Help My Unbelief: Doubt and Unanswered Prayer - Bible Study Blog for June 1

Study Texts: 

Mark 9:17-29, Matthew 17:19-20

In tonight’s study, a father comes to Jesus’s disciples and begs them to cast the demon out of his son. They fail to cast it out, so the father goes to Jesus.

Why did they fail? After all, Jesus had given them authority to cast out demons in his name.

1. Was their faith overwhelmed by the horrific suffering they witnessed?
2. Was the boy was in the grip of such terrible evil that only Jesus could free him?

Jesus scolds his “faithless” disciples. But why? While they failed to trust Jesus’s power to heal the boy, their greater failure was the fact that they gave up. Rather than going directly to Jesus to intercede on the boy’s behalf, they leave the father to do that himself. 

When the father asks Jesus if he can heal his son, Jesus answers, “All things can be done for the one who believes.” We struggled with this statement, recalling numerous occasions when we’ve prayed for loved ones who ultimately died. Did they die because we didn’t believe? Because we didn’t pray enough?

Unanswered prayer is the root cause of much doubt, and understandably so. However, when God does not answer our prayers according to our wishes and timelines, we become discouraged and give up. We assume that it is God’s will to say “no,” and we stop praying. 

When the disciples ask Jesus, in private, why they could not cast out the demon, Jesus says, “This kind can come out only through prayer.” 

Andrew Murray, author of 31 Days in the School of Prayer writes, “Many Christians cannot understand what is meant by much prayer, and they cannot form a perception or feel the need of spending hours with God.”

Today’s Christians devote far too little time to prayer. Why is this? Because we’re so busy, or because we doubt God’s ability to act through our prayers? God doesn’t say “no” to us nearly as frequently as we say “no” to God by our failure to pray and pray persistently. By not praying, we are unplugging ourselves from God. We are limiting God’s power to reveal to us all the amazing things God is doing. If you fail to offer God your time and attention in prayer, you are failing to offer God your life. 

In the passage from Matthew 17:19-20, Jesus says, “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 for you.”

Faith the size of a mustard seed is very small! But it is still faith, through which God can act in powerful ways. 

The greatest danger to the spiritual life is not God’s unwillingness to answer our prayers, but our unwillingness to persist in prayer. Our lives and our congregations would be vastly different if we were more deliberate and persistent in our prayer and fasting. It’s not that we lack faith. God gives us faith—and we don’t exercise it.