Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2881
“And immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” Mark 9:24.
THIS is the case of a man who knew well enough what he wanted and who was full of anxiety to obtain it. Indeed, he was so anxious to obtain it that he prayed most earnestly and most importunately for it. He prayed to the right Person, too, for, after having failed with the disciples, he resorted to their Master, Himself. Yet, not withstanding all this, at the time recorded in our text, he had not obtained the blessing that he sought.
We probably know of many persons who have not yet been awakened to a sense of their need—and much labor has to be expended by the faithful minister in order to show them their danger and to make them realize their true condition in the sight of God. They have many spiritual needs, but they do not know what those needs really are. This man had gone further than that, for he did know what was the great need of himself and his son. Then there are others who have head knowledge as to their spiritual needs, but they do not seem to be anxious to have those needs supplied. They are stolid, careless, immovable. That was not the case with this man. He knew that he needed his son to be healed. He was intensely eager that he should be healed, and healed then and there. His heart was moved with compassion for his child and he was most anxious that the evil spirit should be cast out of him at once. There are some of our hearers who seem to have desire of a certain kind, but they do not use that desire in the right way. They go about seeking salvation where it is not to be found. They are, to an extent, earnest in their own fashion, but to them the Lord might say, as of old, “Why do you spend money for that which is not bread? And your labor for that which satisfies not?”
This man had gone a stage beyond that. He was directing all his entreaties to Jesus—he was appealing to the great Lord, Himself, from whom alone deliverance could come. It is a great mercy, my dear Friends, if you are brought as far as this poor man was—to know what you really need, to be anxious to obtain it—and to be making your appeal to Jesus to grant your requests. Yet, with all that, this man had not obtained the gift he was seeking. There are many like he who have not secured the blessing they are seeking. You are aware of your sin and you lament it, yet you cannot get a sense of pardon. You know your spiritual needs and you bemoan them, but you cannot grasp that which supply them. You have made an appeal to God in Christ Jesus and you are resolved that you will never leave off so appealing—yet, for all that, you have not, thus far, received the blessing. There is something or other in the way—something that hinders you. And I should not wonder—no, I feel quite certain—that the thing which hinders some of you from getting what you seek from Christ is your own unbelief. That is the point at which I am going to aim in my discourse, as God shall help me. And I pray that as I do, from many a heart may be breathed this confession and cry, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”
I. There are three things in our text. The first is THE SUSPECTED DIFFICULTY AND THE REAL DIFFICULTY.
Reading the story carefully, I gather that this man saw difficulties as to his child’s cure, but that he never thought of the real one. He fancied that the difficulty lay in the case of his child. His words to Christ, “If You can do anything,” seem to imply that he felt, “This is a case that is quite out of the ordinary run—something special and singular—and, therefore, beyond Your power.” If I can interpret his thoughts, it is my opinion that he said to himself, “This is too mysterious a case to be cured. An evil spirit has struck my boy dumb, yet that same spirit makes him foam at the mouth and
gnash with his teeth. Those very organs which refuse to utter articulate speech, are, nevertheless, strangely in motion. He seems to be taken, too, by this evil spirit at intervals, and hurried this way and that—he cannot tell how—and, at one time, he is hurled into the fire and, at another time, into the water. It is a most mysterious malady and, possibly, because it is so mysterious, it is not in the Messiah’s line of things.”
I have known some who have thought their case, spiritually, to be very mysterious. They have imagined that there was something about their constitution, or, still worse, that some extraordinary guilt had brought upon them a condition of heart that was peculiarly vicious. They have even fancied that this state of heart had put them beneath the ban of the unpardonable sin and that others had better beware of coming near them, for their condition was so strange, so singular, so wild, that they could not tell what to think or say of themselves. Sometimes they are hot and in the fire. But at other times, cold, and in the water—with no voice for praying or praising, yet able to curse and to blaspheme. “Ah,” says such an one, “my case is so mysterious that even the Lord Jesus Christ will never be able to save me.”