I’ve been a Christian for most of my life and for most of my life, I have doubted the existence of God.
You’re probably thinking "How is that possible? How can you be a Christian and doubt the existence of God?" Seems pretty fundamentally flawed right? You’re not wrong.
However, it is important to note that Christianity does not equate with perfect knowledge and we, even as people of faith, are not excluded from doubt. We are all human beings born with questions of identity, origin, purpose and meaning. We all struggle to understand why we are who we are, how the world came to be and to what end. Having a relationship with God doesn’t mean you automatically have the answers to every question in the universe. In fact, there are a lot of things we’ll never know until we come face-to-face with God. So, while we do have incredible resources (like the Bible) and intimate knowledge of God because of our relationship with Him, we don’t know everything which means we will have questions and we will, at times, have doubts.
I want to pause here for a second because I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately about prominent Christians and church leaders leaving their faith behind and I want to address this because I've noticed a pattern among these individuals that is really rather heartbreaking. When they all listed their reasoning for leaving the church and their faith in God behind, (at least in the videos I’ve watched and articles I’ve read) they all said the same thing. Something akin to “I had doubts for a really long time.” “I struggled with my faith because there were unanswered questions that I had”. And that’s always the part of their story that kills me the most because their story didn't have to be that way. There have been MANY times in my life when I have felt the exact same insecurities, I spent MANY years carrying around a lot of unanswered questions that made my faith feel small and antiquated but it turns out, those doubts and questions were not the end of my faith, they were just the beginning.
The struggles these individuals are talking about could’ve just as easily become the foundation from which they built an even deeper and more intimate relationship with God and I know that, because I'm the evidence. So before we move on, can I just encourage you by letting you know that your doubts don’t make you less of a Christian or less loved by God. Your uncertainty doesn’t disqualify you and it is totally normal to feel uncertain about things you don’t understand. Science and nature and art are not contradictory to God but rather, evidence of Him and exploring those things is not an insult to your faith. Having questions isn’t a dire offense and God’s not insulted by your transparency, He encourages it.
Like many of my fellow Christians, I was conditioned to believe that the presence of doubt in someone’s life meant that the individual never really had a relationship with God to begin with and/or that their faith wasn’t genuine. So, I’m sure you can imagine my own discomfort with the idea of transparency in the midst of my doubts and my open hostility towards challenging perspectives and challenging people. I was very unsure of myself and unsure of my relationship with God so when someone asked me questions that I didn’t have the answers to, I reacted out of my own insecurity and uncertainty.
I’ll give you a perfect example:
My freshman year of college I met this amazing human who I love so dearly and am still friends with to this day. She had just transferred from a public school to our private university and she had SO many questions about God and The Bible. SO MANY. At first, I enjoyed our conversations and the way she made me think more deeply about what I believe and why I believe it but then it became too much for me. Every conversation we had dredged up a lot of old doubts that I had buried deep in my heart and she asked a lot of questions I didn’t know the answers to or questions I knew the answer to but couldn’t defend/explain well enough. I felt like every time I gained some ground with her, every time I was able to prove my faith and defend my beliefs, she would come back with yet another question that would blow my house of cards right over, and I COULD NOT handle it. I remember going into my room a few times after hanging out with her and saying, “Listen God, I love her and everything but I don’t think we can be friends anymore because she’s making me doubt you and that’s not good right?”
In my mind, I saw all of my friend’s questions and doubts as hostile inquisitions instead of honest evaluation and transparency. I knew that she was just trying to figure her own faith out but she was honing in on my own doubts and insecurities in the process, which I did not appreciate. I was honestly scared that if she kept digging, she’d find my faith was rooted in nothing and the God I had lived my whole life serving wasn’t real. I was terrified. And that fear, I’ve seen that fear in so many church people’s faces. We have questions that we never got answers to, doubts that have gone unchecked and uncertainties that have never been looked into so when someone points those things out, it’s like touching an open wound or a raw nerve, we have no idea how to respond. So, we often respond out of pain and fear.
But what I’ve learned over the course of my very-short-but-very-rollercoaster-like life, is that God is not afraid of your questions or your doubts. It’s not illegal to say, “Hey, I’m having some trouble believing that you exist. Can you help me figure this out? Can you show me the hows and the whys?”. You’re not committing an unforgivable sin by talking to God and letting Him know “Someone said something to me today that is contradictory to what I know about you but makes a lot of sense and I’m not sure what to do with that. Help.” It’s not wrong to say, “I don’t know the answer” or “I’m confused” or “I’m a little lost here, God”. God’s not going to disown you. God didn’t disown Peter when he doubted or even when he denied his relationship with Jesus. God didn’t revoke his calling; He didn’t distance Himself from Peter and say “You ingenuine fake believer”. No, He loved Peter through all of that. He loved and lovingly corrected all of His disciples through all of their questions and doubts because God knows that faith is something we have to cultivate and grow. It takes time to develop and coming face-to-face with doubts doesn’t mean that you’re not trying or that you’re failing at faith. Interestingly enough, recognizing doubt can actually be a good thing, something you can use to your advantage because doubts are indicators of vulnerabilities and cracks in the foundation where other things are starting to leak through. They’re like little alarm bells that tell you, this area is a little bit shaky and could use some TLC. They point out the places in your heart where you might be trying to lean on your own limited understanding instead of leaning on God and trusting in Him and in His word.
I’m probably going to mess with your theology a little bit here when I say this but bear with me.
I believe that, just like the flesh and the spirit, both doubt and faith can exist in your life at the same time BUT you can only feed one. Either you feed your faith or you feed your doubts, and that choice will not only nourish one but it will starve the other. So, if you choose to feed your doubts, to meditate on them, to live in them, to service them, to crumble in defeat whenever they rise up, you’re starving your faith. And part of feeding your doubts is leaving them unattended and ignored because doubts, left unattended, spring up like weeds and begin to choke the life out of what little faith you do have. Likewise, if you choose to feed your faith, to focus on God’s word even in the presence of doubt, to seek Him out for the answers and wait with expectation, to worship and honor God even when you don’t feel like it, to trust in the character of God even when you don’t know how everything works and you can’t explain the why’s, you will starve your doubts. But recognize that there’s no room for passivity or complacent routine here, both choices are active lifestyles. If you’re not actively feeding your faith you are actively feeding your doubt.
In Matthew chapter 14, you’ll find ,what I’m sure is, a very familiar story about the time Jesus walked on water and Peter got out of his boat and attempted to walk on the water to meet Him. If you know the story, you know that Peter initially was doing really well but there came a point when he began to focus on the wind and the waves instead of on God, and his fear, his doubt, his uncertainty, caused him to lose his footing and he almost drowned.
When Jesus reaches for Peter He says something I want you to take note of before we move on ( just in case you were having a little trouble with my theory about faith and doubt existing in your life at the same time) He says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”. In that one little sentence, Jesus is showing us the tension between doubt and faith. He points out that Peter did, in fact, have faith, “little” as it was, but he lost his focus and began to feed his doubts. And the fear that doubt creates drowned the measure of faith Peter had when he first stepped onto the water.
The issue of doubt versus faith is truly one of focus. It’s about what you choose to embrace and give your attention to. This is exactly what we see in this story, in the life of Peter, he lost focus on God and set his sights on the world around him.
Oftentimes, we treat God like He is an angry tyrant that will immediately rage against any whiff of dissension in the ranks, instead of the loving merciful patient father He is. For some reason, most of us never really think to bring our doubts to Him like we bring our most fervent prayers and our biggest dreams. Maybe we’re scared that God will abandon us if He finds out. Maybe we’re afraid that our doubts are too big or that if we dig deep enough, we’ll find out something isn’t quite right with our faith. I’m not sure what it is that motivates us to bury these things under layers of Christian clichés and fakeness but I’ve come to realize that when we bury our doubts and our unanswered questions, not only do they grow and choke the life out of the faith we have left BUT they create division between us and God.
(Just to clarify, having doubts and questions doesn’t necessarily separate you from God, it’s when you bury them, and you keep them from Him that you find yourself separated)
Why? Because you’re hiding something. You’re keeping something from Him. You’re keeping parts of you in the dark when God asked for everything. And that hiding, that burying, that lack of transparency in your relationship with God eats away at you more than any question ever could.
The real kicker is, God already knows. He already knows about your struggles and your doubts so hiding them doesn’t really accomplish anything.
Let me ask you a question: Do you know how many people have set out to disprove God and instead, ended up believing in Him? A LOT! And If God can minister the truth to someone whose heart is dead set against Him, with all their questions and challenging ideologies and biased opinions, imagine how much grace and love God has for you (His child) when you come to Him earnestly asking and seeking. When your heart is yearning to know the truth and you are simply longing for clarity. In Matthew 7:7 it says “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” That’s not just a nice scripture or cute little phrase, it’s a promise. It’s something you can hold God accountable to, not that you’d have to. God isn’t a mystery; He’s not trying to keep things from you or keep you in the dark. He literally wrote you a 66-book love letter in which He tells you all about Himself. He wants you to know Him deeply, to have your questions answered, He wants to share Himself with you and be in constant fellowship with you.
So, when doubts rise up in your heart and in your mind, don’t give them the time and attention their seeking, give them to God. Run to Him and tell Him everything you’re thinking about, everything that’s on your heart. Just be open and willing to listen and He will meet you there. If the answer doesn’t come right away, if you leave your time with God still questioning, still uncertain, that’s when you exercise your faith. That’s when you trust in His word and what you already know to be true. That’s when you believe in the character of God, that He is who He says He is and He will do what He said He would do. That’s when you pull out the promises and meditate on them. That’s when you remember His faithfulness in your life previously and you remind yourself, that this is the God you serve. The God of perfect timing and infinite wisdom, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and you. The God you can trust in a fiery furnace, in a lions den, in a prison cell and in stormy seas. Don’t give up just because your answers don’t come in a microwave minute. This journey that you’re on with the Lord is the most important journey of your life.
A favorite author of mine (C.S. Lewis) once said, “If Christianity is false, it is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance.”
Infinite importance is worth waiting on.
Infinite importance is worth exercising a little bit of faith and a little bit of trust.
Of infinite importance is the love of God for you and trust me, you will not be disappointed in the faithfulness of the infinitely important God who is seeking you just as hard, as you are seeking Him.
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