Lord, Help Thou Mine Unbelief | Lon Solomon

[Music] well hello everybody welcome to live with lon and we're so glad you joined us today we have a wonderful study in the scripture in the gospels for today uh every passage of scripture is wonderful and so uh before we get into that allow me to wish you a happy thanksgiving weekend uh i know this has been a crazy hard year uh for all of us for all kinds of different reasons and but uh with the vaccine imminent uh we're hoping for 2021 to get back to more like normal and even in the hard year of 2020 uh remember what job said the lord giveth the lord taketh away blessed be the name of the lord we thank god that in 2020 god was still on the throne and we count our blessings we name them one by one and it will amaze us what the lord has done so even in a tough year uh god's mercy uh we still can thank him for and so let's go to prayer and then we'll go into our study for today here we go dear lord jesus we pray that you would make us like the one leper who came back to thank you in luke's gospel after you healed him not like the nine that you healed who never came back to say thank you and lord we are here to thank you uh that uh you have been on the throne this entire year and with all of its difficulties god we can still trust you and your mercy is still evident even in in this vaccine being available so quickly uh to the human race what an amazing thing and we thank you for your mercy lord and and i pray 2021 uh will be a year with much less uh difficulty uh than this year has been for us lord i i pray now that you would use the scripture in our life and make it lord uh something that is powerful today in our life and we pray this in jesus name and everybody said amen okay well as i said we're studying the gospels and today we have a wonderful passage um that uh i think is gonna really encourage your heart and my heart and we're gonna depart from matthew's gospel and go to mark's gospel because mark's gospel has a little more detail about what happens next remember a text without a context is a pretext right and so uh as we come to our passage here in mark's gospel or matthew's gospel uh the context is that the disciples three of them peter james and john have been up on the mount of transfiguration with the lord jesus he has peeled back his human nature so they could see some of the glory uh that is his as the second person in the godhead god uh he talked to moses and elijah god the father spoke from the cloud and jesus said i don't want you to tell anybody you peter james and john what happened up here until after i have been resurrected and so now they head down the mountain mount tabor uh in the northern israel uh just south of the sea of galilee and when we pick up remember eight of the disciples didn't go up the mountain they stayed down so uh now as they come down there's a commotion going on uh at the foot of the mountain and we pick up the story with jesus and the three disciples coming down to uh the foot of the mountain oh and by the way did i just say eight disciples were down at the bottom no there were twelve disciples nine were down at the bottom hey this is what you get when it's live folks uh this is live with lon okay all right now here we go uh mark's gospel mark chapter nine uh verse 14. here we go but when he came to the disciples he saw a great multitude around them and the scribes disputing with them this is down at the base of the mountain and immediately when they saw him jesus all the people were greatly amazed and running to him greeted him and he asked the scribes what are you discussing with them my disciples and one from the multitude answered and said teacher i brought you my son who has a mute spirit and whenever he the spirit seizes him he throws him down my son he foams at the mouth he gnashes his teeth and he becomes rigid and i spoke to your disciples that they should cast the demon out and they could not and jesus answered him and said o faithless generation how long shall i be with you how long shall i bear with you bring him bring your boy to me uh i think jesus expresses a tiny bit of frustration here uh like golly day folks to his disciples what's wrong you guys can't i mean i i just think he's a little frustrated at this point uh and and and that's why he said what he did verse 20 and they brought the boy to jesus and when he saw him the demon immediately the spirit convulsed him and he fell on the ground and wallowed foaming at the mouth and jesus asked his father how long has this been happening to him and the father said from childhood and often he has thrown him the demon has thrown him both into the fire and into the water to destroy him folks these are the demons this is satan i have told you before there is no mercy satan's only desire is to see people die and end up in hell with him for all of eternity no compassion and the demon was trying to kill this boy perhaps because the demon and satan knew that if jesus healed this boy he was going to come become a great testimony for the lord jesus christ he was going to become like legion going around and evangelizing and telling people what great things the lord has done for him and so they were trying to take him out of the world before he was able uh to do that you say you really think satan does stuff like that i absolutely i think that uh uh you know i think there were many times that the enemy tried to take me out of the world out of this life before i could come to christ because he knew that once i came to christ god was going to use me to speak to many many people about the gospel and see many many people come to christ as a result and and so absolutely i think that he uh tries to destroy uh prospective servants of god uh before they can actually come to christ absolutely and i believe this is what satan was trying to do here now uh the man says he you know his spirit was trying to kill him but uh he says then in the middle of verse 22 he says to jesus but if you can do anything have compassion on us and help us wow if you can do anything have compassion on us and help us now you could read this to say but if you can do anything lord which i believe you can then have compassion on us or and help us or you could put the emphasis on a different syllable and you could say if you can do anything please help us not sure you can do anything no but please help us you would say well that's the statement of of doubt that's right you say well which is it well i'm not 100 sure because it was all about the inflection uh this is all about the inflection of the sentence and the bible doesn't tell us how the sentence is inflected so i'm not 100 sure but look what jesus says jesus says verse 23 if you can believe all things are possible to him who believes now some versions uh some translations leave out the first believe so that what jesus is quoted to say at back to the man is if you can all things are possible to him he believes uh who believes if you can uh with an exclamation point or like if you can what do you mean if you can of course i can uh or a rhetorical question with a question mark if you can uh what do you mean if you can of course i can all things are possible to him who believes uh but the uh the majority of greek manuscripts uh follow the king james with the word believe if you can believe all things are possible to him that believes now you say well is the which is it well it doesn't matter it all means the same thing regardless if you can believe all things are possible to them who believe if you can what are you kidding of course i can all things are possible to them who believe either way uh jesus is saying of course i can do something and if you believe in me all things are possible uh so here we go immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears lord i believe help my unbelief that's an amazing statement now in the old king james which is how i memorized it it he says i believe help thou mine unbelief and so that's how i memorized it i believe help thou mine unbelief um we'll come back and talk about this in just a moment in our so what uh but let's move on now let's finish out the passage so this is what the father says i believe helped thou mine unbelief and when jesus saw that the people came running together he rebuked the unclean spirit saying to him you deaf and dumb spirit i command you come out of him the boy and enter him no more why did jesus say that well don't you remember the little story he told about the demon who gets cast out of the man and and the house is swept clean but nothing fills that man and so that demon goes and gets seven demons and like him and they come back and they uh come back into the man and jesus says the second state of the man is worse than the first you remember that little story he tells so i'm assuming a demon could uh if you don't fill your life with christ a demon that once cast out can come back so jesus says and don't you ever come back in this boy here and look the spirit cried out convulsed the boy greatly and came out of him why because jesus is greater than the demons because greater is he who's in us than he was in the world because as the disciples said even the demons are subject to us in thy name why did the demon come out because he had no choice jesus is more powerful than the demons and he has total command over them the demon came out of him and he verse 26 the boy became as one dead so that many said he is dead but jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up and the child arose and when he had come into the house his disciples asked him privately why could we not cast this demon out and he said to them this kind of demon can come out by nothing except by prayer and fasting now friends i'm not an exorcist i've never seen an exorcism and exorcisms are nothing to play around with i've never seen the movie the exorcist i don't see demonic movies of any kind uh i don't do that i don't give satan an opportunity uh in my life by seeing this and putting it in my mind and then having to struggle with it later once it's in my mind so but i can just tell you casting a demon out is no small thing we need to be very careful before we go marching in and just trying to cast demons out this is we need to be careful anyway the disciples uh could not even cast out this demon but they hadn't had time to pray and they hadn't had time to fast uh the boy had just met them i'm assuming maybe if they had had time to do that they could have cast the demon out but this is just what jesus says and i can't take it any farther than that because i don't know any more than that okay now this is our passage but it leads us to ask our most important question and you know what that question is so are you ready here we go come on now thanksgiving weekend here we go one two three so what oh yeah and what do we say when we're entering brooklyn so to speak come on say it with me how sweet it is yeah to hear so what you bet now in our so what i want to go back to this phrase to this comment that the father made in verse 24. let's read it again jesus said if you can believe verse 23 all things are possible to him who believes and immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears he loved his son and he said lord i believe help thou mine unbelief now at first glance this looks like an oxymoron this looks like a contradiction uh lord i believe help thou mind unbelief how could you believe and then ask god to help your unbelief at the same time well actually not i believe this makes perfect sense and if you're a believer in jesus it should make perfect sense to you uh because we believe in the lord yes we do but there's always that unbelief there's always that deeper belief that we could go to so i believe but i could always believe more now i believe but my faith could always be deeper and and i believe but my faith could always be stronger and so this is what the father is saying he calls jesus lord and he says lord i believe a but uh i still feel that unbelief in me and i still feel uh that lack of faith sometimes in me so help me to believe more uh help me uh to have a deeper faith in you than i've got right now even though i have faith my faith could be deeper uh this is perfectly normal i remember when i was a brand new believer and i read this passage immediately i was so literally dumbstruck with uh what this this man said because it's exactly how i felt lord i believe in you but help my unbelief uh go away and help my belief go stronger and deeper so if you're a believer i suspect you can relate to this now this brings us to our question today how can we make our faith stronger and deeper uh how can we believe more and doubt less this is the uh oxymoron of faith we can believe but we can still struggle with doubt and struggling with doubt doesn't mean that you're not a believer it doesn't mean you haven't placed your trust in christ to go to heaven because of what he did on the cross it doesn't mean you're a bad christian or that god will never answer one of your prayers but we should we should always be striving to take our belief deeper and our faith deeper so uh how do we do that well there are two things that will take our faith deeper one of them is something that we uh have control over and the other one is something that the lord has total control over you say all right i'm i'm a little bit lost okay well let me explain the first thing the one that we have control over is the way to take our faith deeper is for us uh this is something we have control over to be in the bible to be in the word of god every day studying memorizing meditating opening our heart to learning who god is his greatness his power his omnipotence the deeds he's done in the past the magnificent deeds he's done in the past the way in the past he has revealed his awesome power and the more we read that and the more we believe that as being in the word of god the more our faith will deepen now this is what romans chapter 10 says listen to what romans chapter 10 says so then faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of god faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of god and if you and i want our faith to go deeper and stronger and we want to help thou our unbelief turn into belief we need to get into the word of god and uh this um is something that you know if you're a follower of jesus you understand that reading the bible is important but why is it important you say well i don't know because it's it's just uh a legalistic thing you gotta do no no no no no we read the bible so we can discover god we read the bible so that we can learn of the power and the majesty of god as we see it on display in the scripture we read the scripture because faith comes by hearing and hearing comes by the word of god so therefore faith comes by the word of god right and that's why it's so important for us to be men and women of the book men and women who saturate ourselves with the scripture and i know i've told you before that when i first came to christ in 1971 bob eckhart the man that led me to christ the street preacher challenged me to be in the bible and and i i made a goal to read the whole bible all the way through in the first six months that i was saved now i didn't have a job and i was hitchhiking around the country so i had a little more time but but trying to read the whole bible through in a year uh is a noble goal and an important goal and then i memorized scripture i had a stack of of three by five cards probably two feet high well a foot and a half anyway of verses that i had memorized and uh as i went through the scripture and i carried them in my uh shirt pocket and when i wasn't busy i would take them out and go over them and then once a month i would go back through the whole stack to familiarize myself and remind myself friends i gotta tell you uh my faith grew uh like topsy it was an unbelievable uh experience why faith comes by what the word of god and you can pretty well put it down the more you're in the word of god the more your unbelief will go away the more your belief will grow in the lord and the stronger your faith will become that's something that's on you and me making sure we have time every day to read study memorize meditate on god's word now second of all i said there was a second part of our faith growing that is under god's control and what is that well friends that is the building blocks sending trials into our life and using them as building blocks to help us trust god ever more and more james talks about this in james chapter one listen to what he says james chapter one verse two my brethren count it all joy when you fall into various trials uh now that's one that is hard most of us our initial response when we fall into trials is not just to count at all joy but james says count it all joy why there's a reason knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience and but let patience have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete lacking nothing what is james saying here james is saying that the testing of our faith produces a depth produces patience and it produces a deeper completion of our faith uh lacking nothing as james says so this is god's part uh deciding where and how he's gonna test our faith to make it stronger now how does testing our faith make it stronger well because friend everything the lord puts us through where he forces us to trust him and then he comes through just like he says he's going to come through just like he promises he's gonna come through that becomes a building block upon which we can trust him a little more the next time and every time we we trust him a little more then we we that's a building block so that the next time we can trust him a little more and the next time we can trust him a little more and the next time we can trust him a little more the people we read about like uh george mueller and and moody and all these people these great saints spurgeon uh they didn't just start off trusting god the way they did hudson taylor the great missionary to china no no they started off trusting god for little things and then little things and then little things and then bigger things and then bigger things and then bigger and then grandiose things this is how god deepens and builds our faith and this is his doing we don't pick which trials he sends us we don't nobody prays at least that i know of and ask him to send trouble and trials and temptations into their life may we should maybe vote but most of us don't but god chooses them and he chooses them based on first corinthians 10 13. look at this passage of scripture with me first corinthians 10 13 it says no temptation has overtaken you except that which is common to man but god is faithful who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able but will with the temptation also make the way of escape that you may be able to bear up under it so whenever god sends a test into our life he always examines it first to make sure that it's within our ability uh to endure and to go through and to make it uh so if you can take a brick this size uh god's not going to send you a brick this size yet one day you may get a brick like this but right now god's only going to send you uh what you can endure i love that verse of scripture because no matter what trial i'm in uh oh yes i can god i can't make it oh yes you can because i already inspected it it might it might push you to the edge but oh yeah you can with my help you can now do we see any examples of this in the scripture sure how about moses who opened the red sea uh and brought water out of a rock and manna uh descended from heaven moses didn't start off like that uh moses went out and uh had to flee egypt and he had to trust god out in the wilderness and then the burning bush he had to trust god uh for uh before that uh for because moses said i can't speak so good and god said don't worry i'll take care of that and then the plagues moses had to trust that his snake would his rod would eat up the other rods and all the plagues and then then god takes him to the red sea after moses has experienced all of these building blocks to get him to the red sea and trust god for the red sea to open how about david remember what david said when he was faced with goliath he said i have when the when a bear or a lion came upon my sheep i went out and i i took on the bear trusting god and i killed the bear and i went out and took on the lion trusting god and i killed the lion and then he says and this uncircumcised philistine goliath will be just like them so wait a minute god had been building david up to the goliath god just didn't plop david down in there and say all right go take on goliath no no that would have been too big a brick for for young david first god had him take on a bear and then god had him take on a lion to prepare him for goliath you say long i don't consider bears and lions fighting them bare-handed or however david did it i don't consider that to be a little brick are you kidding well i don't know maybe he had some littler bricks before that the scripture doesn't mention but that's how god prepared him for goliath and folks the way god will prepare you to trust him with great things is he first um helps you trust him for little things and then little bigger things and then little bigger things and then little bigger things hey i remember when god asked me to trust him for our present location of mclean bible church the old national wildlife federation building uh this was a hundred million dollar project we had three thousand people attending mclean bible church at the time that's it our budget yearly was three million dollars yeah that's this is why the real estate agent for the for the sale wouldn't even meet with me wouldn't even talk with me he said this is crazy you can't y'all can't pull something off like this you no this is impossible wait a minute i told him i said oh no this is our building and our property from the foundation of the world and brenda walked up to me one time in the middle of this when things looked so bleak and said i just need to know i'll follow you as a member of the congregation but you do you look me right in the eyes and you tell me you know god's gonna do this and i looked her right in the eyes and i said brenda i am as sure of this as i am my own name and she said okay now how did god give me the ability to with a three million dollar budget and three thousand people to trust him for a hundred million dollar project uh which includes the land jill's house is on which oh by the way is completely paid off 11 years later we paid off the whole debt the whole thing and finished in the black with our budget year after year after year with a 20 million 30 million dollar budget how did how did god allow me to trust him for that well folks he did little thing he he worked me up to that it started with my hitchhiking around the country when i first came to christ i only had five dollars in my pocket when i left chapel hill north carolina in the spring of 1971 and i said to myself i want to see if my god is really powerful enough that he can take care of me out there on the road with no job no money knowing no one i want to see and you know what when he did it boy that was a huge block in there and then the next block and then the next block and i prayed god if you want me to serve you i i need some training and all of a sudden i found myself in seminary learning greek in hebrew and theology and whatever and then and then and then and then uh brendan and i were never supposed to have more than one child uh the doctor told us that that my oldest son james was it but we were praying and uh and and just said lord you're bigger than that we got four children now yeah so all those little building blocks finding my keys when i lost them uh finding a parking space when didn't look like there were any to be had all those are the building blocks who went in that went into it and god was building my faith so i could trust him for greater and greater things and that's all faith is the ability to trust god the ability to trust god uh and and that's why that man said i believe helped out my unbelief lord help me trust you for bigger and bigger things and my friend that's how god will get you there so those those trials that you detest uh those difficulties that you hate um listen god's trying to help answer your prayer to increase your faith and help out your unbelief by putting those building blocks in he wants you to trust him and he'll prove faithful that's what first corinthians 10 13 says god is faithful and he'll prove faithful in every one of those and every time he does then it helps you to trust him for a little more and a little more and a little more until you're moses and you're ready to trust him for the red sea in your life so all of us have trials today in our life all of us have difficulties why because we need to otherwise our faith would never grow deeper otherwise our unbelief would never turn into greater belief and so rather than despising them today let's thank god for them today count it all joy when god puts you through a building block experience because he's trying to take you up to a bigger and bigger one and he will never ever ever fail you he will never fail to be faithful to you as he builds your faith let's pray dear lord jesus to do what james says to count it all joy when we fall into diverse or different trials this is a hard thing lord this is contrary to human nature but lord it's not contrary to biblical truth so help the lord right now people i know a lot of us have got all kinds of trials in our life financial trials health trials trials with our children trials with our grandchildren uh trials with our vocation uh lord we've got all kinds of trials help us lord this thanksgiving to remember to thank you for these not because they feel good or we like them in the flesh but because we understand what you're doing you're putting the building blocks in place to enable us to have greater faith and trust you more so encourage our hearts with this great truth today lord fortify our spirits to continue to go one block at a time and watch you demonstrate your power and your faithfulness so we can trust you for bigger blocks and we pray this in jesus name and everybody said amen and amen okay well remember what we do here at live with lon what do we do we do the bible come on now the whole bible and what nothing but the bible and then we apply it to our lives and that's what you got today folks that's what we did the bible and we applied it to our life and that is expository preaching that is exegetical preaching and that is life-changing preaching join us next week for live with lon lord willing god bless you and have a great rest of your thanksgiving [Music] you

Channel: Lon Solomon Ministries

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Length: 37min 45sec (2265 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020