Lord, Help My Unbelief: Stories of How God Answers Prayers When We Are Afraid to Have Faith

By Arthur Garrison

God sees. God hears. God answers.

Life hurts, and in times of failure, do you wonder if God hears? Does he see? Does he care? The Bible says have faith and it also says hope deferred makes the heart sick. How do you have faith when your heart is sick? Lord, Help My Unbeliefreviews famous stories in the Bible with a focus on the human pain within these stories, and how God sees our pain and doubts and fears and works with them, and in them, to prove his love for us and to make life better.  

Lord, Help My Unbelief proposes that God's heart and hand are shown to be practical and can be counted upon. In times of trouble, it is less about our faith and more about his faithfulness in the process of time. The heart is made sick in the middle of that process, but in God's time that longing of the heart is fulfilled by the root of the tree of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Keledei Publications
• Release date: Jan 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958139073

Arthur Garrison

Arthur Garrison is a professor at Kutztown University, and he has published on various Christian living topics including biblical hermeneutics and biblical worldview on faith, law, and justice. His writings have appeared in academic journals and publications on other topics, including race, crime, criminal justice history, and Supreme Court jurisprudence.

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cover-image, Lord Help My Unbelief

Lord, Help My Unbelief

Stories of How God Answers Prayers

When We Are Afraid to Have Faith

Arthur Garrison

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An Imprint of Sulis International Press

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LORD, HELP MY UNBELIEF

Copyright ©2022 by Arthur Garrison. All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations for reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher. Email: [e-mail].

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked AMP taken from the Amplified® Bible (AMP), Copyright © 2015 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org.

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV from the King James Version, public domain.

Scripture quotations marked LEB are from the Lexham English Bible. Copyright 2012 Logos Bible Software. Lexham is a registered trademark of Logos Bible Software.

Scripture quotations marked MSG from The Message. Copyright © by Eugene H. Peterson 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide, www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2007, 2013 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NLV are taken from the New Life Version, copyright © 1969 and 2003. Used by permission of Barbour Publishing, Inc., Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683. All rights reserved.

ISBN (paperback): 978-1-958139-06-6, 979-8-215463-66-6

ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-958139-15-8

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-958139-07-3

Published by Keledei Publications

An Imprint of Sulis International

Los Angeles | Dallas | London

www.sulisinternational.com

The Apostles’ Creed

I believe in God the Father Almighty,

Maker of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;

who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,

born of the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell;

on the third day He rose again from the dead;

He ascended into heaven,

and He is seated on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;

from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost;

[the Matthew 16:18 Church under the Lord Jesus Christ];

the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins;

the resurrection of the body;

and the life everlasting.

To Fay Garrison Mitchell, my mother, who taught me, both through her life and words, about God and His Son Jesus.

❖

God said of Himself,

[W]ho shut in the sea with doors . . . I fixed My limit for it . . . I said, This far you may come, but no farther, and here your proud waves must stop! (Job 38:8, 10–11).

❖

Yet it is written of Him,

And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice (1 Kings 19:11–12).

Contents

Preface

Old Testament Stories of God’s Faithfulness in Times of Abuse and Failure

1. A Father’s Story (Mark 9:23–25; Matt. 17:1–21)

2. The Encounter at the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:6–7)

3. A Blind Man Receives His Sight on the Road to Jericho (Mark 10:48–52)

4. The Centurion and Jesus (Luke 7:1–10)

5. The Woman with the Issue of Blood (Luke 8:43–48)

6. Mary, Martha, and Lazarus (John 11:21–32)

7. Cornelius and Peter (Acts 10:1–35)

8. Jairus’s Daughter (Luke 8:40–42; 49–56)

9. Lessons of the Five Thousand (John 6:1–14)

10. The Samaritan Woman and the Nobleman’s Son (John 4:46–54)

11. A Man’s Crew Goes Through the Roof (Matt. 9:1; Luke 5:17; Mark 2:5)

12. What a Sinful Woman Knows about Faith (Luke 7:36–50)

13. The Hope of the King and Nineveh (Jonah 3:9; 2 Sam. 12:22)

14. The Canaanite Mother and Puppies (Matt. 15:21–28)

15. The Trial of the Adulteress (John 7:53–8:1–11)

16. The Battle at Gethsemane (Luke 22:43–44)

17. Jesus and Simon, the Man from Cyrene (Mark 15:21)

Epilogue: Let the Redeemed of the Lord Say So

Appendix: A Hermeneutical Proof of the Bible

Preface

This book is premised on the belief that God sees, hears, and answers our tears.

God not only captures our tears in a bottle (Ps. 56:8) and writes them down in His book (Mal. 3:16; Ps. 139:16), but also acts in our lives even when our faith is less than a mustard seed (Luke 17:6; Matt. 17:20).

This book is also premised on the belief that we can be sure God sees, hears, and answers our tears because the Scriptures promise that He does. God has elevated His Word—the Bible—above His own name (Ps. 138:2). And that Word became flesh and walked the earth (John 1:1–2, 14) to be a comfort and guide for humanity.

❖

Paul recorded in his second letter to Timothy,

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. (2 Tim. 3:16–17)

The Bible is a practical book. Through the Bible, God provides both protection and direction for life as it is on earth. The Bible was written to comfort as well as provide conviction (correction). The Bible is a guide as we all walk together, fellow-passengers to the grave,¹ on our way to meet God face to face.

While this book is not written to reflect any particular denomination, I find agreement with the Baptist tradition of faith regarding the Bible.

We believe that the Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its matter; that it reveals the principles by which God will judge us, and therefore is, and shall remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and opinions shall be tried.²

The Bible being true, it nonetheless must be interpreted, as Paul instructed Timothy, rightly dividing the word (2 Tim. 2:15).

That rightly dividing includes a faith in its truth.

The Bible is the final authority on all things that it addresses.

And yet, it does not address everything. [The] Bible is God’s instruction for God’s best in our lives.

In other words, the Bible is not as much about good and bad, as it is wise and foolish.

And it is about God’s creational intentionality. I, by faith, believe that this book shows me what God intended from the very beginning and gives me principles upon how to live with God and how to repair humanity. I believe that the Bible is the manual that God has given us and given the world so that you and I can live our best lives.

The Bible may not tell you everything, but it does tell you the basics about how to live this life.

It is sixty-six books, written over a fifteen hundred year period, that deals primarily with God’s redemptive plan for our lives.

It is a book that was not dropped down here in completed form, and then fell apart, as some people believe. But that God chose people over a fifteen hundred year period [through whom He wrote the Bible]. . . .

What we believe is that God worked with humanity in the [imperfectness] of humanity [and] ultimately gave us a book that bears His redemptive plan and His heart. . . .

The Bible is God’s word. . . . In order for the Bible to make sense, you need to read it through the lens of Jesus Christ. In order for life to make sense, you need to see it through the lens of Jesus Christ. . . . [Jesus is] the key that unlocks the Scriptures. [Jesus is] the door that leads you into the very presence of God. [Jesus is] the way, the truth, and the life. [Jesus is] the one that gives you everything that you need in God.³

The Bible is God’s attempt to reach mankind. To tell mankind who he is in the eyes of heaven and to introduce him to the love and majesty of His Son, who rectifies all mankind to the love of God.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

You have magnified Your word above all Your name. (Ps. 138:2)

Come now, and let us reason together, says the

Lord

. (Isa. 1:18)

Put Me in remembrance; let us contend together; state your case, that you may be acquitted. (Isa. 43:26).

Paul wrote to Timothy, From childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 3:15), and encouraged him to be diligent to present [himself] approved to God . . . rightly dividing the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15).

The Bible, like any text, is to be read literally. The word literally has a specific meaning within the science of textual interpretation.

First, the meaning of the written text is determined by the writer, not the reader.

Second, there is a process of determining an understanding of the message that the writer is trying to convey.

This process of understanding the Bible literally is what Paul described as rightly dividing the word of truth, which is done through interpreting the text through multiple lenses.⁴

First, understand that the literal words of a text were written in a particular time in a particular historical context for a particular people in that specific time and event and context.

Second, read that specific text with the goal of understanding the underlying principle that God wants to apply to the present-day reader.

Third, focus on the underlying principle of the text through a Christological lens to understand how that text reflects Jesus and how Jesus wants to address the context of the life of the present-day believer.

Fourth, understand how the principle of the text and how the Christological lens of the context of the Word of God has both collective and individual implications for the contemporary world.

The focus of this book is to show through the stories of the Bible that God does see our pains and trials and provides answers to injustices.

❖

Did you ever sit on your bed or in the mess of your life or in the dust of your broken dreams and look to heaven and said, Why? What do you do when all you have done has failed and when you look into heaven, all you can say is, I have no more faith?

The Bible says we must have faith (Mark 11:22–24), but it also says hope differed makes the heart sick (Prov. 13:12). How are those two things squared? How do you have faith when your heart is sick?

In Lord, Help My Unbelief, I review some of the most famous stories in the Bible, from Sarai’s kidnapping to Hagar’s abandonment—from Leah being unloved to Joseph’s betrayal—from Rahab’s rescue to Ruth’s redemption—from Esther’s victory to Job’s restoration, among many others, all culminating in the story of Jesus’s battle with Satan and His own anguish. I review these stories from the human perspective of the pain they endured to the triumph they achieved. I hope to show how God actually saw their pain and how, by their example, we can know that God sees our pain and doubts and fears and works with them and in them to prove His love for us.

In reading Lord, Help My Unbelief, you will learn in practical terms that in times of need, God’s heart and hand can be counted upon. In times of trouble, it is less about our faith and more about His faithfulness. He is faithful in the process of time between failure and success.

Old Testament Stories of God’s Faithfulness in Times of Abuse and Failure

Did you ever have a time in your life when you looked up to heaven and asked if God was paying any attention? Even more, did you ever look up and ask, Do You know what the [colorful word or two] You are doing? When I asked God these and other questions, to be honest sometimes I got no answers.

Other times I got answers from other Christians that were cookie-cutter answers, like Just have faith, or Your time will come, or The Lord is testing your faith. I asked questions, and I got blame-oriented questions like, How are you living so that you are giving the devil room to steal your blessings—the blessings God is showering on you?

Or worse, I was told that God is a God of wrath, and He was directly punishing me for my past sins. I was told that failure in my life would follow me until I repented. I was told this while being told that God was good. What?

I was told once, God has filled your blessing bag, but you have sin in your life, so there is a hole in your bag. So God is watching the blessings He gave me fall out of the bag into the gutter of my life and run down the drain. Think that through. That makes God stupid and me a fool for following a fool.

Wow, thanks!

At a time when all I could do was to believe God existed and cling by my fingernails that God was not laughing at me, I watched a play at a church I was faithfully attending (because I was told that God blesses those who serve in His church and that was the way for His blessings to find me), and it was about a man who lost his job and was in financial distress. Okay, I was in a position in which I could relate. Scene one showed him hit rock bottom. By scene three, he was praising God, had a new job, with no long-term financial injury, and his marriage was secure. Okay, it was a Christian church play after all. Happy endings. Fine. But the play implied that the change from scene one to three was days! And it only took days for a life-altering disaster to be resolved. All you need is faith. The same cookie-cutter answer, again.

I was close to being done.

My issue was less about what God was doing, although I thought He was doing close to nothing, and more about these cookie-cutter empty statements about faith that God works in mysterious ways.

My resentment was changing from focusing on God—I would deal with Him later—and shifting to hostility regarding the useless advice I was getting about God from church.

To make matters worse, this advice was the dominant message that televangelists were posting all over Christian media. That along with the prosperity gospel, which was asserting, if not implying, God was dropping blessings out of the sky on all of His children, and if I was facedown, behind up, in the dust, there was something wrong with me, because God is good and He treats all of his children the same. If things are bad, it’s my fault by definition, because nothing bad comes from Him.

Great! I was facedown, and all the church had to offer was repent and seek spiritual counseling to determine what sin is resisting your blessing.

I was told there is seed-time harvest with God. Seed is you acting in faith in the face of difficulty and things looking bad in the physical, a church term to state that you should look past your five senses and see in the spiritual what God has for you, because, as I was told to sickening levels, We walk by faith and not by sight.

Fine, the Scriptures do say that. We do walk by faith. But here is the lesson that would have been helpful to me at the time. It’s not the seed that requires faith—IT’S THE TIME between the seed and the harvest!

What would have been a help is being told that in that space—the time between seeding and harvesting—nothing happens and that nothing does not mean I am at fault and need to repent and break generational curses! Time means time. The analogy is this: when the farmer plants the seed in the ground and waters it and fertilizes it—that’s it. He has to wait for an entire season to come and go before plant one comes out of the ground, much less the harvest. There is no fault in the middle season. Nothing is supposed to happen in the physical. In that season, you do what you have to and wait for the blessing to come.

Faith is grown in the waiting, not the planting.

But even more, God is not so petty that He sits on the sideline and lets the devil steal all of His blessings from you because you have issues and the slightest sin blocks the almighty hand of God! That’s not how it works!

As we will see in various Bible stories, God blesses people who are in sin because He wants them to see Him and His grace. God acts even in our sin to get us out of our sin.

He derives no pleasure nor achieves none of His goals by watching our sin, while doing nothing and waiting for us to repent. The point of Jesus is that He redeems us from sin and then says, Go and sin no more.

God knows we are, by nature, no good (Gen. 6:5; Ps. 51:5), but He blesses us anyway (Num. 6:24–26; Phil. 4:19; James 1:17). But some blessings take time to mature in a fallen world. Sometimes He does not deliver us from being facedown, but He stands with us when we pick ourselves up and walk out of the valley of death, shadow or not. He does this to prove He is with us in the valley.

When we are in the valley of the shadow of death, when we have our evil day at the hands of Satan, God sees and reacts. As Pastor Tony Evans observed, Sometimes God takes you through it. Sometimes He delivers you out of it. And sometimes He gives you the strength to deal with it.⁵

The knowledge of God working with us in the valley of the shadow of death and how we grow there is the point of our trials. We learn who God is and who we are in the valley. What we learn, how God proves Himself, and what we become is a process of developing faith, and time is part of the process. Faith is developed in the time between what God promises and seeing that promise manifest in our lives. It’s a learning curve. The point—don’t beat yourself or God up over the time part of the process.

❖

Paul writes in Romans 15:4 that the Scriptures were written for our knowledge and hope. That through the stories of the Old Testament, which is what he had to work with at the time, we would learn about God and through those stories we can be encouraged in all times of our lives.

But one of the problems with how the great stories of the Old Testament are taught is that they are not taught with a fair reflection of time. The stories, when we read them in the Bible, don’t always let you perceive and feel the months or years between a promise of God and its manifestation. Sometimes the stories are taught or read as if the solution occurred literally one space after the period of the problem statement. In reading the Bible and gaining faith through reading it, the issue is not whether God will come through. The issue is dealing with the space between God saying yes or I am here or you are healed and you seeing it in the physical.

Consider the stories of Sarai and Rebecca when their husbands in acts of pure cowardice abandon them into the possibility of forced marriage and rape because their husbands feared they would be killed if they claimed their wives as belonging to them. As we discuss stories, consider how long they suffered pain and fear and then God heard them. And then rescued them. The point of their stories is God sees and God protects.

Sarai and the Kings of Egypt and Gerar

In Genesis 12 we are introduced to Abram, who later would be renamed Abraham. God tells him to leave his home in Haran to move into the land of Canaan, which God would give to him and his descendants. This is the famous promise to Abraham—that God would make him a blessing for all the nations of the earth.

Abram and his wife, Sarai, later to be renamed Sarah, took all his belongings and left Haran, modern-day Syria, and traveled south and settled in Bethel, modern-day east Jordan, which was in the land of Canaan.

And now comes the problem.

God told him to settle in the land of Canaan, but There was a famine in the land and Abram went down to Egypt to dwell there, for the famine was severe in the land (Gen. 12:10).

Okay, so picture how this story begins. God told him to go to the land of Canaan, a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you (Gen. 12:1–2). But when Abram saw the famine, he disregarded what God had said and went to a place that looked better. Straightforward disobedience.

Now, we are told that Sarai was drop-dead gorgeous. Genesis 12:11 says she was a woman of beautiful countenance. Because she was so beautiful, Abram thought the men in Egypt would kill him and take her for themselves. So he said to his wife, The place I am taking you is full of men who will take you for themselves and will kill me. So when we go to such a place, Please say you are my sister, that it may be well with me’" (Gen. 12:13).

Now picture her face. She is a woman whose only protection is her husband, who just uprooted her from her home in Haran on nothing more than a promise from a God who did not talk to her, and her husband just said, Because you are so good looking, the men will take you for themselves after killing me! They will kill me, rape you, or force you to marry someone you don’t know. I know this for a fact, but let’s go to such a neighborhood anyway because I just quit my job—to put it in a contemporary light. This is who the Scriptures will later say is the father of our faith! Never say God can’t take you—your foolishness and all—and not make you a great person with some time and effort on His part.

Anyway, he takes her to Egypt, and the men indeed think she is beautiful (Gen. 12:14). They are so impressed that they recommend her to Pharaoh himself, and they take her from Abram and give her to Pharaoh (Gen. 12: 15).

Now, here is where we talk about how God is not blind to the pain and fears and weakness of those whom He loves and who are under His eye and protection. This is the theme I hope to reveal through this book.

Sarai was walking down the street with her husband, and she has told all the men, per Abram’s request, that she is his sister. Pharaoh sends a detachment of guards and takes her from Abram, and he is given a dowry for her (Gen. 12:16). She is taken to Pharaoh’s house. She is in a harem, at best, or alone in his house, at worst. She is defenseless. She knows what can be done to her. She is crying out to a God she does not know, pleading to Him to not let them hurt her. God help me, she says. She did not put herself in this mess. Her coward of a husband did, after he went to a land God did not give him. He took her to a place where he knew she could be taken from him.

Sarai is in Pharaoh’s house, kidnapped, waiting for the worst. But she is not touched. Then she waits, and while waiting for her fate, she sees and hears of plagues landing on Pharaoh’s house. Great plagues, the Bible says (Gen. 12:17). We are not told how many, but great plagues implies more than a few, and they occur in sequential order. Both Sarai and Pharaoh learn together a truth: God is God, and He protects what is His. Remember God spoke to Abram, not Sarai. She did not know God yet, but in her fear and suffering and helplessness, she saw God move heaven and earth to redeem her—and remember, she was not touched. When she saw God defend her and come to her aid, she was able to