How Long Shall I Bear With You?
“O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you and bear with you?” – Jesus.
Have you ever been fed up with someone? Jesus expresses anguish over the state of belief in His disciples and the culture at large in His own time. The problem with jumping right in and saying, “Oh yeah, I know all about those people who don’t trust God like they should.” is that we are those people too! This event is given to us in all three of the synoptic Gospels and it comes on the heals of Jesus’ descent from the Mount of Transfiguration. Much like Moses as he came down from Mt. Sinai to find the people in rebellion, Jesus comes down to those nasty old Scribes disputing with His disciples who have failed to cast a demon out of a boy and heal him. Jesus is immediately met by the boys father;
Luke 9:38-40 Suddenly a man from the multitude cried out, saying, “Teacher, I implore You, look on my son, for he is my only child. 39 And behold, a spirit seizes him, and he suddenly cries out; it convulses him so that he foams at the mouth; and it departs from him with great difficulty, bruising him. 40 So I implored Your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.”
All of these people have God’s Word that tells them what the Messiah will be like. All of them have a knowledge of Jesus and His ministry; healing, teaching, helping the poor and the sick. Likewise all of them have something that keeps them from fully embracing who He is and what He has come to do.
The Scribes: They “sit in Moses’ seat” and are the ultimate authority in the land. They make their living and gain their reputation by interpreting the Mosaic Law. They use their status and position to defraud people out of their property for personal gain (See Matthew 23). Jesus opposes them at every turn and calls their sin, sin. Their Flesh kept them from believing in Jesus.
The Disciples: They know the “Word of God” in more ways than one. They understand that it teaches about the Messiah and that He comes to heal and set the captives free. They have sat under Jesus’ teaching for two years and have also been commissioned by Him to preach the Gospel and to heal and cast out demons (Mark 3:13-15) But now they encounter a difficult situation and cannot manage to do the job. Instead they end up in an argument with the Scribes (Mark 9:14) The problems of life, i.e. the World, kept them from the faith they needed to get the job done.
The father of the boy: Again he has a knowledge of both the Bible and of Jesus though certainly not as intimate of a knowledge as the Scribes or the Disciples. In His situation the devil has plagued his family and afflicted his only son and when the disciples failed to remedy the situation he too is losing his faith. He says to Jesus; “But if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” (Mark 9:22) And so the devil has brought his faith to the crisis point.
We are all like one or more of these people or groups of people, we are faithless and perverse at times. We allow our situation to obscure our faith just as each of these did. Whether we are worried about what the world thinks of us, confronted by a difficult situation or afflicted by the devil we let our faith get twisted, which is what “perverse” means here in the text, and fail to trust God appropriately. That said I am pretty sure it is safe to say that Jesus could say the same thing about you and me.
The Good News is the answer to the rhetorical question that Jesus posed in our text, “How long shall I be with you and bear with you?”
John 13:1 Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that His hour had come that He should depart from this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.
Jesus stuck it out to the very end even though He was disappointed at times. Even though He felt frustrated, He finished the job and didn’t leave the disciples or the rest of the world to deal with the situation alone. This should humble us and encourage us to strengthen those who are weak in the Faith that we know. We should all be praying with the father of the boy, Mark 9:24 “Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “‘Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!’”
Jesus has promised those who believe that He will never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5). Our faith is insufficient, our bodies are weak, our wills are disposed to the honor of men rather than the honor that comes from God. Yet if we have believed we must remember that His strength is made perfect in our weakness and continue on even when we cannot endure in our own strength, for when we are weak, then we are strong.
I encourage you to listen to the audio of this message by clicking on the link below.
How Long – Luke 9:41
In Christ!
Kevin
Tags: Dispair, Faith, Lack of Faith, Trust
Sermons | Kevin Hoffman | 
August 10, 2010 7:07 am
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