to warn you that we're going to spend some time bouncing back and forth between right here and Mark 9, I think verse 14 is where I'm going to start there. But because, interestingly enough, if you were to kind of categorize the way that different gospel writers give us information, most of the time we would say that Mark is the one who summarizes the most. He just gives us a lot of times a short and sweet account of something that takes place. But in this particular instance, as we're going to talk about this healing that Jesus works and some things surrounding it, we're going to see that Matthew is the one that is a little more basic in his description, and Mark gives us a bunch of details that we don't get either from Matthew's account or from Luke's account. So this account is in Matthew, Mark, and in Luke. We're going to be moving back and forth to try to take in some of that teaching and information as well. But we talked about last week, if you were here, as Jesus and Peter, James, and John were on the Mount of Transfiguration, we kind of talked about the idea of kind of being on the mountain spiritually. And I think if you've been walking with the Lord for a period of time, you probably know what that's like, that there's just times in your life where the seasons when it's sweet, or you go to an event, or you're involved in something, or maybe it's just a sweet time between you and the Lord, you've been studying your Bible, you've been getting a lot out of it, whatever the case may be, we kind of go through these times of being closer to the Lord in our seasons of life. And that's a good thing. I think in my life, I could just, if I thought about it hard, I could say dozens of times where I felt like I kind of had what some would call that type of mountaintop experience, whatever shape that it took in my life. But as I mentioned last week, the problem with the mountaintop is that you can't live on the mountaintop. The air is thin and nothing grows. It's glorious. It's beautiful. It's something you celebrate. When you get to the top of a mountain, you celebrate being there. You bask in the glory of God as you survey all that you can see. But mountaintops are not made to live on. Spiritual mountaintops are a blessing, but they're not a destination. And I think we're gonna see today what happens in Jesus's life and the life of the disciples when he comes down off of the mountain. And I think Jesus is gonna give us some instruction on how to live and to live for the Lord in the valley. So I wanna read the passage in Matthew and then we're gonna immediately jump over to the Mark passage for a moment. The Bible says here in Matthew, beginning in verse 14, chapter 17, And when they had come to the multitude, a man came to him, kneeling down to him, and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and suffers severely, for he often falls into the fire and often into the water. So I brought him to your disciples, but they could not cure him. Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? Bring him here to me. And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the child was cursed from that very hour. Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, Why could we not cast it out? So Jesus said to them, because of your unbelief, for surely I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting. Let's pray for a moment. Lord, help us today. Help me. Lord, we are a weak and needy people. We need your strength. We need your encouragement. We need your correction. Lord, I pray you'd bring it to us through your word today. Lord, I ask that you'd help me to speak the truth faithfully, and you'd help those here to listen and to understand, Lord, your truth, not mine, that if I say anything that's apart from what reflects your word accurately, that they would forget it quickly. Lord, that you'd bring it to my attention as well. Father, we just ask today that you'd bless this time in Jesus' name, amen, and amen. As I said, I wanna take a moment just to begin with to jump over to the passage in Mark chapter nine. beginning in verse 14, because there's a section that is included at the beginning of this encounter that Jesus has with this man and his son that we don't get this information in the Matthew passage. In Mark 9, verse 14, the Bible says this, when he came to his disciples, he saw a great multitude around them and the scribes disputing with them. Immediately when they saw him, all the people were greatly amazed and running to him and greeted him. And he asked the scribes, what are you discussing with them? So we get this little prelude to what we just read in Matthew, that it isn't just that when Jesus came off of the Mount of Transfiguration that They went right into the time of dealing with this man and having to deal with this demonic presence and all of that. There's a little precursor here that when he comes down to where the rest of his disciples are, there's a bunch of people around, and the scribes are there, and they're having this dispute with Jesus's other disciples. Jesus arrives, they'd been on the mountain, Peter, James, John, and Jesus, they had been up on the mountain. And they had experienced, Peter, James, and John especially, but Jesus had been glorified. Jesus had been revealed in some measure of his glory. The glory of God was put on display in a way that is really probably beyond our imagination. And now they descend into the valley. They find a crowd around the disciples. They find the scribes. They're arguing with them. I might be reaching here, but I think perhaps the scribes were maybe seizing upon Jesus's absence as well as the inability of his disciples to heal this boy, maybe to do what they'd been trying to do all along, which was to discredit Jesus. It seems that they were trying to egg the crowd on and to say, look, they can't do this thing. I wanna tell you something, when we talk about this idea of spiritual mountaintops or walking in a season of being really close with God, something I need to tell you, I need to tell myself, is when those things happen, we should praise God for them, but we need to acknowledge something. God doesn't give us those times in our lives just for us to say, well, wasn't that good? I don't believe that's why God does that. Now, should we say that? Should we sometimes just kind of stand and survey all that's going on and say, wow, isn't God good? I think we should. But that's not the end goal, I believe, of Jesus giving us those times, those seasons of celebration, those seasons of closeness. I think what we often find when we kind of come off of the mountain is we find that there are brethren, brothers and sisters in Christ, that are dealing with issues. They're under attack in the valley. And I believe that most of the time, God gives us these mountaintop-type experiences to prepare us to minister to others who have trouble in the valley. I believe that. I don't think that God wastes a moment. I don't think that God wastes any season of our life, whether it's a good season, a mountaintop-type season, or it's a season where we feel like we're not just in the valley, we're in a hole in the bottom of the valley. I don't think he wastes any of it. And so when we experience these times of closeness, these times of celebration, this time of really having a real awareness of the glory of God in our life, I wanna tell you that we need to understand that God is preparing us to minister to others, to love others well. I think that's what we see here. These disciples, they're being surrounded. Jesus asked them what they're talking about and the scribes didn't answer him. It's the father of this boy who is going to answer. They knew better, didn't they? The scribes had had some dealings with Jesus already. The Pharisees had had some dealings with Jesus already. They knew once Jesus showed up, their opportunity for having the upper hand was over. And so even in the Mark account, we don't get any idea that perhaps that they were going to engage with Jesus in this way. So I'm gonna flip back to Matthew here and what we see is that we kind of get a description of what's going on. Verse 15 and 16. He says, have Lord have mercy on my son for he's an epileptic and suffers severely for he often falls into the fire and often into the water. So I brought him to your disciples but they could not cure him. There's a boy who has a problem. His father is here seeking the help of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible says, in my translation, that he was an epileptic. That's how they describe him. If you look at that word, what it literally means is moonstruck. That's what the word literally means, but it does describe someone who would have seizure-type activities. Now, we gotta recognize something. There are times when Jesus heals just illnesses, okay, in the Gospels. That happens, all right? But that's not what's going on here. It isn't that this boy just has epilepsy that's caused by some organic problem that he's got, some physical illness that he's got, and that Jesus is going to heal him of that illness. That's not what's taking place here. This boy, he's under oppression or possession of a demonic force. And so we've got to differentiate between that, between illness and between demonic oppression. And I say that today because you need to know this if you don't already, that there are people out there that are going to make, I think, the grave mistake of attributing every illness or every physical problem that we encounter to being something demonic. And I think that's a mistake. It's a big mistake, in fact. We live in a fallen world, we're fallen people, and we get sick. Now, is it possible that there are sometimes consequences of our sin, that there are demonic things that can happen in our lives that can manifest themselves as some sort of an illness? I think that can happen. All right, but it's not always the same thing. And one of the reasons I'm bringing this up, and I'm probably gonna make somebody mad this morning, but as it relates to this topic, I don't really care, and you'll see why in just a moment. I don't want you to hear me. There is a well-known so-called evangelist, all right? And he's coming to Arkansas, I think in May. And he's somebody that teaches things like this. As a matter of fact, there's a clip of this man in his so-called church standing up and telling people if their kids have this illness or that illness, including things like autism, that those kids have a demon problem, not a physical problem. He says that, and that's a lie from hell, is what that is. I understand that there are dark things in this world, but there are illnesses, there are problems that we encounter just because of the way the world is and that our bodies are not perfect anymore. We encounter things and God brings those in our lives and he uses them in our lives. But there are people out there selling folks that are born with problems and the faith healer nonsense and all that kind of stuff. And they're saying this is all about the demonic. We gotta be really careful, and I'm gonna tell you who it is, and some of you know who this is. He used to be really popular in political circles, and he's gotten a little weird. His name's Greg Locke, and he needs to be avoided. He's a wolf. It's what he is. He needs to be avoided. He's coming to Northwest Arkansas, and I'm just telling you that. If you have friends going to that, you need to tell them. Not only that, he's an adulterer who left his wife and married his secretary. All right, so I'm saying all that to warn you, because I'm your pastor, and that's somebody coming to our area, and I've heard people in the community talking about it, and he is somebody who would take scriptures like this, talking about a young man who's under demonic oppression, and say, look, that's what we're seeing today. It's not the truth. All right, and people like that need to be, they need to be guarded against. This young man was under demonic oppression. Yes, it manifested in this sense in a way where he had some sort of a convulsive sickness. And the demon was, you see not only that he had these convulsions, but when he was having those convulsions, they was trying to pitch him into the fire. It was trying to pitch him into the water. That's a description we get. He's demon possessed, he's mute. Jesus acknowledges that elsewhere that he's deaf, I think that's in the Mark account. I don't think it actually mentions it here. But he had asked, this man had come, this father, and he had asked his disciples for help, and they could not help him. Whatever it was they tried, we don't know exactly how they tried to help him, but we know that they had failed. Here's this father in the valley. Here's these men who are followers of Christ in the valley, all right? They're in the valley and they face with this situation and they can do nothing about it. Powerless, it seems, to what's going on in front of them. I want you to know today that sometimes when you're in the valley, even when you're a follower of Christ, these men were the close followers of Christ, the disciples of Jesus. Other than Peter, James, and John, the word here used is disciples, these are the close disciples of Jesus. And they're powerless, or at least they think they are. I want you to know that sometimes when you're in the valley, even when you're walking with Jesus, you're going to feel powerless against the things in this world. You're gonna feel powerless sometimes against the circumstances in your life. You're gonna feel powerless against kind of all of the things that are going on in the larger world that just seem so insane and so crazy and you don't know what to do with them. Friends, sometimes we survey the world and we say, how is this possible? What are we going to do? What are we gonna do? There's wars going on here. There's wickedness going on here. Our culture's disintegrating. All of those things we tell ourselves. I feel powerless at times when I survey even just a community, like in a place like Ozark, where there's so many people that are so lost and in such desperate need of the Lord Jesus Christ. And many that want nothing to do with the truth of the gospel. And there's times, if I'm honest, that I feel weak and powerless. I survey the apathy of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, people that claim to be Christians and they're apathetic. They don't care for the things of God. It's way down the list of priorities. And sometimes we can just feel powerless. That's, I imagine, how the disciples felt. We know it seems this is how this father felt. He says, I brought him to your disciples. They could not cure him. I want you to look at Jesus' response here. He says in verse 17, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? Bring him here to me. Jesus rebukes. The disciples, I think when he says this, you faithless generation, I think he's rebuking them, but I think he's also rebuking the people at large. This faithless generation here in this context, the people who are supposed to be God's people, the people of Israel, that's who they were supposed to be, and yet here they stand, faithless. having no trust in God, not walking with God. I don't think he's just talking about what's going on in this moment. Surely he's doing that. But beyond that, there was a whole generation of the children of Israel, in fact, generations of them who had rejected the truth of the one true God and they were rejecting Jesus who was the Messiah and God in the flesh. And he looks at them and calls them a faithless and perverse generation. I believe we, even at that time, and I think even up to this time, we could rightly have called almost any generation between that one and this one a faithless and perverse generation. Does that mean that there weren't godly people in that generation? No, absolutely not. There's people of God within every generation. God is maintaining a remnant of His people who follow after Him all along the way. But at large, there is a world that is rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ. He looks at them, he looks at his own disciples, and he's saying, you faithless, you perverse generation, but I think the last piece of this verse is so powerful to me. At the end of verse 17, what does he say? He says, bring him here to me. What a command, and it is a command in the original language there. Bring him to me. I'm gonna tell you, before we dive off into the rest of this, and there's a lot more to get to, that when we find ourselves in the position of the disciples, maybe we're trying to help someone, and for whatever reason, we can't seem to help them. Or maybe we're in the position of the father, we've got something that's very personal going on, it's happening to us, or it's happening to our family, and we just can't seem to get it right, we just can't seem to get the answers that we need, or the help that we need. Whenever we find ourselves in that situation, Jesus gives us the answer here. And the answer is, and it was here, and it always is in our lives, the answer is bring them to Jesus. That's the answer. You say, well, I got this going on, I understand, bring it to Jesus. Bring it to Jesus. I don't think Jesus is a genie in a bottle that's gonna magically cure everything that's going on in your life, but what I know is is whenever I bring my burdens to the Lord, he is faithful to take those burdens because he says his yoke is easy, his burden is light. He has taken on the heavy burden of sin and he has given us the burden of joyful obedience to him. The answer for the problems of life is bring them to Jesus. The answer for the loved one who is slipping away in illness is bring them to Jesus. You say, I prayed and I prayed and I prayed and they never got better. I'm here to tell you that your prayer did not go unheard if you are here and you're a child of God. God may have had a different plan, but the answer is still to bring them to Jesus. Because as we bring our cares to Jesus, as we bring our loved ones before Jesus, what we find is that, not that we're going to change the mind and the will of God because his mind and his will is perfect, but he will bring us the comfort, the peace, and the strength so that we might live through whatever it is we're dealing with. Jesus is going to do something miraculous here. And it's wonderful, and it's glorious. And I've seen things like that happen and so have you. It may not have looked, it didn't look like somebody, you know, like some of the things I was talking about earlier on TV, somebody gets slapped upside the head and somehow that heals them. Some of that nonsense that's on TV. But it looked like the people of God laboring in prayer for someone and God showing up and doing something. Those things still happen. I believe that. But even if they don't, It's the song that the praise team sang the other week, and I said something about it when I got up after they sang it. The idea of even if. We know God can do all things, but even if he doesn't show up in the way that I want him to show up, it is still the right thing to bring it all to Jesus and trust him with it. Jesus says, bring him to me. And immediately, What you see, and this was really, we get more of this from the Mark account, all right, because it's pretty summarized in the Matthew account. But if you come over to the Mark account, I think around verse 20, yeah, verse 20, it says, then they brought him to him. And when he, that's the boy, when he saw him, immediately the spirit convulsed him. And he fell on the ground and wallowed, foaming at the mouth. So he asked his father, how long has this been happening to him? And he said, from childhood. And often he has thrown him both into the fire and into the water to destroy him. They bring this boy who's oppressed by a demon. And the moment that they bring him into the presence of God, the boy begins to react physically. I wanna tell you something. When you truly seek to bring things to Jesus, when you're dealing with wickedness, whether it be in your own life or that that's happening to you, when you bring someone who's dealing with something, maybe they've stepped off into great sin, and whether you bring them in prayer or you try to bring the gospel of truth to them, when you do that, when you try to bring people to Jesus and the enemy is there and he's got his hooks in, there's going to be a reaction. Have you ever tried to share the gospel with somebody that just got mad I mean, I have. I've been cussed. I mean, I've learned some cuss words sharing the gospel, and I thought I knew all of them, right? People would get mad. Why? Because there is a spiritual war going on, and whenever this boy had been oppressed this way since childhood, a lifetime of control that this demon had over this young boy, And when Jesus shows up, when they bring this boy to Jesus, the demon knows that Jesus has the power to free this boy from this oppression. And I believe that when you bring the gospel to someone in the forces of darkness, whatever they may look like, the wickedness of our own hearts even sometimes, it recognizes inherently. It says, I see that Jesus is coming and that it is possible that freedom could come with him. And there will be an attempt to reject. But Jesus is still He's got the power to heal. He's got the power to save. He's got the power to do the miraculous thing. And I want you to know, I say this all the time, the greatest miracle that you and I will ever experience is not that we see somebody healed from some sort of illness, or even that we might see somebody delivered from something like demonic oppression. Those are wonderful things, but the greater miracle is that we would see someone come to know the Lord Jesus Christ. I told those of you that were here last Sunday night about my trip to Zambia and when we were teaching these pastors how they kept bringing up things about their tribal religion and the witch doctors and all of that stuff. And they were talking about that, well, wouldn't it be better just for the witches to die? That's what these pastors asked. And part of me is kind of like, well, maybe. I mean, I'm just telling you how I felt when they asked that question. But then I asked those guys, I said, what would be the greater thing, that the witch would die or that the witch would repent and place their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? I know when we hear the word witch in our culture, we think, well, that's kind of crazy. I'm telling you, witch doctors are a reality in that part of the world. Demonic oppression, the demonic spiritual warfare that goes on takes a whole different shape. We've got it here, but it's a different flavor over there. It's old school biblical kind of flavor in that part of the world. And I'm here to tell you that it would be a greater thing for a practitioner of a wicked religion, a witch doctor like that, to come to Christ to be confronted with the truth than it would be for them to perish. Now they may perish, and they may perish in judgment. But I'm gonna tell you, the flesh and the devil will fight when Jesus is brought into the equation. But Jesus still has the power. This boy had been under control his entire life until the day Jesus showed up, and it was in his plan to deliver him. And I wanna say that to you so that you might be encouraged. There might be somebody in your life that you love, that you've been praying for, that you've been talking about, that you've been bringing to God, and just over and over and over again, and there's rejection and even hatred, and don't talk to me about that nonsense. But I'm here to tell you that as you continually bring them to Jesus, as you persevere in that, that perhaps it's in the plan of God that after more and more time passes, that he would bring them unto himself through the power of the Holy Spirit. I wanna encourage you in that. Jesus still has the power to save. Jesus still has the power. And just because he doesn't do it the first time that you pray doesn't mean that he's not going to do it. Salvation is in the hand of the Lord, but it is upon us to continually strive in prayer and bring Jesus to the forefront so that the Spirit of God might work in a life. Persevere. This father, I'm sure he had tried everything. He had done this, he had done that. I bet you he'd prayed. He hears about Jesus's disciples being in the region. He says, I gotta try something. I'm gonna take him over here and see what they can do. And then the disciples couldn't do anything. How do you think the guy felt? But then, hope descends from the mountain. And there's Jesus standing there in the flesh and he cries out and he asks Jesus to heal him, to heal his son. Something else we get from the Mark account that's not in the Matthew account is this interesting discussion of the Father's faith. In verse 22, he says this. At the end, I read the other part, he says, but if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help him. Jesus responds, and I think Jesus is reacting a little bit here to the language of, if you can help him, right? Imagine Jesus saying, what do you mean, if? He says, how about this, if you can believe, All things are possible to him who believes. Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. This is, for me, this is one of the greatest confessions in the history of all of the scriptures. It's the one that hits closest to me because I am so often a vessel of unbelief. I am so often a pessimistic Christian if I'm not careful. And I pray lackadaisical prayers like, Lord, I know you can do this if you want to, but if you don't want to, God, I understand, I'll trust you anyway, and I just kind of go through the motions sometimes. And here's the reality, God's gonna do what he's gonna do, but if I can pray as this man prayed, Lord, I do believe, I know you can, but I don't believe enough, help me believe more, help me trust you more. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. The Father shows us the picture of most of us in the valley. We have hope, but it is a fading hope. We're discouraged, we're weak, we're troubled. But his prayers, his weak prayers, are answered by Christ. And when he cries out, acknowledging what? He acknowledges, number one, he acknowledges the capability of God. I believe, but he acknowledges his own weakness. Help my unbelief. That's praying, folks. God, I'm weak. I'm weak, and you're strong. Lord, I can't do it, but you can. Acknowledging, that's what worship's about, did you know that? That's really what worship's about. It's to remind us every time when we gather together and we ascribe glory to God, it's to remind us of his power, his majesty, his capability, and our weakness as we have to lay ourselves before him and acknowledge he is able and we are not. I believe, help. help my unbelief." He acknowledges something else here, that faith is a gift from God. When he says, I believe, but help my unbelief, what's he saying? I need more faith. I need to believe better. And he's asking God for faith, why? Because faith is a gift that comes from God. You can't kind of build faith up in yourself. It only comes from God. How does it come from God? In asking for it and in walking in it. And whatever measure of faith we have, we walk in that faith, I believe God grows our faith. And Jesus is gonna bring really that point up in just a moment. Verse 18, back in Matthew. This is the summary, everything we just kind of covered over the course of five to 10 minutes, Matthew covers it in one verse. And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and the child was cured from that very hour. Matthew gets to the point. He rebuked the demon. It doesn't tell us anything about the convulsing. It doesn't tell us anything about that. But there's something else that happens in the Mark account. It says, I'm not gonna turn back there for the sake of time, but it says that the boy, once the demon leaves him, he's kinda laying there and the people thought that he was dead. But Jesus goes and he lifts the boy up and it's clear that he has been freed from this demonic oppression. What we fail to realize is when we look at the valley as a place of difficulty, a place of trial, a place of struggle, What we fail to realize is the valley is the place of deliverance too. It's the place of salvation. And it's the place of not halfway salvation, not halfway freedom, of complete freedom. I want you to know today that if you are delivered by the Lord Jesus Christ, if the Spirit of God draws you and you repent of your sins and you place your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and you are saved, you are not halfway saved. You're not a quarter of the way saved. You are completely saved, and you are free from the bonds and the punishment of sin. And you say, well, I still sin. Yes, you do, but you've been delivered from that. You need no longer sin. Before you were saved, you were in bondage to sin. Sin had control of you, and it had control not only of your actions, but it had control of your will. You wanted to sin. If we're believers, yes, we still sin, but we have been freed from that bondage, and whenever we sin, it's not because we are tied to sin in the same way that we once were. It's because we continually are choosing to do that. We still do it, we need to repent, but we need to recognize we now, in Christ, we are capable of walking in holiness, of walking in freedom. We don't do that perfectly, but we have the capability. Before we're delivered, we don't have the capability. This young man, he didn't have the capability of doing anything except being thrown around and having these convulsions and all of this kind of stuff. He was under complete bondage. But once he's delivered, he has the capability to live a brand new life. And if you're in Christ, you have the capability to live a transformed life to the glory of God. It's possible that you don't do that. It's possible that you choose to sin. That's possible. But you have the capability to do differently because you've been delivered by the power of God. You've been indwelled by the Holy Spirit and you can walk in obedience to the glory of God. Jesus delivers this boy, he's left in a heap, he lifts him up, showing that he's been freed from this demonic oppression. And then here, we're gonna see something in the life of the disciples, back in Matthew 17, 19. Then we're gonna see that the valley's not just a place of deliverance, it's the place, it can't be the place of struggle, it's the place of deliverance, but it's also the place of growth. There's a reason why people build farms in valleys. It's a place where things can grow. And I think the disciples here are going to be taught something, they're going to grow. They come to Jesus in verse 19, they ask the question, why could we not cast it out? Why couldn't we? Before he answers the question directly, at least according to Matthew's account, Mark's is ordered a little differently. But Jesus says, number one, he says, because of your unbelief. Isn't that interesting? That was the confession of the Father, help my unbelief. These are the disciples who are walking with Jesus, and yet he's telling them their unbelief is still a problem. He says, because of your unbelief, for assuredly I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, move from here to there, and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you. However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting. The disciples asked this question, I think because they sincerely want to know, they sincerely want to be able to do what it is that Jesus would have them to do. I mean, how did they end up in this situation? We have accounts in the Gospel of Matthew already where the disciples are sent out and they have the ability to heal people and deliver them. Jesus gives them that ability. But it doesn't happen here. Maybe the disciples were kind of enamored by their early experience. Maybe they got the big head. They said, man, you ain't gonna believe how many people I cast demons out of today. We know these guys are, we'll talk about when we get to verse 18, how they just like to walk around going, I'm gonna tell you what, I think I'm the greatest. And the other one says, I think I'm the greatest. And they just talk walking around talking about how great they are. You'd think they'd catch a little humility from this episode, but we'll find out they probably don't, not quite yet. They ask the question, though, because I think they sincerely want to know, why could we not do this? Jesus says, because of your unbelief, or what we might just say, lack of faith, because Jesus immediately launches in to tell them how powerful faith actually is. He tells them, these don't come out by prayer and fasting, except but by prayer and fasting, which he also mentions in the Mark account. And you say, well, I mean, if I pray and fast, then I'll be able to do whatever I wanna do. No, prayer and fasting, which fasting's something we don't talk about a lot in the evangelical church. Fasting is something that is a powerful practice, and it's something that we can and should do at times in our lives. I don't think we need to go, I don't think we have to go on 40-day fasts, okay? I know people that have done that. I don't think we have to do that. But picking out times in our lives where we withhold food from ourselves, whether it's for a day or, a lot of people will fast. When I fasted at times, I would do like, I would eat supper one night and then I would not eat again until supper the next night. And that's how I would fast. And different people do it different ways. I'm not talking about this whole fad of intermittent fasting for weight loss. I'm talking about fasting for spiritual purposes. We should fast and pray, why? Because these are actions that reflect the faith that Jesus is talking about. If you have faith, guess what? You're going to pray, you're gonna fast sometimes. Because when I pray, what I'm saying, again, what I mentioned earlier is that God is capable and I am not. I can't do this on my own. I need God to do what only he can do. I need God to transform my heart. I need God to forgive me of my sin. I can't forgive myself. I need to do those things. Because if I'm a person of faith, I'm going to be praying, I'm going to be fasting, I'm going to be placing all of my eggs in the basket of God, of the Lord Jesus Christ. People say, well, don't put all your eggs in one basket. All my eggs are in one basket, and it's Jesus's basket. Her and fasting reflect faith. That's what all of this section means. Jesus is just telling them, you need to have faith. If you had the faith that you should have had, particularly these men that have been walking with Jesus, you would have been praying and fasting about this situation. And perhaps things would have been differently. Now, look, again, we don't need to drift into the extreme position, which is in error, which is telling people, well, you know, if you just had enough faith, that wouldn't have happened to you. Now, is there times when we, because we walk in sin, we end up in bad situations? Yes, but just like I said earlier, there are times when we're dealing with the circumstances of life. and we have faith and we're praying and we're talking to God, and God doesn't deliver us from the situation, he takes us through the situation. We gotta be careful that we don't fall into the trap that where people say, oh, you're sick because you don't have enough faith. You got this going on because you don't have enough faith. Oh, you don't have enough money because you don't have enough faith. Friends, that is such foolishness. It's such a worldly perspective. God uses all things to his glory in the life of those who love him, even when they're difficult. And some of the most tragic things I've ever experienced, and probably you've ever experienced, have turned out for the glory of God. You've seen it happen, and so have I. Don't fall into that trap, but in the same breath, I want to tell you, pursue faith. We know it only comes from God, but I think the way we encounter it more and more and more as we walk in whatever measure of faith we have, we continue to trust God little by little, and He grows it in us as He lives up to His promises, as we remember what He's done in the past, and we walk in it, and we walk in it, and we begin to look, and we say, man, God's got a pretty good track record in my life. It looked bad at that time, but man, God showed up in my life. God saved me. And I begin to look and I trust him more and more and more and more. That's how faith grows. And Jesus says, if you just got a little bit of it, it goes a long way. He doesn't say that's all you need is just a little bit, but he says, if you even have a little, great things are possible. Friend, I don't know what you're going through. I don't know what you're dealing with. I don't know what the circumstances are, but I want you to know this morning that the faith that you have, it's been given to you by God. If you're a Christian, it's been given to you from Him. If you will walk in it, you will see God do great and glorious things, and your faith will grow. I don't know what shape they will take. It may go through a whole lot more valleys than mountaintops, but you can trust Him in the valley, because the valley is where the good things tend to happen. Yeah, they can be difficult, but ultimately they will turn out for your growth, for the glory of God, for the deliverance even of others from their sin. This man went into the valley with a tragic situation on his hands, and he walked out, and Jesus had done something mighty. The disciples couldn't do it because they weren't walking in the reality of their faith. Let me tell you something. I want to end as I began in talking about the mountaintop. Don't let the joy of the mountaintop make you weak and impotent in the valley. because there's a danger that exists where that all we're trying to do is to get back to the mountaintop. I just want that experience again. I just wanna feel that way again. And we're almost chasing that, almost a high or an emotion or an experience. Instead of pursuing God and understanding we can pursue God just as much in the valley as we can on the mountaintop. Don't chase an experience or an emotion. Devote yourself to pursuing Christ. Pursue Jesus. Friends, I want you to know today, wherever you may be in the journey of life, God is there. And God may not show up in the way you want him to, but God is there, and he's to be trusted. I wanna encourage you in your faith in Christ. Praise Him when you're on the mountain, but trust Him when you're in the valley. It's why King David said, even in the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. Why did he fear no evil? Because thou art with me. And when God is with you, you can walk wherever it is you have to walk, and you can do it to the glory of God. Perhaps you're walking, you're here today and you say, well, I'm in the darkness, I'm weak, I don't know what's going on. I'm here to tell you, is it because you don't know Jesus? I'm gonna ask you that. Is it because you don't know Jesus? Is it because you're trying to deal with all of this? You're trying to walk through this world without the presence of God in you and with you? Perhaps that's the case. I don't know who you are, I don't know why you're here. But I would beg of you to trust in Jesus today because he is the same God in the valley that he is on the mountain. That's what the old song says. God on the mountain is still God in the valley. Y'all know that old song? It's a good one. You ought to keep it in your mind as you walk through this life. But if you know not Jesus, the first thing you must do is flee to him, repenting of your sin, trusting in his life, his death on the cross, and his resurrection from the dead. Christian, my encouragement today is mostly for you. Mountain or valley, thin or flush, whatever may come, God is good, he's to be trusted, and he will do great and mighty things if you'll walk in obedience to him, trusting him all along the way. He is good, he is God on the mountain and in the valley. Trust Jesus today. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the day. Thank you for your word. I pray you used it. I don't know what way you might have used it in the lives of those who've heard, but I know the way you've used it in my life, I pray that I would walk in it as others would as well. Lord, I pray that you would just do great and mighty things that wherever we may find ourselves, all of the folks that are here, that you might encourage us, you might strengthen us with the reality of your presence, the reality of your deliverance, the reality of our growth in grace and faith. Father, we look to you today because there's nowhere else to look. I pray for the one that might not know you at all, Lord Jesus. And I ask that through the power of the Holy Spirit, you convict their hearts, you draw them to yourself, that they would repent of their sins and believe in the gospel today, so that they too can walk through this life in faith, glorifying the name of Jesus, that he might be high and lifted up, and he might draw men to himself. We pray in his name, amen. And amen.