Considering Faith and Doubt

The struggle between faith and doubt takes place in every Christian’s heart.  Our circumstances can foster doubts.  These doubts will either drive the roots of faith deeper, or expose that our faith is misplaced such we “lose our faith.”

Dan Allender addresses this in The Wager of Faith, part of The Healing Path.  Here are some things I need to remember, and perhaps you need to remember as faith and doubt do war in your soul.

“Faith involves placing our well-being into the hands of others who we hope are committed to do us good.”

God is committed to my well-being.  Ruthlessly committed to my well-being.  This does not mean that my circumstances will be good, but that God is conforming me to the likeness of Christ (Romans 8:28-9).  Not everyone is so committed to my well-being, and sometimes we are betrayed.

“Our past may blind us or distort what we consider good or bad, but our conscience continues to warn, chide, and rejoice in truthful loving. … Faith is trust in the goodness of God.”

Our own sinfulness, our particular sins and how we’ve been sinned against color our perspective.  This creates some of the doubt we experience.  We struggle to believe that God is good when life is particularly difficult.  I know I do. 

“We suffer when we remember.  And as we suffer, we doubt.  It is doubt that sends us on a search to comprehend God. … Disruption of shalom is the soil God uses to grow us to become the people we are meant to be. … But God knows that joy is being like him.  And we will not move to become like him and know the sweet joy he desires for us if we are comfortable where we are.”

We are drawn to security.  God is drawing us to holiness.  Holiness and security don’t go together often.  The go together when we are seeking our security in Christ, knowing that we are adopted by God by grace.  From that secure place, rather than from financial security, that holiness springs (see Walter Marshall’s The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification).  But we look for job security and financial security.  God will occasionally rock our world, disrupting the secure places we have worked so hard to establish precisely so we will seek him and grow in holiness (Lane and Tripp call this Heat in their book How People Change).  At the same time he is establishing in our identity as his sons and daughters by stripping us of all other identities.  And this is a painful process.

“… redemption touches us more deeply than tragedy.  But without tragedy there could be no redemption.”

I think of those moments that God came through.  Apart from that sense of utter desperation I experienced at the time, I wouldn’t understand how incredible it is to experience redemption.  My marriage is seen in this context of redemption because we both waited so long to discover one another in God’s providence.  The ache of loneliness was profound for us both.  I’ve been desperately searching for a new job a few times (he seems to get men’s attention with this one) and then seen him come through in an amazing way.

But it is the tragedy (broken relationships, unemployment, illness or injury, abuse) that clouds our memory of his goodness (especially the cross, which leads us to repentance).  When I seem most lost, most desperate, most like a fish flopping on land, that he sneaks up on me to deliver me.

Look at Scripture, he always shows up at the last possible second.  You couldn’t right a better movie.  He is never early (lest we not feel our need for him), nor late (lest we be destroyed).  Nor does he show up like we expect.  His grace is often surprising to us.  He leaves us with dropped jaws.

“It is not enough to ask, ‘What is God trying to teach me?’; far more, we must ask, ‘What does God want me to become?'”

This is the question that breaks us, actually.  If we just had to learn something, or do something, that would be okay.  But he is changing us.  We must come to grips with the fact that we must change.  Though Paul likens it to changing clothes (Ephesians 4-5, Colossians 3), it is not that easy.  He elsewhere likens it to a putting to death and a coming to life (Romans 6-7, Galatians 5).  That is painful.  As I heard at the Sonship conference, “faith feels like dying.”  That is change too.  But to refuse to change … that is really dying.