09/09/2025
Have you had a “Mid-Faith Crisis”? What did that look like for you? For many of us, it starts with wondering what happened to our faith, why we don’t think and believe the way we used to. But the good news is that, while this is a painful crisis, it can be healthy, even necessary.
John 6:60-69 ESVWhen many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”
After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
Initially the crowds that followed Jesus were excited. They lived hard lives, and here was something new. Jesus brought healing, and comfort, and the promise that God’s kingdom did not belong to the powerful but was right here among them.
But for many, the excitement wore off quickly. John writes of a time when the crowd started to dwindle, when even his disciples started to grumble, and many turned away from him.
Jesus turned to his closest twelve friends and asked, “Do you want to leave me, too?”
Notice that they don’t say “No! You’re the best! We never doubted!” In fact, we know for sure that many of them were bewildered most of the time.
But they stayed. They kept going, even when they didn’t understand.
Matthew 17:20 ESVHe said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
Most of us today experience something like this. There was something in the Christian message that caught our attention, and we were excited. But it hasn’t all panned out the way we hoped or expected. Life continues to be hard, and for so many reasons we’re just not as sure as we once were.
The good news is that faith doesn’t require certainty. The twelve who stayed with Jesus were still quite confused and went on to let him down—even abandon him on his hardest night. But they kept trying, kept following, kept searching. Not perfectly, not by a long shot.
When we’ve lost so much faith that we can hardly keep going, how do we know when to throw in the towel? Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed could move mountains—and “a mustard seed isn’t very much.”
