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.”
— Matthew 17:16-17
Men, Jesus has just come down from the transfiguration and is confronted by a man with an “epileptic” son. His son needs healing and the disciples could not do it. Bringing the boy to Jesus, Jesus answers; “O faithless and perverse generation, how long will I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?” Jesus is roughly 6 months from the cross. Knowing His time is coming short, He really wants to see His followers understand what He came to do. Not just to die for sin, but to reconnect man to the Father, and to dominion. Jesus is disappointed here. Jesus calls them faithless. We often use faith and belief interchangeably, but that is not accurate. The 9 disciples who remained behind “believed” in Jesus. But they failed in faith, or “seeing” the world through Jesus’ perspective. Jesus calls them a perverse generation.
Our flesh is corrupted, and seeing the world through the eyes of our flesh perverts our sight and thoughts. Seeing through Jesus, by faith, purifies what we see. When you turn on the television to the nightly news, do you see opponents? Do you see a mess you’d like to be excused from? Do you see brokenness and opportunity to shine His light into darkness? Are you angry with what you see or are you hurt and burdened for what you see? What we see says everything about our level of faith. How long will Jesus bear with us? How long until we see what Jesus would do and act accordingly? How long until we stop seeing a sick child and try to heal issues on our own? How long until we see a sick child as Jesus sees it, so we can then be vessels of Jesus’ healing power on earth? I ask myself as well. I want to “see” more, and I hope you do too.
Move forward men, looking closer at Jesus to see what He seen.
Vance Durrance
What does the world look like to Him? We can’t engage the world as He would until we understand the world as He does. We must pan back from our circumstances and ask Jesus for a Holy vantage point from which to acknowledge our surroundings.
