I Want to Believe, But I Can't

Try, right now, to believe that there is an elephant in the room with you. Not to pretend, not to picture — to actually believe it. You will find you cannot. The will has no lever that reaches belief. You cannot decide to be convinced of something, cannot order yourself to find a thing true, any more than you can choose to find a joke funny or command yourself to be moved by music that leaves you cold. Belief is not on the menu of things the will can order. It is a response, not a decision — something that happens to you when you see, not something you manufacture in order to see.

So when a person says, with real anguish, I want to believe in God, but I can't — and means it, having tried — they are not confessing a personal defect. They have stumbled onto the truth about all of us. And it is the opposite of bad news.

The Most Honest Sentence in the Bible

A man once brought his suffering son to Jesus — a boy seized since childhood by something that threw him into fire and water. The father had already tried the disciples, and they had failed. By the time he reaches Jesus he is running on fumes, and his request comes out hedged with doubt: "if you can do anything, take pity on us and help us." Jesus catches the word. "'If you can'?" he says. "Everything is possible for one who believes" (Mark 9:23).

And the father — cornered, exhausted, unwilling to claim a faith he is not sure he has — says the truest thing anyone says in the Gospels:

"Immediately the boy's father exclaimed, 'I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!'" (Mark 9:24)

Read it slowly, because it should not work. I do believe — and in the same breath — help my unbelief. He affirms and denies his own faith in one sentence. By every rule of logic he has just disqualified himself: a man who admits his belief is shot through with unbelief has, surely, no faith worth acting on. And Jesus heals the boy. On the spot. On the strength of a faith the father himself called unbelief. The miracle did not wait for the doubt to clear.

That is the first thing the person who cannot believe needs to see. Christ does not require a clean, unmixed, confident faith before he will act. He answered a faith that was honest about its own cracks — because the saving was never being done by the faith. It was being done by the One the faith, however faintly, turned toward.

What the Father Did Right

Notice where the man took his unbelief. He did not take it away from Jesus to go fix it in private and come back when he had more. He brought the unbelief to Jesus and asked him to deal with it. Help my unbelief. He made his very inability the subject of his prayer.

Sit with how strange that is, because it is the whole secret. He is asking Jesus to supply the very thing — faith — that he is supposed to be bringing to Jesus. He is asking the doctor to give him the strength to walk into the surgery. And that is not a contradiction. It is the exact shape of grace. You cannot pray help my unbelief unless something in you has already begun to believe that he can. The cry for faith is itself faith's first heartbeat — you cannot want to believe unless something has already started believing in you. The wanting you are grieving as too small is the gift, already arriving, already turning you toward its source.

The Prayer That Started a War

Sixteen centuries ago, a man named Augustine wrote a sentence in his Confessions that would, within a few years, split the church. Looking back on his own helplessness to obey God, he prayed: "Give what you command, and command what you will." Lord, demand of me whatever you like — purity, love, faith — but then give me the very thing you demand, because I have no power to produce it on my own.

A British monk named Pelagius heard that line read aloud and could not bear it. He objected, loudly, nearly coming to blows over it — because Pelagius believed that whatever God commands, a person must be able to do, or the command would be unfair. If God says believe, then surely belief is within your unaided power. The seeker who whispers I can't believe is standing, whether they know it or not, on the exact ground of the oldest and most important argument in the history of the church. And the church's answer — hammered out against Pelagius and settled for good at the Council of Orange — was Augustine's, not Pelagius's. Even faith, the council confessed, is not something we contribute; it is poured in. "No one can say, 'Jesus is Lord,' except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:3). The very God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," is the one who "made his light shine in our hearts" (2 Corinthians 4:6) — the same fiat that lit the first morning lights the first faith.

Why does this matter to you, tonight, when you only wanted to believe and found you couldn't? Because it means your inability was never the disqualification you feared. If faith were a work you owed, your empty hands would damn you. But faith is a gift God gives, and an empty hand is the only kind that can receive a gift. "It has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe in him" (Philippians 1:29). "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them" (John 6:65). Your part was never to generate the faith. It was to do what the father did — bring the little you have, cracks and all, to the only One who can complete it. "Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith" (Hebrews 12:2): he starts it, and he finishes it. You are not asked to be its author. You are asked to let him be.

"But My Faith Is So Weak"

Then hear the freest thing in all of this. The apostles, watching Jesus, once burst out, "Increase our faith!" (Luke 17:5) — the cry of men who knew their own was too small. And Jesus did not scold them for the smallness. He told them that faith the size of a single mustard seed is enough to move a mountain, because the power was never in the size of the seed. It was in the soil it was planted in.

If faith were your contribution to your rescue, then weak faith would be a weak contribution and you would be right to tremble. But Scripture will not let faith be your contribution. It hands you faith itself "in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you" (Romans 12:3). So the question is never is my grip strong enough? The question is whose hand am I gripping? — and even the gripping was placed in you. The trembling hand that barely brushes the hem of his cloak is healed exactly as surely as the steady one, because the healing was never in the reach. It was always in him.

An old hymn-writer named Joseph Hart, who spent years certain he was too cold and too far gone to come, finally understood it and wrote it down for everyone after him who would feel the same:

"Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth
Is to feel your need of Him."

That is the whole of it. The only qualification grace asks is that you have none. The only fitness required is the felt absence of fitness. Your I can't believe, far from shutting the door, is the exact knock the door was waiting for.

Bring Him the Little You Have

So do not wait to believe better before you come. That is the old lie wearing a humble face — the idea that you must work up a faith worthy of him before you are allowed to ask. You will never out-believe your unbelief on your own; the father in the story certainly didn't. He simply turned what little he had toward Christ and asked Christ to do the rest, and it was enough, because it was Christ doing it.

Say his words. Make them your prayer tonight, exactly as they stand, no improvement needed: I do believe; help my unbelief. It is not a polished prayer. It is an honest one, and honesty is the only thing it requires. The fact that the prayer is even rising in you — that you want the elephant to be real, that something aches toward a God you cannot yet see clearly — is not your achievement to perfect. It is the dawn already breaking, the gift already given, the life by which you will believe already stirring in a heart that, an hour ago, you thought was too cold to hold it. You came here unable to believe. You are not as alone in that as you feel. The hand that wrote the cry into the father's mouth is writing it now into yours — and the One it is addressed to has never once turned away a person who came to him with empty hands and an honest ache. Come as you are. The fitness he requires is only that you feel your need of him — and you do.

Read on: where faith actually comes from, why it was never the one work left to you, and what to do when you are afraid you are not one of the chosen. And if you want the argument from the man who first won it for the whole church, his words are in the library: Augustine's Anti-Pelagian Writings, where he proves, against every objection, that even the faith you cannot manufacture is the thing God delights to give.