But if you can do anything have compassion on us and help us.
Mark 9:23
Most will be familiar with this story from Marks’s Gospel. The disciples have found themselves with a Father and son who they have been unable to help. Jesus comes down from the ‘mount of transfiguration’ to a crowd surrounding this scene. This father is desperately seeking deliverance for his son and the nine disciples are unable to cast out the demon, so as he meets Jesus, he seems both hopeful and unsure..
We see this expressed in the words, but... and if....
My thought today revolves around the awesome responsibility we have been given to accurately and faithfully represent Jesus.
These disciples were not born again, not baptized with the Holy Spirit, but given the authority to preach, heal, and cast out devils in the name of Jesus (representing Jesus). This always gives me pause to consider my personal activities and judge my work extending the Kingdom as a Spirit filled believer.
My thought doesn’t focus on the unbelief of the father, or of Jesus saying “if you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes”, or even the crowd as the “faithless and perverse generation” but rather the inability of the nine to do the assigned works.
Privately, Jesus addresses their question of why they could not cast him out. It wasn’t for their lack of obedience, rather a need for growth and development of spiritual capacity which could only be developed through prayer and fasting ~
‘This kind goes not out but by prayer and fasting’.
When John’s disciples asked Jesus the reason of His disciples lack of prayer and fasting, Jesus answered basically, this isn’t the time or season for fasting.
Jesus answered, “how can the guest of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them; then they will fast.” Mt. 9:16
With greater works assigned to the church and the command from Mark 16, how much more today, should his disciples exercise a discipline of prayer and fasting?. The flesh and its desires must be kept in subjection in order for faith to dominate. There must be a real sense of dependence on God of which prayer is the continual expression.
I don’t want to be found lacking, unable to righteously express Him in any facet of need I may meet, when I preach Jesus, the need for my dependence upon God grows daily in this hour.