Lord I Believe, Help My Unbelief

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke, the first chapter.

In the days of Herod, the king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah of the division of Abijah, and he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was

Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the

Lord, but they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.

Now, while he was serving as priest before God, when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the

Lord and to burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense.

And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing on the right side of the altar of incense.

And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him,

Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayers have been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name

John. And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the

Lord, and he must not drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the

Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the

Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit of power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, and to make ready for the

Lord a people prepared. And Zechariah said to the angel, How shall

I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years. And the angel answered him,

I am Gabriel, I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news, and behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.

And the people were waiting for Zechariah, and they were wondering at his delay in the temple. And when he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the temple, and he kept making signs to them, and remained mute, and when his time of service was ended, he went to his home, and after these days his wife

Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she kept herself hidden, saying, Thus the

Lord has done for me in the days when he looked upon me, to take away my reproach among the people.

In the name of Jesus. I am reminded of that account when Jesus comes down from the

Mount of Transfiguration, and he finds a kerfuffle. You know how kerfuffles go.

Usually people are talking loudly to each other, there's words going back and forth, and there's a little bit of pandemonium, a wee bit of mayhem, and what has happened is that a man has brought his young son, who has a demon, to Jesus' disciples, the ones who were remaining at the base of the

Mount of Transfiguration, while Jesus took Peter, James, and John up, and they saw Christ transformed before their eyes, and Moses and Elijah happened to show up.

But when they get down to the bottom, the disciples who were left, well, the kerfuffle is going on, and well, they're in a fight.

The Pharisees are screaming at the disciples, the disciples are probably yelling back, all because this fellow brought this boy who had a demon, and they couldn't cast it out.

And when Jesus shows up at this kerfuffle, what ends up happening is the boy manifests.

The demon shows itself, and the kid goes into a full convulsion.

I kind of imagine it, kind of like the Exorcist or one of those kind of movies. He's down there going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, doing whatever demon -possessed people do, and Jesus, rather than tending to the boy, tends to the father first.

You'll note that fathers are important. So Jesus said to him, how long has this been going on? And you can almost see the guy going, you're not doing anything yet?

You're going to ask me, we're doing this now? And so the fellow says, well, ever since he was a small boy, the demon has tried to destroy him, throwing him into water and into flame, and then the fellow says this, if you can help us, please do.

And Jesus says, if, if, all things are possible for the one who believes.

And the man blurts out, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

It's an important phrase, and you're going to note here that God does help our unbelief.

Think about Zechariah. Think about his wife, Elizabeth. They started off life together probably fairly young.

Back then, it wasn't uncommon for kids to get married in their teens, because, well, the average life expectancy wasn't all that long, you know, 40 -ish.

If you get to 50, you're really old, right? That's how they're thinking at this point.

And so they started off their life together, and they had their wedding ceremony, just like every other young couple in Israel, and it was probably beautiful.

The bride was gorgeous, the groom was excited. They came together with the expectation that they were going to start a family together, because this is what happens.

But no kids. Not one. And back in those days, if you're not bearing kids, as a woman, well, as Elizabeth says in our

Gospel text, she was bearing reproach among her own people. The murmurings begin.

Now, is there something wrong? What's going on here? Maybe they're cursed from God. Maybe God is angry with them.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. And this just goes on and on and on and on and on, and, well, she has to surreptitiously raise other people's kids.

It's kind of a, well, it's a bum deal. And all of this, if you were to think about it, is kind of a big result of the consequence of sin, but this is a common theme throughout the

Scriptures. There's women who are barren who then conceive. She's in good company.

If you think of Abraham and Sarah, Sarah also, she didn't conceive until she was well advanced in years, way past the age of childbearing.

And Elizabeth seems to be following suit. But all of those barren wombs of the

Old Testament and here of Elizabeth's all point to that miracle that God's going to do in bringing us the virgin -born

Son of God, our Savior. And so, what happened with, well, Elizabeth and Zechariah is that weeks turned into months, months turned into years, years turned into decades.

And somewhere along the line, probably all along the line up until a particular point, there were prayers.

Did that just cut out that area? There were prayers. And their prayers were probably to the effect of,

Lord have mercy, please grant us children. And yet, that prayer went unanswered for a long, long time.

And then Elizabeth, well, her hormone levels went out of whack.

She started having hot flashes and then she was past the age. She's dried up.

That's how this all goes. And at that point, all hope is lost.

And you just hope on finishing your course well. But see, God had other plans in mind.

God actually intended to answer their prayer, but answer their prayer way beyond what they would have even imagined.

You know, see, God is able to answer our prayers far more abundantly than we can imagine.

And he oftentimes does, because God was up to something big. If you think about the

Old Testament, the very last page of the Old Testament, of the Tanakh, in the prophet

Malachi, Malachi, my servant, my messenger, is his name,

Malachi. He's God's messenger. He prophesied that one would come in the spirit of Elijah.

And Malachi's prophecy makes it sound like it's soon. It's like just on the cusp.

And you get the feeling that with God, what he thinks is soon is like nothing related to what we think is soon.

I mean, if I didn't know better, I would accuse God of being late at times in my life.

If he had showed up just a little bit earlier, things wouldn't have gotten as crazy as they did. But always and again,

God is never late. He knows exactly what he's doing. And so, 400 years after Malachi told that one would come to prepare the way of the

Lord and that he would come in the spirit of Elijah, God took that prophecy, which had 400 years of dust on it, blew the dust off, and breathed new life into it.

God was up to something. And he was up to something more than removing the reproach that, well,

Elizabeth felt because she was unable to bear children. He was about to send the

Son of God. He was going to prepare the way for his own son who had come to earth for the purpose of taking away our reproach, our sin, our iniquity, and reconciling us to God and to each other.

And so, in a very classic Old Testament kind of way, God then does something spectacular.

He sends the angel Gabriel. What a great name, by the way. Gabriel. Gabriel. Gabriel.

All right? The Lord is my hero. It's a good way to put it. Gabriel means the

Lord is my hero. It's a great name for this archangel. And so, our text then begins that in the days of Herod, the king of Judea, there was a priest named

Zechariah of the division of Abijah. He had a wife and the daughters of Aaron. Her name was Elizabeth.

They were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and the statutes of the Lord. Now, important to note here,

I think the Holy Spirit inspired Luke to put this in here to make it very clear to every generation that would follow that the reason why

Elizabeth was barren had nothing to do with the fact that she didn't have enough faith or that she was somehow being punished by God.

Both her and her husband, they walked blamelessly in all the commandments and the statutes of the

Lord, and they were righteous before God. That means they had faith. They had no children because Elizabeth was barren.

Both were advanced in years. And while he was serving as priest before God, his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by Lot to enter the temple of the

Lord and to burn incense. Over and again, when Lots are thrown, the idea is,

Lord, who is the one you have chosen to do this duty today? And on this particular day, well,

God chose specifically Zechariah to go in and burn the incense. This is the time of the evening prayer.

Let my prayer rise before you as incense. The lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

And so he goes in. And by the way, it's always, well, a little bit of a scary thing to go in to the temple of God because you never know what's going to happen.

And according to the Mosaic covenant, the priests who would go in to serve inside of the temple, part of their ephod was they had little jingle bells on the bottom of their vestments.

Why? Because if God was not happy with what they did and they didn't do it right,

God had the prerogative and, well, the right, if he wanted to, to strike somebody down.

And so you can always tell a priest hasn't made it when you hear, chink, oh.

And what do you do? Well, there's a rope around his ankle. You just drag the body out and send somebody else in, right?

You know, this is the days before OSHA, right? Could you imagine the lawsuits today?

But you get the idea. So you do not volunteer for these duties.

Instead, you have to be chosen. He's chosen and he goes in and you have to know based upon what an awesome thing this is that he is not doing this willy nilly.

He's a man of faith. He knows very well he needs to dot his I's and cross his T's and make sure that he doesn't do anything out of bounds so that he doesn't displease

God. Here's what happened. There appeared to him an angel, we know the angel's name is

Gabriel, an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense and Zechariah was troubled when he saw him and fear fell upon him.

I cannot make this point strong enough. That is the standard operating procedure when a human being comes in the presence of a holy angel.

Today when people say, oh yeah, there's angels everywhere, I met one for lunch the other day, they are lying to you, okay?

And the way you can tell they're lying is how flippantly they talk about meeting with angels. Everybody meets with an angel in scripture, their first thing that they do is their knees are knocking, they're completely afraid and you'll note what

Gabriel has to say. He says, first thing, don't be afraid,

Zechariah. And then hear these words, your prayer has been heard, what?

Which one? You can almost, what do you mean my prayer has been heard?

Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son. We prayed for that three decades ago, four maybe,

I don't know. We don't know how old they are, right? We prayed for that decades ago. You see, but God doesn't forget our prayers.

The prayer of a righteous one is precious in the sight of God. And so these words actually should help us see a little bit of something that we need to keep in mind, and that is that God hears our prayers.

Does it feel like when you pray, your prayers bounce off the ceiling, does it feel like when you pray

God hasn't heard you? Have you prayed and wondered, where is he? He's heard your prayers.

He knows exactly what he's doing. And the suffering that you may be going through is still designed to create a new character and hope.

That's the purpose of these things. So do not cast away your faith in God because God hasn't answered your prayer in what you believe is a timely manner.

It may be that he is going to answer your prayer at a time and in a way that you would have never even foresaw.

So, the angel said to him, don't be afraid, your prayers have been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear a son, you shall call his name

John, and you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth for he will be great before the

Lord and he must not drink wine or strong drink and he will be filled with the

Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the

Lord their God. And he will go before him in the spirit and the power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the

Lord a people who are prepared. Ah, prepare the way of the

Lord. Now, this coming Sunday, we're going to hear the preaching of John the Baptist. And I must confess by today's standards, it's a wee bit bumpy, somewhat rough, politically incorrect, extremely.

Necessary? Yes. Because to make ready a people who are prepared for the

Lord requires God's law to go out and to confront people in their faces with their iniquity, with their sin, with their hard heartedness, with their false religion, their idolatry, and all the ways in which they are guilty before God.

It is necessary. Because before the gospel comes, the law must convict us of our sin.

And exactly what Gabriel said would happen is exactly what happened.

Because Gabriel wasn't giving these words because he was sharing his opinion with Zechariah.

He was sent from God with an actual message. And he delivered the message. And when

God says it's going to happen, it's going to happen. And nobody can stop it. And nobody can turn away the words of God.

His words cannot be broken. And we take solace in this. So, Zechariah upon hearing this amazing, amazing word from God, delivered by the archangel

Gabriel. Gabriel, by the way, also showed up in the Old Testament. Twice in the book of Daniel he shows up.

He actually explained a vision to Daniel in Daniel chapter 9 and was there in Daniel chapter 8.

This is a well known angel. So it wasn't just any old angel. This is the one that actually spoke to Daniel.

And rather than sit there and go, this is amazing. Praise God. Thank you, Lord, for hearing my prayer.

Zechariah goes, well, how shall I know this? For I'm an old man and my wife is advanced in years. Is anything too hard for the

Lord? Are you familiar with what happened with Sarah? What about Samson's mother?

How about Hannah? There's great examples in the Old Testament. Why are you doubting this?

You were experiencing the fear of being in the presence of the angel. And now you're kind of going, well,

I don't know. Who does this? Well, the reality is that I think we all do this.

You sit there and go, well, I haven't had an angel appear to me. Yeah, I know. Neither have I. But I think we have something a little stronger than that.

We have the eyewitness accounts of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ on the third day after he was crucified under Pontius Pilate.

And you know what a big doubt that people struggle with as Christians? I don't know if God can really forgive me.

Seriously? Jesus is risen from the dead and you have doubts regarding that?

Well, you don't understand what I've done. Really? No, I do. And so you'll note, we struggle along these lines.

And what happens next, I think, is a kind punishment.

Lord, I believe, help my unbelief, right? So Gabriel, you can almost hear the indignation in his voice.

But he's there to deliver good news. He's not there to smite Zechariah.

Zechariah didn't fall over dead and the jingle bells go off and then have him drag his corpse out. He was kind to him in that sense.

Instead, the angel answered him and said, and you can just see this, I am

Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God. Right? You can almost hear this, the indignation.

And I was sent to speak to you to bring you this good news. And this is great news.

Do you not recognize the significance of what it is I just told you? Your son is the fulfillment of Malachi's prophecy, the very last page of the

Tanakh. And ah! Right? You just hear

Gabriel, right? And he says, all right, behold, you're going to be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.

So at this point, Zechariah isn't believing it. He's not trusting the angel

Gabriel. Gabriel says, fine. Silence. Not a word from you for nine whole months.

Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. And at the end of those nine months,

I do find it fascinating that, well, Zechariah is a full -blown believer.

I would have to fast forward a little bit. So he's not able to talk, but here's the account then of the birth of John the

Baptist later in this text. Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son, just like the angel

Gabriel said. Surprise, surprise. They didn't even have to have an ultrasound to figure out the sex of the child.

They knew before he was even conceived that it was going to be a boy. Right? And she bore a son.

Uh -huh. And by the way, Zechariah, no talking up to this point. And her neighbors and her relatives heard that the

Lord had shown great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her, just like the angel

Gabriel said. I'm seeing a pattern here. God speaks, and look it, it happens.

So on the eighth day, ah, that eighth day stuff is important. First day of the new creation.

Right? They came to circumcise the child, and they would have called him Zechariah after his father, but his mother answered, no, he shall be called

John. And now, Zechariah is not able to speak at this point, right?

So you'll note that Elizabeth, she's standing her ground. She knows that his name is going to be John. How is she figured it out?

Because, well, good old Zechariah had to scrawl it out for her. He had like a little wax tablet.

And the angel said to me, and this had to take forever, right? His name is going to be John. And you could just see her going, ah, this is great.

No, his name is John, so she's heard the word of the Lord at this point. And remember, the angel is helping his unbelief.

So they said to her, well, none of your relatives is called this name. And so they made signs to his father.

We're going to talk some sense into you, Elizabeth. Let's go to the patriarchy. What do you have to say?

Inquiring what he wanted him to be called, he asked for a writing tablet. And he wrote, his name is

John. And they all wondered.

And immediately his mouth was opened. And his tongue was loosed.

And listen to the words that come out of his mouth. He spoke blessing to God. You see, although the angel

Gabriel silenced him, it was to help his unbelief. And now Zechariah fulfills part of the words of the good news that were given by the angel

Gabriel. And he says, blessed be the Lord God, the maker of heaven and earth. Now fear came upon all the neighbors.

And these things were talked about through all the hill country of Judea. And all who heard them laid them up in their hearts saying, what then will this child be?

For the hand of the Lord was with him. Brothers and sisters, as we prepare to celebrate the birth of our

Savior, let us hear the words of Scripture. Let us hear the words of John the

Baptist. They're coming on Sunday. And let us not turn away from them. Let us not say what a crazy loon this guy is.

What kind of diet is it that he's eating? And what's that uniform that he's wearing? Let us not be offended by his words, because as the angel

Gabriel said, he is the one whom God sent to prepare the way of the

Lord. And he is coming this Sunday to prepare us for the coming of Christ.

He will not be here physically, but his sermon will be preached.

His message will be here. And I assure you, if you do not turn away, if you take heart and take heed, you are well prepared for the arrival of Jesus.

John will make you uncomfortable. He will lay bare your sin. He will cause you to feel grief.

And he might even remind you of the reproach that comes because of sin and iniquity.

But fear not. Don't let that shake you, because John has come to prepare us for the arrival of Christ, who has not come to condemn us, not in his first advent.

He has come to save us. Our King is going to come, well, in diapers.

Small and humble and obedient. And he will go all the way to the cross to bear your reproach so that you do not have to bear it on the last day.

So, as we consider this first advent message, the sermon series on the angels, note then,

Gabriel brought good news. And in kindness, he helped

Zechariah's unbelief. And now let me come back to this. God helps our unbelief too.

If you struggle with believing that you are forgiven, or struggling with knowing that God hears your prayers, you're not alone.

Many Christians struggle with these things, but take heart. Christ is here to assure you and comfort you that you are forgiven in him, and that you are reconciled to the

Father because of all that he has done for you. So, you too can cry out,

Help my unbelief. And he will help you. He will not send you away and say,

Well, you better sort that out yourself, and don't you dare come to church until you've got that worked out. Instead, he welcomes you here to hear his words, and take note, let the words sink in, and let your fears melt away to the comfort and confidence that is in Christ for you.

That you are forgiven because of his great sacrifice on the cross for your sins.

And he is not here to condemn you. He is here to save you. And he promises to give you eternal life as a gift.

You do not need to fear Christ in his first advent. He's come to give you comfort and forgiveness, mercy and reconciliation.

Hang on to those words and note the pattern. When God speaks, his words come true.

Even if it's through an angel or an apostle or a prophet. And he has assured us that we are forgiven in him.

And it is absolutely true. So we need not bear our reproach alone.

And we can be forgiven. So let us then have our unbelief give way to belief.

As God helps us. In the name of Jesus, Amen. If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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