“…And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”’
Mark 9:21-24
In the gospel of John, the Bible says, “even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs and wonders in their presence, they still wouldn’t believe in him.” Most people think wellness is about knowing something beyond a shadow of doubt, therefore we approach life through the lens of empirical evidence or as a perpetual religious high. We struggle finding balance between reason and faith. There’s a lot of fear to commit in our cultures today. A pastor friend once said,“We have a fast-food culture where the most dreaded sentence would be to serve a life with no options.”
In the gospel according to Luke 18:8², Jesus says, “… when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” I encourage people to put faith-building material into their mind. By that I mean books, music playlists, and podcasts that build strong motivation for life. Humankind is built to thrive amidst death, sickness, stress, emotionalism, etc, because without these we can’t deal intelligently or critically examine what we believe. No empirical evidence can explain why we encounter difficult times. In his book, The Gift of Doubt¹, Gary Parker wrote:
“
If faith never encounters doubt, if truth never struggles with error, if good never battles with evil, how can faith know its own power? In my own pilgrimage, if i have to choose between a faith that has stared doubt in the eye and made it blink, or a naive faith that has never known the firing line of doubt, I will choose the former every time.
In a quote from the Servant magazine in 1999, Ravi Zacharia asserts that “mankind rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit its need for God, not intellectual demands or scarcity of evidence.” We have the constant sensation of not enough: not enough time, rest, exercise or leisure. Where does God fit into a Life that already seems inadequate and behind schedule. Therapists and support groups now offer outlets that used to be reserved for God alone because they give immediate feedback and God to so many seems distant. Pastor Martyn Lloyd-Jones summed up the confusion saying, “of all the activities in which the Christian engages,…, there is surely none which causes so much perplexity and raises so many problems as the activity which we call prayer.”
It is part of my prayer often in difficult moments to say “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” I give God my doubts and walk by faith in him.
¹ Parker, Gary E. The Gift of Doubt: From Crisis to Authentic Faith. Harper Collins, 1990.
² The Bible. New International Version.