I Do Believe; Help Me Overcome My Unbelief

Here is a letter that I wrote for the students in my youth group that are graduating this year:

Mark 9:24b
"I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!"

This verse is one of those that has stuck with me for a while. It is one of those weird phrases in the Bible that doesn’t seem to make much sense, so we often just skip right over it. The two phrases seem to contradict one another. If the guy believes, then how does he have “unbelief”? And yet, I have come to realize that this one verse make a whole lot more sense the longer I looked at it.

One of the biggest struggles when I got to college was that it was the first time that I really began to understand that I had a real sense of independence, both personally and intellectually, from my parents. I was now the one who decided how late I could stay out on the weekends, how clean I was going to keep my room, and how much time I spent playing video games. I also realized that I was beginning to learn things in class that my parents didn’t know. I was starting to realize things that I had never been taught at home or in high school, and it was really liberating. I began to see that knowledge was so much bigger than what I had been shown up to that point.

Another big change was that I had complete say over whether or not I was going to go to church or not, and given the choices between church and sleep, I invariably chose sleep. In a lot of ways, my faith was still tied to that old, small knowledge that I had been taught when I was in high school, the one that I was now growing out of. I was starting to realize that my faith understanding of God was rather shallow, and didn’t hold up to too much scrutiny, so I just opted to not think about it that deeply, to store it away to be pulled out occasionally, but not something that had much relevance in my every day life. Most of the classes that I was taking seemed to make perfect sense without the need to bring faith into it, and some of them seemed to work even better without it.

I came to realize, though, largely through a class that I took called “Understanding the Bible” (which should have been called, “Understanding How Hard it is to Really Understand the Bible”) that my faith wasn’t obsolete, it was just undeveloped. Just as we don’t stop growing or learning once we hit high school, our faith isn’t something that is finite or static. It’s not black and white. Instead it’s something that we need to keep working on, keep growing in our understanding of it. That’s when this verse really started to take shape for me. Belief and unbelief aren’t two opposites. We too often view these as separate poles, that you either believe or you don’t, but that’s simply not the case. For a while, all I knew was that I believed in Jesus, that he was a real guy who lived and breathed, and that he dies on a cross. I wasn’t so sure that I believed in God. I had belief, but I also had unbelief. Eventually, I came to terms with the belief I had that Jesus was raised from the dead, that he was God’s son. If Jesus was God’s son, then there had to be a God. This is admittedly a rather backwards way to get to God, but it was what got me there, for me personally. You may have to go a completely different way. Maybe you can accept that the universe was created, but you can’t move beyond that yet. You have belief and unbelief.

This verse from Mark becomes a very simple prayer, but one that never stops being relevant. The man in the story is directly appealing to Jesus, saying that he does believe in Jesus, but he also recognizes that he has doubts, that there are still areas that he needs to grow in, to believe in more, to have greater faith.
I heard faith described once as “belief in things that we cannot prove.” I’m not sure that this is a very good definition, as many would argue that there is a lot about faith that we can “prove” more or less. I would instead say that faith is “belief that we put into action.” It is belief that dictates how we live our lives. When you get onto an airplane, you have faith that this huge piece of metal will be able to fly through the air, and then land safely somewhere else. You are putting your complete trust in something that, when you really think about it, very few of us can even begin to understand. In many ways, logic would tell us that a plane cannot fly, or at least is more than likely bound to crash, so the more rational thing to do would be to stay away from planes, or even cars for that matter. Yet we have faith enough to put our trust in them in an active way.

Having belief without faith is like saying that you believe a plane can fly, but never being willing enough to get on one. If you are living your life with a belief in God, but are not willing to live that believe in such a way that it actually influences how you live, you don’t really have much faith. If you have belief in anything without faith, then its fairly pointless. Moreover, to believe that there is no god, to be atheistic, requires as much faith as saying that there is not. Both require us to rely on things that we may not fully understand, to trust in things that people tell us that we cannot completely explain or comprehend on our own. One view is not really any more “rational” than the other. In fact, atheism requires you to deny far more than theism (belief in God) does.

But back to this notion of belief and unbelief: You are on the verge of something big. You are about to be exposed to knowledge that will change how you view your entire life, and how you view those around you. Your whole understanding of belief and unbelief are about to change. My hope for you is that the learning that you have in college is something that enables you to grow in your belief in God, and that this belief can lead you to a truer faith in God.

There is nothing wrong with unbelief. It is when we pretend that it is not there, or when we start to think that belief or unbelief cannot co-exist that we struggle.

So, I pray for you that you do believe, however small that belief may be, but even more so, I pray that you let God to help you overcome your unbelief.

Grace and peace,
Tyler