Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

Greetings,

Last week I wrote about a man whose giving is an expression of what he believes. This week I want us to wrestle with the deeper question beneath that.

What happens when life gets really tough, when the challenges, the adversity, the disappointments and sorrows pile on with no respite in sight? When the conviction is real but the confidence wavers?

Certain streams of Christianity have done significant damage to how men understand faith. The teaching goes something like this. If you just believe harder, feel it more intensely, conjure enough certainty in the moment, the outcome changes. Name it and claim it. Speak it into existence. Your faith is the variable that determines what God does.

That is not biblical faith. It is willpower masking itself in Christianese. And when the feeling does not come, it can leave a man feeling hopeless, destitute, as if he simply cannot conjure enough faith, as if conjuring were the remedy in the first place. As if God is waiting on the strength of his feeling before he acts.

Jesus used the phrase little faith several times in the gospels. And what he meant by it is almost always misread. When the disciples panicked in the storm, when Peter began to sink on the water, when they worried about having no bread — Jesus rebuked them for little faith. And the assumption many subtly believe is that the rebuke was about quantity. You did not believe enough. You needed more faith. Top up the tank and try again.

But that is not what Jesus was saying. Look at what he pointed them to every time. In the storm: do you not know who is in this boat with you? On the water: why did you doubt me? With the bread: do you not remember what I did with five loaves? The rebuke was never you believed too little. It was you forgot who you were believing in.

Little faith is not a quantity problem. It is an object problem.

A man with a small amount of faith in the right object is in a far better position than a man with enormous confidence in the wrong one. The disciples had seen Jesus heal the sick, cast out demons, feed thousands. Their faith was not weak because the feeling was low. It was weak because in the moment of pressure they took their eyes off him and fixed them on the storm, the water, the empty basket. The object shifted and the faith collapsed.

Pastor Justin put it plainly in a sermon I sat under recently. He said that little faith exhibits a deficient view of God. The man who is anxious, who struggles to trust, who finds it hard to give or pray or obey without certainty, his problem is not that he needs to manufacture more confidence. His problem is that his picture of God has shrunk. And a small God produces a small faith, regardless of how hard the man tries to believe.

I was reminded of this recently on a plane just about to touch down. Looking out the window, the houses and cars below looked impossibly small. And it struck me, that is what our problems look like from God’s perspective. He is not viewing our situation from where we are standing. He sees from a vantage point so much higher, so much broader, taking in so much more than we can see from where we sit. A God that large, that faithful, that sovereign over every detail we cannot see from the ground, our worries shrink in his presence. The problem is rarely that our problems are too big. It is that our view of God has become too small.

David understood this from the inside. Psalm 42 is a man whose soul is cast down, whose tears have been his food day and night, who asks God why he has forgotten him. And yet in the middle of that, he did not wait for the feeling to return. Instead, he speaks to himself. Why are you cast down, O my soul? Hope in God. Rather than trying to manufacture emotion, he redirects his gaze. He is doing with his soul what Jesus was calling the disciples to do in the storm. Stop looking at the water. Look at him.

That is what faith in a dark season actually looks like. A man talking himself back to the right object.

The father in Mark 9 said it even more plainly. Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. It is a man in the middle of wavering faith who does the only thing that actually helps. He looks squarely at Jesus and admits he cannot get there on his own. He brings what little he has and looks to Jesus to be the source of the faith he cannot produce on his own. And Jesus does.

That is the picture. A man who in his weakness looks in the right direction.

The remedy isn’t simply in an exercise of the will. It is a renewal of the mind. Romans 12:2 says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. The mind that has been filled with a true and large and faithful picture of God does not need to conjure faith. It finds that faith rises naturally from what it has been beholding.

Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith.

This is why the disciplines matter. As the means by which a man keeps beholding the God whose character is the object of his faith. The man who reads and meditates on the Word daily is keeping his eyes on the right object. And the man whose eyes are on the right object finds that the storm, the empty basket, the uncertain future, none of it has the final word.

Do I truly believe what I say I believe? Do I truly believe in the one whose faithfulness does not depend on the steadiness of mine?

Where have you been looking when your faith has felt thin, and what would change if you looked to him instead?