there with him. We feel the discord between our faith and our faithlessness.
This is really an amazing moment. Notice that the father doesn’t say, “I believe!! Now help my son!” We might expect him to say that. We might say that if we were in his place. But what he says is, “Help my unbelief!” Before any other help can come, I need to believe who you are. Help me!
Somehow, in just a few words, Jesus has reoriented this man’s whole perspective. He realizes now that he has a problem deeper than his son’s condition, deeper than his constant fear for his son’s safety. His deepest problem is his unbelief. His deepest problem is that what he believes about Jesus doesn’t match who Jesus actually is. And it’s a problem he can’t solve by turning on some worship music and lighting candles until he just “feels” something nice. The belief he needs in Jesus can only come from Jesus. So he does exactly the right thing. He acknowledges his own helplessness and cries out, “Help my unbelief!”
And Jesus does help his unbelief, right there, by healing his son. All things are possible for one who believes.
Believe God, because this is the Deepest Answer to our Problems (Mark 9:28-29)
And this brings us to our third reason: Believe God, because this is the deepest answer to our problems.
After Jesus casts out the demon, we don’t hear anything more about the father or the son. Instead, we overhear Jesus and the disciples debriefing the day. The disciples ask Jesus why they couldn’t cast out the demon. They’re confused. Back in Mark 6, when Jesus sent them out two by two, he “gave them authority over the unclean spirits” (v7). And it worked! Verse 13 says that they “cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.” Why were they not able to cast out this demon?
Jesus tells them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” In Matthew’s version (Matt 17:20), Jesus tells them it is “because of your little faith.” So which one is it? Do they need prayer? Or do they need more faith? The answer, of course, is yes. Because prayer and faith can’t be separated.
Prayer is the language of faith. We come to God in our need because we are needy, and God is not. In prayer, we trust that God is able to do something about our problems. It is also a confession that we can’t and won’t muscle this on our own strength, or blaze our own path. It shows us to be who we actually are – creatures in relationship with the Creator. Eugene Peterson says that prayer is our “most human action” (Kingfishers, 59).
At the very beginning of The Silver Chair, Eustace and Jill want to get to Narnia, and Jill – who doesn’t know anything about Narnia, or prayer – suggests that they draw a circle on the ground and recite a spell. But Eustace – who has been to Narnia and been changed by his own encounter with Aslan, says,
“I’ve an idea that all those circles and things are rather rot. I don’t think he’d like them. It would look as if we thought we could make him do things. But really, we can only ask him” (8-9).
We can only ask him.
When we come to God in prayer, we don’t make demands, or try to manipulate him to get what we want, and our prayers are not magic spells that give us some kind of control over outcomes. True prayer comes to God asking him to do what we can’t, believing that he can do it. What comes of it is up to God – we can only ask him.
And that kind of surrender only comes from total faith in God’s goodness, power, and wisdom.
I don’t know if the disciples forgot to pray. I don’t know if they became overconfident and forgot that their authority to cast out demons only comes from God. The text really doesn’t say. Jesus simply says, this kind needs prayer, which is another way of saying, you need to believe. The disciples biggest problem, the father’s biggest problem, and our biggest problem is our unbelief.
Our faith is too small in relation to the object of our faith. Not trusting Jesus is like stepping onto an aircraft carrier, terrified that your body weight will make it sink. Jesus says it’s like having eyes that don’t see and ears that don’t hear. We’re missing it – we’re missing who he is.
If we feel stuck in our walk with Jesus, more than anything else, we have a belief problem. We’re not going to solve it by getting up earlier, or making a color-coded schedule for our day, or by raw self-discipline. We need to go back to where we started, and respond to Jesus in faith.
Deeper than whatever sins we may have to repent of, we find the unbelief that led us to that sin. Deeper than our sufferings, it is unbelief that hurts us most. Deeper than our dull hearts toward Jesus, our unbelief blinds us to his glories.
This is how Pastor Jonathan speaks about this:
“I’m going to say it, and I mean it: For most everything you encounter on an average, daily basis, your greatest need is not a change of your situation, it’s a change of you” (Mercy for Today, 66).
And in Mark 9, Jesus is teaching us that the change we need is faith. Faith in him. We need to know him as he truly is. He’s both the one we believe and the one who can help our unbelief.
Like Jill and Eustace need to remember the signs, we need to remember, remember, remember who our God is! We need to believe him. When we wake up in the morning, and when we lay down at night and when we wake up in the middle of the night. Whatever strange things may happen – believe God. Nothing else matters.
In Mark 9, the father brings his son to Jesus, then prays, “Help my unbelief!” I want to take a minute to slow down and be still and ask: If you were that father, what would you be bringing to Jesus today?
Will you bring it to him right now and ask him to help your unbelief? Whatever God brought to mind for each of us, let’s believe God more than what our eyes can see.
All things are possible for one who believes.