“There is no way to God that bypasses the call to let go {i.e., to choose to trust Him}. You may have many intellectual doubts, and it is really important to be honest about those, to talk about them and study. However, thinking and studying alone never remove the need to choose. The question of faith is never just an intellectual decision”—John Ortberg
Tag Archives: doubt
John Stott On Our Sufferings In Light Of The Cross of Christ
I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. … In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of his.
How To Deal With Emotional Doubts
Our thought life is central to living a vibrant Christian life. In Romans 12:2, Paul says that the way we resist the pattern of this world is by renewing our minds. Now he could have said a lot of different things instead of mind—heart, emotions, worship—but he didn’t. The reason is that what we think about and what we believe are critical to how we live. Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher who has done a lot of work in the area of spiritual formation, offers penetrating insight into the interplay of thoughts and emotions:
Our thoughts are one of the most basic sources of our life. They determine the orientation of everything we do and evoke the feelings that frame our world and motivate our actions. Interestingly, you can’t evoke thoughts by feeling a certain way, but you can evoke and to some degree control feelings by directing your thoughts. Our power over our thoughts is of great and indispensable assistance in directing and controlling our feelings, which themselves are not directly under the guidance of our will. We cannot just choose our feelings.
We don’t have direct control over how we feel. But we can indirectly affect our emotions by thinking in certain ways. If we want to get at the root of the emotional doubt, then we have to change our thinking and stop allowing ourselves to believe lies. We must tell ourselves the truth—God’s truth—until we accept it. Again, this is not a one-time remedy; it’s a habit we need to build into our life.
In light of this, I hope that you will no longer feel ashamed when you experience doubt, nor idly sit by and allow emotional doubt to paralyze you with fear. I will let the poignant words of Oswald Chambers conclude our discussion: “Unless we train our emotions they will lead us around by the nose, and we will be captives to every passing impulse or reaction. But once faith is trained to control the emotions and knows how to lean reso- lutely against weakness of character, another entry way of doubt is sealed shut forever . . . Much of our distress as Christians comes not because of sin, but because we are ignorant of the laws of our own nature.”
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Do You Have A False View Of God?
A.W. Tozer famously said “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important about us.” But why is this so important? Here is some excellent perspective:
Believers get into their heads such a wrong idea of God that it comes between them and God or between them and their trusting God. Since they do not recognize what they are doing, they blame God rather than their faulty picture, little realizing that God is not like that at all. Unable to see God as he is, they cannot trust them as they should, and doubt is the result.—Os Guinness
If we do not come to know God as he is–as he has revealed himself to be–it affects our ability to trust him in good times or bad. This is what theology is all about (we’ve talked about that before). So what is God like? Here’s a start from a top-notch theologian:
God is an invisible, personal, and living Spirit, distinguished from all other spirits by several kinds of attributes: metaphysically God is self-existent, eternal, and unchanging; intellectually God is omniscient, faithful, and wise; ethically God is just, merciful, and loving; emotionally God detests evil, is longsuffering, and is compassionate; existentially God is free, authentic, and omnipotent; relationally God is transcendent in being, immanent universally in providential activity, and immanent with His people in redemptive activity.—Gordon R. Lewis
These are not just words on a page. They are the perfections of the one true God! Would you like to grow deeper in your understanding / experience of God? Do you have 5 minutes a day? Then the 5 Minute Theologian is for you. It really is a helpful and easy way to learn theology.
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Should Christians Have Doubts?
Real Christians don’t doubt. Or at least that’s the unspoken message you’ll find in many churches today. Well, if that’s true then I guess I’m not a real Christian because I’ve had (and still have) my share of doubts at times. By the way, your parents, youth pastors, and parents have them too! Pastor Tim Keller offers helpful insight:
A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.
As humans, we all have limitations. We all experience doubts simply because we cannot know everything about everything. So be encouraged, you are not alone. But in order to live with our doubts in a spiritually healthy and faith-building way, we need to be clear about what doubt is and isn’t. First, as J.P. Moreland and Klaus Issler point out, there is a difference between unbelief, doubt, and lack of belief.
Unbelief – someone willfully sets themselves against a biblical teaching (e.g., Jesus is not the Son of God).
Doubt – someone has an intellectual, emotional, or psychological barrier to a more secure confidence in a biblical teaching or in God Himself (e.g., I believe God is always there for me, but when bad stuff happens I struggle to believe this).
Lack of belief – someone doesn’t believe a biblical teaching or idea, but wants to (e.g., I need some help to believe).
Also, all doubts aren’t created equal; there are different flavors. The two most common are intellectual and emotional doubts. Given a Christian understanding of faith as “confidence or trust in what we have reason to believe is true”—as opposed to ‘blind faith’ or wishing—the recipe for overcoming your doubts is not to somehow dig deep and crank out more faith by holding your breath and concentrating really hard. What you need to do is have the courage to “doubt your doubts.” Investigate. Seek the truth.
Here’s a place to start: (1) be specific about what your doubts are—write them out and list reasons for / against (2) start your investigation by reading the articles in this study Bible (3) remind yourself that you are not the only one who has ever asked this question, and that 99.9% of the time a reasonable answer exists. Sometimes emotional doubts look like intellectual ones. But the root cause turns out not to be unanswered questions at all. Some sources of emotional doubts: (1) experiencing disappointment, failure, pain, or loss (2) having unresolved conflict or wounds from our past that need to be addressed (3) letting unruly emotions carry us away for no good reason (4) being spiritually dry (5) fearing to really commit to someone.
Also, it is crucial to remember that emotions are good and normal but they aren’t always right. They need to be examined. I may be emotionally down, but that may have nothing whatsoever to do with my confidence that the New Testament is reliable, Jesus was who he claimed to be or that God really exists. When encountering emotional doubts, the best thing to do is to (repeatedly) tell ourselves the truth from God’s Word, invite God in to this by prayer, and then tell a trusted friend that we are emotionally struggling.
If you find yourself with doubts, you’re in good company (cf. Mk 9:24). But having the courage to doubt your doubts in the context of a thoughtful and caring community and investigating the root of these issues over time will lead to greater confidence as a follower of Jesus. That is what the journey of faith is all about.
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*A form of this article first appeared in a contribution I made to the Apologetics Study Bible for Students, published by B&H.