Navigating Doubt to Strengthen Your Faith in Times of Uncertainty

When I first came to know Jesus, a well-meaning preacher sat me down and said, “young man, this is the day when your eternity is marked forever. Trust God with this and never for one moment give doubt any room.” I took that to heart. Which meant when doubt reared its ugly head, I ran away from it rather than confronting it. I put doubt in the same category as something like sexual immorality. Flee from it! Get as far away from doubt as you can!

But I came to realize that my doubt needed to be dealt with. If I was going to take my faith seriously and live in authenticity, I had to be honest about my questions. Os Guinness said this about doubt:

“Find out how seriously a believer takes his doubts and you have the index of how seriously he takes his faith. For the Christian, doubt is not the same as unbelief, but neither is it divorced from it. Continued doubt loosens the believer’s hold on the resources and privileges of faith and can be the prelude to the disasters of unbelief. So doubt is never treated as trivial.”

The first good thing I did with my doubt was stop running away from it. Honesty demanded that I bring all of those doubts out into the open. If God is who we say (and I believe He is) then He is able to handle any question we’d ask. And this kind of honesty is really the first step to repentance. Isn’t the first step of healing usually an acknowledgement that we have a problem? It’s no different with doubt. We need to bring it out of the darkness and into the light.

I believe. Help my unbelief.

Photo credit: ©Getty Images/fizkes

Our brains do not do well with cognitive dissonance. That is the discomfort we feel when we’re holding onto two conflicting beliefs. Our souls are similar. Is “soul dissonance” a phrase? It should be.

Some kinds of doubt do not cause this dissonance. Like when you watch one of those action flicks where you know the hero is going to win but you aren’t quite sure how. At a moment in the flick, you’re not doubting that they will come through — you’re just doubting how it is going to happen. There is also a type of doubt that is more akin to a lack of confidence. That might cause some difficulty but not soul dissonance. And there is some doubt that is evil to the core — it is a doubt that doesn’t want to believe. There isn’t soul-dissonance here either.

But there are times in our lives when we do doubt, but we don’t want to doubt. You’re hanging in suspense because you’re actually afraid that you may abandon the faith, but you don’t want to abandon the faith. This is the kind of doubt that keeps you up at night. Just as with cognitive dissonance when our soul is disturbed, it’s like a plane running out of gas looking for any place to safely land.

I share this point because you need to know that in these seasons you are especially vulnerable. If you’re desperate and looking for a place to land, there are many unhealthy landing zones that are happy to receive you. But these are deadly. What I’m saying is that just because you land it doesn’t mean the battle is over. Once you land the plane of doubt you need to look at the landscape — you might have to get that plane back up in the air. We ultimately want to land in the field of truth. Anything else will leave us undone.

Photo credit: ©Getty Images/Sirbouman

When doubt came knocking on my door it carried with it a couple of unwelcome companions. Depression and Shame were right beside it. I was depressed because of the soul dissonance I felt. And I felt shame because here I was a youth pastor. I’d passionately preach the gospel to teenagers (because I really did still believe it) but then I’d step out of the pulpit and that dastardly voice of doubt and shame would start mouthing off again. I felt awful that I felt this way and kept running from it, as if I was trying to keep it from God and myself.

Then Psalm 103 broke into my soul. “He knows our frame; he remembers we are dust.” There was something about those words that absolutely broke me. But this time in the good way. God knew that I was struggling. He knew that I was on that tiny pale blue dot we call earth. Yes, all those things in that Indescribable sermon were true…but that didn’t make me any less known. He knew me to be small. He knows my weaknesses and all of it.

It made me think of pictures my children drew for me when they were little. They wouldn’t soon be housed in the Museum of Fine Art. Unicorns had six legs, the sun didn’t cast a shadow, balloons were as big as trees, and it seemed to want to tell a story but it wasn’t coherent. Of course, I didn’t judge it by these standards. I judged it by the standard of my child wanting to show love and affection. I came to realize that God’s perspective of me is probably similar. Rather than being terrified of my smallness in a big universe, I was slowly able to chuckle.

Photo credit: ©Getty Images/Tinnakorn Jorruang

Then my big break came when I stumbled upon the story of John Bunyan. Bunyan had an experience similar to my own. A whole flood of doubts and blasphemous thoughts came upon him. He doubted his salvation and everything he’d ever thought to be true. He felt as if he was caught in this middle place where he didn’t want to be an unbeliever, but because of his doubt he would be cast into hell for all eternity. I felt it. Verses like Hebrews 6:4-6 terrified him. How could he even come back if he wanted to after having such doubting thoughts?

But then one day while walking in a field, a glorious thought came upon his soul — “thy righteousness is in heaven.” I’ll let Bunyan tell it:

“One day as I was passing into the field, this sentence fell upon my soul: ‘Thy righteousness is in heaven.’ And with the eyes of my soul I saw Jesus at the Father’s right hand. ‘There,’ I said, ‘is my righteousness!’ So that wherever I was or whatever I was doing, God could not say to me, ‘Where is your righteousness?’ For it is always right before him.

“I saw that it is not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse, for my righteousness is Christ. Now my chains fell off indeed. My temptations fled away, and I lived sweetly at peace with God.

“Now I could look from myself to him and could reckon that all my character was like the coins a rich man carries in his pocket when all his gold is safe in a trunk at home. Oh I saw that my gold was indeed in a trunk at home, in Christ my Lord. Now Christ was all: my righteousness, sanctification, redemption.”

Much as it did with Bunyan, when I read this the chains fell from me. I realized that it was not the vivacity of my faith that mattered as much as its object. I learned, as it has been said elsewhere, that a weak faith can lay hold of a strong Christ. What matters most is the object of our faith. Christ is strong even when we are not. He is our righteousness.

Doubt isn’t the goal. Doubt isn’t a virtue. But it’s real. We have it at times. And we’re still loved and accepted and secure. He’s bigger than our doubt.

Photo credit: ©Getty Images/Khanchit Khirisutchalual

This is what I have found for all of these years since that initial battle with doubt. God upholds. I still go through seasons of doubt. I still have times when my faith is rattled. But God upholds every step of the way. This is where my confidence rests. God is able to maintain even a spark of grace. John Newton said it well:

“It is a mighty manifestation of his grace indeed, when it can live, and act, and conquer in such hearts as ours; when, in defiance of an evil nature and an evil world, and all the force and subtlety of Satan, a weak worm is upheld, and enable not only to climb, but to thresh the mountains; when a small spark is preserved through storms and floods.”

God will uphold you. Bring even your doubts to Him. And rest in His love. Learn to doubt your doubts. And hang on in the midst of the darkness of doubt, knowing that a much bigger hand (though unseen at the moment) is holding you up.

Source
Os Guinness, In Two Minds, 31

Photo credit: ©Getty Images/kitzcorner