Mark 6:5

THE POWER OF UNBELIEF

‘And He could there do no mighty work, save that He laid His hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.’

Mark 6:5

What an idea it gives us of the wonder-working power of Jesus—that to ‘lay His hands on a few sick folk, and heal them,’ was not accounted as any very ‘mighty’ thing!

But I shall have to do more with what the Lord did not do, than with what He did. Great and many as are the things which God has done for every one of us, they are but as nothing in comparison with what He might have done, and with what He would have done, if only we had let Him.

I. The place was Nazareth, the most privileged spot of the whole earth; for there, of thirty-three years, Jesus spent nearly thirty. And there it is evident that His heart went forth to do ‘many mighty works.’ Yet in the minds of the men of Nazareth there was an unholy familiarity with holy things—with the name, and the person, and the work, and the truth of Jesus Christ. See the result. They had no faith—the material view destroyed the spiritual. They grovelled in the confidence of an outside knowledge till they became steeped in unbelief. No city ever disbelieved like Nazareth, and so we have the inevitable consequence, the essential retribution, ‘He could there do no mighty work.’

II. The counterpart.—With the whole face of truth—the sublime truth, the truth in Jesus—none upon the whole earth can be more familiar than you. You have looked at it—ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years. Have we come to treat these things as some very ordinary concern of daily occurrence? Has some truth been so long before our eyes that we have lost the sense of its power and majesty, and have no appreciation of its beauty? Are there not thousands and tens of thousands with us who are occupied with the accidental and the external?

III. There are two great truths which we must always lay down as fundamental principles. One is, that the love and beneficence of God are always welling and waiting, like some gushing fountain, to pour themselves out to all His creatures. And the other, that there must be a certain state of mind to contain it—a preparation of the heart to receive the gift—both, indeed, of grace, but the one, the moral condition of the soul, previous and absolutely necessary to the other. Before you can have the gift you must believe the Giver.

Illustrations

(1) ‘You have been engaged in some work to do good to a fellow-creature, and you have laboured long and hard, and you have not succeeded. Why? You have distrusted the issue. You thought you were distrusting yourself, but you were distrusting God. You said, “Who am I? how can I do this?” when you ought to have felt, “It is God’s work, it is for God’s glory; to it He has promised success, and therefore it will be, though I am all ignorance, and all weakness, and all sin.” But because of your want of faith, in you God could “not do the mighty work.” ’

(2) ‘You go to your knees in prayer, and, within the range of the promises, there is no limit to the answers which God has covenanted to that prayer. But you can tell of no success—you bring up your burdens, and you take them back with you again; your soul was cold and powerless when you began, and it is cold and powerless now that you have done. No sense of peace, no acquisition of strength, no light to the soul, has broken through the iron and the brass with which your heaven was sealed. The promises sound by you, but you cannot grasp them; your supplications seem to have found no entrance to God’s mercy seat. And why is it thus? You have not really believed that God was going to do what you sought.’