When Your Faith Doesn't Work

What do you do when you're sure you have faith, you believe something is God's will, you step out expecting Him to move, and nothing happens?

It's easy to explain away somebody else's unanswered prayer. Maybe they didn't really believe. Maybe they misunderstood God's will. Maybe they never acted on what they believed.

But what happens when you know you believed?

Andrew Wommack faced that question after an experience in Omaha, Nebraska. What happened there sent him on a two-year search through scripture and eventually changed the way he understood faith, unbelief, and the condition of the heart.

The answer began with a man in a wheelchair.

When Confidence Meets Reality

Andrew had recently seen a man raised from the dead. After an experience like that, his expectations were high.

Then he went to preach in Omaha.

Sitting on the front row was a quadriplegic man. Andrew looked at him and thought that if God could raise someone from the dead, healing this man shouldn't be a problem.

He wasn't wondering whether God could do it. He expected it.

Andrew finished preaching, came off the platform, took the man by the hand, and pulled him out of his wheelchair.

The man fell face-first onto the floor.

He couldn't catch himself. He was a quadriplegic.

Andrew put him back in his chair, prayed for him, finished the meeting, and went back to his hotel room with a question he couldn't shake.

What happened?

The Easy Answers Didn't Work

Andrew could have concluded that healing wasn't God's will in this case. But that answer didn't fit what he saw in scripture.

Jesus told Philip in John 14:9 (NKJV), "He who has seen Me has seen the Father."

Jesus also said in John 5:19 that He did what He saw the Father do.

For Andrew, that meant Jesus was the clearest picture of God's will. And when Andrew looked at Jesus' ministry, he saw Him healing people.

There were places where people didn't receive. Mark 6:5–6 describes Jesus' ministry in His own country, where unbelief was so strong that few miracles happened. But Andrew saw a difference between people refusing to receive and Jesus refusing someone who came to Him for healing.

So Andrew couldn't settle the Omaha experience by saying, "I guess God didn't want to heal him."

There was another obvious explanation.

Maybe Andrew didn't have faith.

But he couldn't make that fit either.

"I Know I Believed"

Andrew wasn't standing over the man hoping something might happen. He had enough confidence to grab a quadriplegic man and pull him out of his wheelchair in front of everyone.

You don't do that casually.

Andrew knew he had faith.

That created a problem. If healing was God's will, and if Andrew really believed, why didn't the man walk?

The question stayed with him for nearly two years.

There is a similar moment in Matthew 17. The disciples tried to cast a demon out of a boy, but they couldn't do it. After Jesus delivered the boy, the disciples came to Him privately and asked why they had failed.

Their question is important.

They expected it to work.

These were men Jesus had already authorized to minister. They had seen God's power operate through them before. Their failure surprised them.

Something was interfering with what they believed.

Andrew began to realize the same thing could be true in his own life.

Faith Isn't Always the Whole Story

We often talk about faith as though it's the only thing happening inside us.

Either you believe or you don't.

But Andrew began to see that the condition of the heart is more complicated than that. A person can genuinely believe God while also carrying thoughts, expectations, and patterns that work against that faith.

That means the right question isn't always, "Do I have faith?"

Sometimes the better question is, "What else is operating in me?"

That question eventually led Andrew to Mark 6.

The disciples had just participated in one of Jesus' most famous miracles. Thousands of people had been fed from a tiny amount of food. The disciples didn't hear about the miracle later. They were there. They handled the food. They distributed it. They watched the impossible happen in their own hands.

Then Jesus sent them across the sea.

Mark 6:48 says they found themselves straining at the oars because the wind was against them.

Jesus came toward them walking on the water.

And something strange happened.

Jesus Would Have Passed Them By

Mark 6:48 says Jesus came to them walking on the sea and "would have passed them by."

Andrew points to this detail because it challenges the idea that God automatically does everything He has the power to do.

Jesus saw the disciples struggling. He knew what they needed. He had more than enough power to solve the problem.

And He still waited for a response.

The disciples cried out.

Jesus answered them in Mark 6:50 (NKJV): "Be of good cheer! It is I; do not be afraid."

Notice when He told them to cheer up.

The storm hadn't stopped yet.

Their circumstances had not changed.

Jesus was asking them to respond to His word before the natural situation gave them a reason to feel better.

That's faith.

Hebrews 11:6 says that without faith it is impossible to please God. Faith doesn't wait until everything looks safe before deciding what is true.

But Andrew was about to discover that the disciples had another problem operating alongside their faith.

The Verse That Changed the Question

Jesus got into the boat, and the wind ceased.

Mark 6:51 says the disciples were greatly amazed.

That sounds reasonable. Anyone would be amazed after seeing a man walk across a stormy sea.

But Mark doesn't present their amazement as a compliment.

He explains it.

Mark 6:52 (NKJV) says, "For they had not understood about the loaves, because their heart was hardened."

Their amazement revealed something.

They had watched Jesus multiply food only hours earlier, but they hadn't allowed that miracle to change what they expected from Him next.

They experienced the supernatural without letting it reshape their thinking.

And scripture called that a hardened heart.

For Andrew, this opened an entirely different way of looking at what had happened in Omaha.

Maybe the issue wasn't that he had no faith.

Maybe faith wasn't the only force operating in his heart.

Maybe a person could love God, believe His Word, step out in genuine faith, and still have areas of the heart shaped more by the natural world than by what God had revealed.

That possibility changed the question.

Instead of asking only, "Why didn't my faith work?"

Andrew began asking, "What is a hardened heart?"

And that question would lead him much further than he expected.

This post draws from Hardness of Heart by Andrew Wommack.