He went away from there and came to His hometown, and His disciples followed Him. When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard Him were astonished. “Where did this man get these things?” they said. “What is this wisdom given to Him, and how are these miracles performed by His hands? Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And aren’t His sisters here with us?” So they were offended by Him. Then Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his household.” So He was not able to do any miracles there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them. And He was amazed at their unbelief. (Mark 6:1-6 — Holman Christian Standard Bible)
Jesus had traveled and preached throughout Galilee (the most northern of the 3 Israeli provinces). Wherever He went He healed the sick, drove out demons, and did great miracles; there was joy in all the towns and cities after one of His visits. But when Jesus came to His home town, He could not do any miracles, and healed only a few sick people. What was wrong? Jesus' power was the same, but the people were different — they had no faith.
In fact, everyone has faith; faith is a gift of God. But each one of us chooses either to use it, or to ignore it. Faith increases when we hear the Word of God and when we exercise it.
The people in Nazareth had faith, but what killed their faith? They “knew” Jesus, or thought they knew Him. They had watched Him grow up from a little boy, knew His parents, His brothers and sisters… and because they had a certain amount of familiarity with Him they wrongly assumed He could not perform great miracles, that He could not be God… “He’s Jesus that went to 2nd grade with my son.” But like we mentioned in yesterday’s devotional, Abraham did not understand how God's promise of a son and His command to sacrifice that son could both be true — and yet he obeyed without trying to figure it out and ended up seeing that God had a wonderful plan in mind all along. Faith demands that we temporarily suspend our belief in the five sense and rely on it alone. God asks us to believe, not to understand everything.
We are not so different from the people of Nazareth. God may be convicting you to pray for a miracle that you have already prayed for many times before, and your mind keeps repeating: “I know prayer isn’t going to resolve this problem — I’ve already prayed a thousand times and nothing changed.” But like the people of Nazareth, you may not know as much as you think you know. Our God is a god of miracles, whether or not we can figure out how they’re going to work. Maybe we haven’t prayed strong enough, or in the right way, or maybe we just need to persist in our prayer. What we cannot do is go through life relying on our own flawed knowledge, canceling out our faith at every turn.
Make sure God is not amazed at your unbelief.
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