“WE BELIEVE, HELP OUR UNBELIEF”
INTRODUCTION: THE STRUGGLE OF BELIEF
If Only I Could Believe. That’s not just a phrase—it’s the title of a book written by an old colleague of mine from L’Abri, where we used to work, a place dedicated to offering honest answers to honest questions about life and the Christian faith.
In the book, my former colleague shares a story about a conversation he and his wife had with a woman who didn’t consider herself a believer but was still eager to talk about life, and how she had drifted away from the religious upbringing of her childhood. They also tackled the Big Questions—the existence of God, the problem of suffering, and whether faith is just wishful thinking.
As the conversation grew more personal, it became apparent that her intellectual doubts weren't the real barrier to Christian faith. Hearing good, solid answers to the big questions wasn’t really helping. For suddenly, with a sense of longing, she blurted out, "If only I could believe!"
That meeting left a deep impression on my colleague, so much so that he continued to reflect on it, respond to it, and eventually wrote a book about it.
BARRIERS TO BELIEF
These kinds of meetings show us that, just as there are different barriers to someone’s health that require their own specific treatment, there are different barriers to Christian belief that require their own unique responses. Some barriers just need sound arguments, others need inner healing, and still others need old fashioned repentance and prayer.
FIRST THINGS FIRST SUNDAYS & THE NICENE CREED
This is the first sermon of First Things, First Sundays , where we reflect upon Bible passages that underpin and relate to the phrases of the Nicene Creed.
What is the Nicene Creed? It’s a core Christian statement that we recite every Sunday after the sermon, used across various traditions. It summarizes the good news of who God is, of what He has done and become, what He does and what He will do. It serves as a declaration of core Christian belief. Today, we are going to look at passages that relate to the first phrase, "We believe," especially addressing those of us, or that part in all of us, that at least at times might want to blurt out, "If only I could believe."
THE ORIGIN OF THE CREED
Before diving into the passages, let's first talk a bit more about how the Creed came to be. For the rest of the sermon, I mostly just call it 'the Creed.' There are other creeds, but this is the most widely recognized and used creed in the Church.
The Creed was written during a critical and divided moment in Christian history when a number of people were denying the full divinity of Jesus. This denial contradicted the early Church's witness, now known as the New Testament, as well as centuries of Christians experiencing Jesus as fully divine in their worship and life together. It also undermined the very foundation of Christian hope—Jesus' divine power to save from sin and raise the dead. To a lesser extent, another group was denying His full humanity, which challenged the belief that His sacrifice truly represented and redeemed humanity, making salvation ineffective and again, further undermining Christian hope.
In other words, the stakes could not have been higher. In response, the leaders of the Church came together and wrote the Creed to preserve unity in the Church by protecting and promoting the full truth of the Good news of God in Jesus.
THE DRED SCOTT CASE
A comparable situation, with of course important differences, occurred in 1857 with the Dred Scott case, a pivotal and divided moment in U.S. history. The Supreme Court ruled that African Americans, whether free or enslaved, were not citizens and had no right to sue, effectively denying their full humanity. This decision fueled the abolitionist movement, leading to the Civil War, as well as some significant documents: the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) which abolished slavery and affirmed the full humanity of Black people.
Both the Amendment and the Creed corrected profound falsehoods—the Amendment by affirming the full humanity of Black people, and the Creed by affirming the full humanity and especially the full divinity of Christ, and both paving the way, eventually, for greater truth and unity, and more of the way things should be.
But it was centuries of affirming the truths in the Creed that made things like the abolitionist movement and the 13th Amendment possible. For example, the Creed's declarations about “Jesus as Lord,” meaning He is our true Leader; that He is “God from God, who became human,” meaning He shows us what God is like, in our shared humanity; that He “came for our salvation,” meaning—according to the gospels that are read every Sunday before the creed—that he loves, saves, and dignifies all people, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, especially those who have been treated otherwise. These kinds of truths, declared and believed over centuries, pave the way for countless good things in history, which the work of Tom Holland, Larry Siedentop, Rodney Stark, and many others attests to.
THE POWER OF BELIEF
Human belief is powerful. Just consider the placebo effect, how just believing a treatment will work can cause your brain to trigger real positive changes in your body, even if the treatment isn’t real. Showing us how strongly our mind, body and belief are connected, and how we seem to be wired to believe.
THE POWER OF BELIEVING THE OF THE GOOD NEWS OF GOD
More than this, consider the power of belief when we actually believe things that are true, especially things like the good news of God in Jesus.
In our Old Testament reading we heard God promise some good things to Abraham, and Abraham responded by believing God, and it says his faith was reckoned, was considered, as righteousness. When we believe, when we put our faith, our confidence in God and what He promises, or the good news of who He is, what He has done, what He does, and what He will do, like the things we find in the Creed, God in turn considers us, declares us, to be good and righteous people. That’s a good deal. That is powerful. It makes reciting the creed on a Sunday morning a significant moment, not just the first time, an opportunity, every time we recite it, to receive something powerful.
Paul, in his letter to the Roman church, famously wrote that he is not ashamed of the good news of God, because it is the power of God for salvation, for all who believe. Those who actually believe from the heart, the good news that we declare in the Creed, they receive power that overcomes what’s wrong in the world and in us, and frees us to live in the fullness God intended us to live in. If we yawn when we come to the creed, we might want a different approach.
We heard in our New Testament reading from 1 John: “This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.” The ultimate overcomers are those who believe, those who trust, those who put their full weight on what we declare in the Creed.
OVERCOMING BARRIERS TO BELIEF
The stakes are high. These kinds of promises make us want to believe, and want to overcome any remaining barriers to belief, in us personally, or in our family, friends, and communities.
But as we said earlier, different barriers require different approaches, some barriers just need solid evidence and sound arguments. And there are plenty of both of those for Christians beliefs.
Frank Morrison, author of Who Moved the Stone?, used to recite the Nicene Creed on a Sunday morning with a good dose of skepticism, particularly those parts about the physical resurrection of Jesus. When it came time to say, “We believe” he told himself it was just a ritual to perform, rather than a declaration of true belief. But in the long run this wasn’t satisfying to him, so he decided to look into the evidence, to settle for himself, once and for all this question of Jesus’ physical resurrection. Well the historical evidence to compelling it transformed his doubt into conviction, belief, that it did in fact happen. Some barriers need solid evidence and sound arguments.
Others need inner healing and communal support, because the trusting mechanism in us has become wounded, broken.
And still others need old fashioned repentance and prayer. In line with repentance a big barrier is inner resistance to God, to God being in charge of my life. Getting over this barrier requires a new mindset that says yes to God being in charge of my life.
And still other barriers require the grace that comes from a prayer. Plenty of people get all kinds of help without praying for it. But there is some help that will only come in response to a prayer. We want to pray especially for those kinds of things. And in the story of our gospel reading we are given such a prayer.
THE FIVE WORD PRAYER
The story begins with Jesus returning from a mountain to find a crowd arguing with his disciples. A desperate father steps forward, explaining his son's severe and spiritually influenced seizures. For those in the medical field, none of the benzo meds are going to work on these seizures, The father initially seeks help from Jesus' disciples, but they are unable to heal the boy, because, as Jesus says later, this kind can only be addressed by prayer. There is something specifically dark going on in this boy's suffering that needs to be addressed with prayer.
When the man asks Jesus for help, Jesus responds, "All things are possible for one who believes." What a huge promise, a promise the father wants to believe, for his son, and therefore wants to overcome any remaining barriers to his belief. But instead of blurting out, “If only I could believe” He sees the solution with Jesus, with help from Jesus, so he asks Jesus, that perfect 5-word prayer, “I believe, help my unbelief.”
And after one final convulsion leaves the boy seemingly lifeless, and maybe causing the father to wonder if Jesus heard his prayer, or if all this just made things worse, Jesus eventually takes the boy's hand, and the boy rises, fully healed, along with the faith of the father.
Here Jesus is displaying the good news of God from God, in this boy, and in this father, showing that, not just certain illnesses, but certain barriers to belief can be overcome by prayer, by a simple 5 word prayer, prayed to Jesus: I believe, help my unbelief.
I BELIEVE, WE BELIEVE
Coming back to the Creed. We start and continue to say throughout the Creed, “We believe.” The original Greek version is “we believe.” The later Latin translation is “I believe” from the Latin word credo where we get the English word creed from. “I believe” is how they currently say it in Roman Catholic churches, and is the version we use at baptisms. And there is a place for both. “I believe” speaks to personal commitment and faith. "We believe" speaks to communal and unifying faith.
“We believe” also helps us be honest, and to be supported by the faith of the body, if say, we are struggling with our faith, or one or more of the lines in the Creed. We can say “we believe, all of us, collectively, even if I’m not currently, for whatever reason, not believing every line individually as I would like to. We as a body are believing together.”
I want to offer you something else, not only for honesty and support, and not just to say but to pray, along with the creed, or any of the Christian creeds. And riffing off the father’s prayer, it would be:
We believe, help our unbelief.
In a moment we are going to recite the creed, and for this Sunday we will pause at the end and respond with.
We believe, help our unbelief.
To be clear I’m not changing the creed. I have no interest in causing that kind of controversy. This is merely a prayerful response to the Creed. A way to ask Jesus to overcome any remaining barriers to belief, in us personally or communally.
Jesus, we believe. Help our unbelief. May it be so.