When He came into the house, His disciples began questioning Him privately, “Why could we not drive it out?” And He said to them, “This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer” (Mark 9:28-29. NASB).


This statement by Jesus, “This kind cannot come out by anything but prayer” augurs a dramatic understanding of prayer unknown by any of his disciples. Jesus’ understanding and practice of prayer stemmed from His intimate, unbroken relationship with His Father. For Him, this was the foundation of prayer. That intimation between Jesus and the Father was carried in Jesus’ incarnational life. This life bore the fruit of prayer which carried the authority that commanded the unclean spirit to depart from the boy (v. 25).

The measure of Jesus’ prayer was in tandem with the depth of His relationship with the Father. The latter is the cause of the earlier. No prayers of ours as men and women are to be greater than the lives we live. Our prayers are as deep, high, mature, and effective as our lives are. When the external performances of prayer are greater than our internal relationship with the Lord, pseudo-spirituality soon becomes the order of the day. Nowhere is this display more apparent than in the Pharisees of Jesus’ days.

The fortuitous question of the disciples deriving from the crisis, “Why could we not drive it out?” must pass from a sense of shame to a definite severance of all lingering human presumptuousness and self-confidence.

Embedded in our relationship with the Lord is the discipline He brings to us that from time to time edges us to a place of “why could we not drive it out?” The purpose being that we would abandon and be brought to utter helplessness. A dying is required if our prayer is to change. Our helplessness changes our view of God. More often than not, most of our views of God have gone awry until they are confronted. In relational reality, our hearts are reconstituted and realigned. Like a child, we begin to feel His heart, perceive His mind, and pray His prayer.