The Power of Prayer
Jeffery Anselmi / General
The Power of the Gospel / Prayer; Power / Matthew 17:14–20
Jesus exorcises a demon, even as he reprimands the disciples for their failure to trust the one to whom their prayers ought to have been offered.
INTRODUCTION
• Today we will come across a situation that I have never seen before. However, some parents claim when their children turn into teenagers, they have experienced the situation we will see in our text today!
• As we have been working through our Power of the Gospel series, we have been looking at the various areas in which Jesus has supremacy.
• Spoiler alert, Jesus has power over everything!
• Since Jesus has power overall, the Gospel is powerful!
• Again, Jesus demonstrates his power, this time in the act of exorcism.
• In contrast to other demonstrations of Jesus’s power, this episode places full emphasis on the inability of his disciples to accomplish the same decisive healing.
• In fact, the disciples' inability to cure the boy’s seizures is repeated three times—first by the father, then by the disciples themselves, and finally by Jesus.
• The nine disciples who tried to exorcise the demon from the child had been doing this type of thing for a while, yet when it came to the situation we will examine today, they failed.
• They failed because they forgot to exercise a powerful weapon they possessed; that is the weapon we will explore today.
• The Big Idea of the Message: Jesus exorcises a demon, even as he reprimands the disciples for their failure to trust the one to whom their prayers ought to have been offered.
• As we examine the disciples' failure, we can learn from them so we do not fail.
• Let’s turn to Matthew 17:14-16 to begin this morning.
Matthew 17:14–16 CSB
14 When they reached the crowd, a man approached and knelt down before him.
15 “Lord,” he said, “have mercy on my son, because he has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire and often into the water.
16 I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him.”
SERMON
I. Praying to the right source.
• Put yourself in the position of this father. His son has been having terrible seizures his entire life.
• With the seizures, the boy loses total control of himself to the point of physical harm taking place.
• This boy has been falling into the fire; he has fallen into the water, and no telling what other harmful things have been happening to him.
• Much like the events we studied last week, particularly concerning the woman who had been bleeding for many years, I have to think the family of this boy had spent a great deal of time and money seeking treatment for his condition.
• We talked a little last week about the concept of going to the right place for help.
• We understand this concept because usually if we have a heart issue, we do not set up an appointment with a foot doctor, we go to the heart doctor, and depending on our issue, we would go to a specific type of heart doctor.
• Now for some context to what had just happened before Jesus and Peter, James, and John came down from the mountain after a day or so.
• This event follows immediately on the description of Jesus’s transfiguration.
• The transfiguration is a spectacular demonstration of Jesus’s authority over nature: “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light,” and Moses and Elijah appear next to him, speaking with him (Matthew 17:1–3).
• What’s more, God speaks to all who are present, as he did at Jesus’s baptism. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (17:5).
• Could there be any more impressive display of divine authority?
• Jesus has left all but Peter, James, and John at the base of the mountain. It’s to these men that they return to find “the misery of the human condition” (Eugene Boring, The Gospel of Matthew, The New Interpreter’s Bible 8 [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995], 367).
• In verse 16, the father said he had taken his son to the disciples for them to heal the boy.
• They could not get the job done. Look at Matthew 10:1.
Matthew 10:1 CSB
1 Summoning his twelve disciples, he gave them authority over unclean spirits, to drive them out and to heal every disease and sickness.
• For reasons we will look at in a bit, the nine disciples were not the right place to go for healing.
• We have to pray to the right source when we pray.
• We have to know where to turn when we need help.
• Let’s look at Mark’s version of how this was going down.
Mark 9:14–18 CSB
14 When they came to the disciples, they saw a large crowd around them and scribes disputing with them.
15 When the whole crowd saw him, they were amazed and ran to greet him.
16 He asked them, “What are you arguing with them about?”
17 Someone from the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you. He has a spirit that makes him unable to speak.
18 Whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive it out, but they couldn’t.”
• The man went to the wrong source for help.
• When you pray, who are you really praying to? Are you praying to God, or are you praying to God in such a way that you are not really seeking God, but rather you are telling Him what you want to be done?
• If that is the case, then you are not really praying; you are telling. Big difference!
• When the crowd saw Jesus, they were amazed and went right to Him, and the father more or less throws himself before the Lord!
• So when we pray, we need to pray to the right source.
• Let’s look at verses 17-18 as the text unfolds another principle for us.
Matthew 17:17–18 CSB
17 Jesus replied, “You unbelieving and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring him here to me.”
18 Then Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him, and from that moment the boy was healed.
II. Praying through the frustrations.
• Sometimes we can be so frustrated with a situation that we quit praying, and we lose faith.
• When Jesus is told what has happened, it is obvious even He is frustrated.
• We can see this by the tone and things He said to the people gathered, and I believe He is looking right at the nine left behind as he, Peter, James, and John went up the mountain together.
• I have to think the nine were also frustrated and embarrassed at what happened or what did not happen.
• These men were given the tools to take care of the situation, but yet here they are, they failed.
• If the religious leaders were there, I am sure they had a field day at the expense of the nine.
• What do we do when we get frustrated by a situation? Do we prayer harder, or do we work harder, or do we give up?
• These men were capable.
Luke 10:17 CSB
17 The seventy-two returned with joy, saying, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.”
• Yet even though capable and experienced in dealing with situations such as the boy was experiencing, they were impotent.
• Jesus comes on the scene, and He seems rather irritated at the disciples in particular.
• Seemingly frustrated with his powerless followers, Jesus indicts the entire generation as unbelieving and perverse.
• Their powerless condition undermined the reality of God’s powerful presence and his sovereign reign.
• In a kind of “prophetic lament,” Jesus poses the rhetorical question, “How long shall I put up with you?”
• The words spell out in graphic terms Jesus’ exasperation with the faithless impotency of his disciples.
• Rather than exercise the divine authority given them, they had become part of a “faithless” generation in Jesus' absence.
• I wonder as these men tried to cast out the demon or heal the boy if their frustration level rose?
• When we get frustrated and embarrassed, we cannot be taken away from our goto, PRAYER!
• Based on what Jesus said and by His level of frustration, I bet these men lost faith in the abilities Jesus had given them and abilities they had used before with great success!
• From what we see in Mark 9:29, it is obvious what these men failed to do, PRAY!
Mark 9:29 CSB
And he told them, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer.”
• The implication was the disciples forgot their most important weapon.
• For whatever reason, maybe overconfidence in their abilities, maybe the level of frustration they were experiencing, they were not engaged in prayer.
• What situation are you so frustrated with that you have not been praying about it?
• Do you think your situation is so beyond help that God cannot even help you?
• Nonetheless, Jesus heals the boy.
• Why couldn’t the disciples do the healing?
Matthew 17:19–20 CSB
19 Then the disciples approached Jesus privately and said, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?”
20 “Because of your little faith,” he told them. “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will tell this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
III. Praying with a strong faith.
• After the folks dispersed, the disciples approached Jesus in private to ask Him why they could not drive out the demon.
• Jesus tells them it was a faith issue.
• In Mark 9:29 Jesus tells them:
Mark 9:29 CSB
And he told them, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer.”
• When you combine these thoughts, you can see they did not have enough faith even to pray. Jesus always prayed to the Lord.
• Faith plays a vital part in prayer.
• In Mark’s gospel, Jesus talks to the father before the healing.
Mark 9:23–24 CSB
Jesus said to him, “ ‘If you can’? Everything is possible for the one who believes.”
Immediately the father of the boy cried out, “I do believe; help my unbelief!”
• The disciples fail to pray.
› It’s a problem that hasn’t disappeared. “It is a strange thing,” writes Christian Wiman, “how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of inadequacy and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits.
› You thought you were unhappy because this or that is off in your relationship, this or that was wrong in your job, but the reality is that your sadness stemmed from your aversion to, your stalwart avoidance, of God. … You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being is unsure.”
› (Christian Wiman, “Hive of Nerves,” American Scholar, June 1, 2010, https://theamericanscholar.org/hive-of-nerves/#.Xg15BRdKhME).
• The disciples failed to pray, but we need not do the same. Engaged in diligent attention to that “ground of being,” we’ll find our own power to trust and thrive will grow as we cultivate our relationship to God through his Son Jesus Christ.
• It may be that they had become infatuated with previous successes and had forgotten the true source of their power.
• Or, possibly the absence of Jesus, coupled with the seriousness of the boy’s condition, caused them to doubt their ability to remedy the situation.
• Whatever the exact reason for their “little faith,” their focus was more on themselves than on the God who could empower them.
› Jesus insists that if they possessed even a small amount of genuine faith that truly trusted in God, they would have access to unlimited resources through the power of God.
› Jesus’ proverbial and hyperbolic illustration of faith the size of a mustard seed commanding mountains to be removed, drives home the enormous potentiality of faith.
CONCLUSION
• What situation is keeping you from exercising your faith?
• What is happening in your life that is bigger than your faith? It the situation that you no longer are willing to pray about.
• Maybe you are failing to exorcise the demons from your life because you do not have faith that God can cast them out.
› Application Point: Prayer demonstrates a relationship of practical trust in Jesus’s power to accomplish more than we might ever imagine.
• Whichever demons, whatever situation has you defeated, take it to the Lord in faith in prayer!
