I touched on faith earlier in the week and all of the blessings that come from faithfulness! But are there consequences to living without it—living in unbelief? Unbelief can actually be hazardous to your health, and it affects people in three ways. The first thing it does is blind your eyes and make you skeptical. Just as Susan and her mother’s unbelief in Santa made them blind to the truth, made them skeptics, and robbed all their joy, so does unbelief keep you from seeing the world the way you should. It blinds you just like those who saw undeniable miracles right before their very eyes in scripture. Christ’s enemies didn’t even deny His miracles, but they did accuse Him of doing evil by performing miracles.
Secondly, unbelief poisons your heart and makes you cynical. Matthew 13:55-57 says, “We’ve known him since he was a kid; he’s the carpenter’s son. We know his mother, Mary. We know his brothers James and Joseph, Simon and Judas. All his sisters live here. Who does he think he is?” The unbeliever will always attack the family of God because his heart is poisoned.
Finally, unbelief robs you of your joy, and you become powerless. Later in Matthew 13, we learn the reason for all that went wrong in Jesus’ hometown—their unbelief. “And he did not do many miracles because of their unbelief” (13:58). He would have healed, if only they would have believed. If they would have believed, great joy would have filed that tiny village of Nazareth. But God won’t work outside the arena of faith. As a result of their unbelief (and ours, too), miracles are missing! Choose today to believe in something greater than yourself, and watch joy fill your life.