What Do We Do with Doubt?

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Mike Kruger
He’s the title today of our gathering is dealing with doubt how to help others or yourself, walk through tough questions about the faith. If you don’t know who I am, I’m Mike Krieger. I’m the president of Reformed Theological Seminary, and New Testament professor there. And I have just recently written a book last year called Surviving religion 101, which is about a lot of things. But it’s really about this topic today, which is how do you navigate tough questions of your faith, and stay in the fight, so to speak, in the midst of all the challenges coming our way in our world today. So I’m excited about this topic, I think you might agree. And perhaps this is why there’s a good bit of attention here today that this is not a topic we talk about very much in the church. And I’m going to say more about that in just a moment. But let me also begin by thanking the sponsor of this session, which is easy for me to do since as my own employer reformed Theological Seminary. I found out you know, they hand you a sheet where you come up here saying, you know, make sure you thank the sponsor, and I’m looking at the Oh, it’s RTS. So, reformed Theological Seminary, as you know, is we’ve got eight different campuses across the southeast and up through New York, I’m at the Charlotte campus, please come see our booth, which is in the bookstore area. I’m there in and out throughout the rest of the weekend. And hopefully, you’ll be able to swing by I’d love to meet you and chat with you about whatever’s on your mind as it pertains to seminary. So thanks to RTS for this sponsorship. Now, as we start though, I think we need to start with a word of prayer, because I know this is a weighty, heavy topic. And I know that there’s a lot of different stories that bring us here to think about this topic. So pray with me as we get started. Or we confess that doubt is part of all of our lives, in one way or another. And if it’s not, we probably just haven’t lived the Christian life long enough. Because eventually it comes. Lord, give us your grace today, not only to be helped ourselves and our doubts, but also to help those that we love. That may be doubting, we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen. So let me start with an opening question for you ever had a time in your life, where it dawned on you for a brief moment that everything you believed about Christianity might just be a lie. Now, as I said in the prayer, if you haven’t ever had that moment, good for you. That’s a blessing of God. But I venture to say that virtually all Christians at some point or another, I’ll give examples of this in a moment, wake up one day and think to themselves, wait a minute. What if I’m just wrong? What if everything I thought was true is false? What if the skeptics are right? What if they non Christian professors, right? What if the the uncle always debate over the holidays about the truth of Christianity? What if he’s actually right and I a Christian, and wrong and as wrong as the person could be? And you had that moment where you’re thinking, what am I going to do with that nagging little feeling we call doubt in the back of your mind. Now, of course, some of us we just push it down and ignore and pretend it isn’t there, and others of us it can totally wreck your life. And we know story after story where this has happened. Now, if that hasn’t happened to you, I’ll tell you when it happened to me, I still remember it. I was 18 years old. I was a first year student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I was a committed Christian, believe the Bible believed in the resurrection believed in the Gospel of Grace had grown my whole life up in a Christian home. And there I was at a secular university, I found myself in a religion class. And as I sat in that religion class, the professor began to bombard me with ideas I’d never heard before about whether the Bible can be trusted and whether it’s reliable and whether it’s been transmitted correctly, and one of those mistakes and contradictions and I realized that at 18 years old sitting in that class, I didn’t have any answers to any of those questions. In fact, most of the arguments I’ve never even heard before and I was thinking to myself, my pastor, nobody ever told me that my my youth leader never told me that I never read a book about that. What if everything I believe is a lie. Now that professor at UNC was someone who at the time was not known by very many, but now was quite well known. That was Bart Ehrman. Some of you may know Dr. ermine, he’s written over 30 books now and may be one of the most prolific critics out there when it comes to writing books critiquing the Bible and critiquing Christianity. And there I sat with no answers to any of the questions. And I doubt it. It’s curious to watch not just how it was affecting me, but as how it affected my classmates. Some folks just pretend that it wasn’t happening. They were just like, well, it’s almost like bury your head in the sand. And, you know, religion is about experience anyway, and I still feel good about my religious experience. I’m just going to pretend it’s not happening. The facts don’t matter. It’s all about how I feel about God, and I’m just going to ignore it. So some did that. Others heard the arguments that ermine made and just completely gave up the faith before the semester is even out, they completely abandoned Christianity and gone a completely different direction than others sort of look for hybrid ways to mix the two, maybe I can believe some of this. In some of that there, I sat thinking, what am I going to do? And by God’s grace, I was able to pursue the answers and find out that actually, a lot of the things that are brought up having answers even though sometimes you just don’t know what those answers are, but it taught me a lesson about doubt. Now, of course, if you’re paying attention to the national scene, it’s not just individual stories that are important. You also know there’s national stories that are all over the news. We have more what are called deconversion stories, it seems now more than ever, where famous Christians, YouTube Christians, well known Christians wake up one day and say, You know what, I don’t believe any of that anymore. Now, don’t think for a moment that that doesn’t happen all the time. Of course it does. But what’s changed in our modern day with social media is that when people D convert, they actually want to tell everyone, they’ve D converted. And then they actually want to create new converts to their deconversion. And then there’s this whole cottage industry, this brings up of evangelism for deconversion. Some of those people may never have evangelized, when they actually profess Christ, but now seem very eager to evangelize now that they’ve decided they don’t believe it anymore. And so no doubt you’ve come across these stories. And you think Well, what I do with these people, and how do I handle doubt in my own life? Now I raise a lot of these questions, and we’re not gonna have time in one short session to even come close to answering that. But what I want to do today with you is give you a little theology of doubt. That’s my job. I want to help you understand what it is what it isn’t. I want to talk about wrong approaches to doubt. And I’m venture to say that some of the wrong approaches the doubt you’ve probably experienced sitting right here in this room. And then I’m gonna talk about what causes doubt, and what can we do to battle it? That’s a long list, believe me, I’ll move quickly here through it. But these are the things I want to share with you as we look at this little theology of doubt. So not only that, you can be encouraged but hopefully you can help the person in your life. My hunch is that some of you are here, right now with a name on your heart. Maybe it’s a brother or a sister or a roommate, child, who’s thinking about walking away from the faith. Maybe he’s walked away from the faith and you’re thinking, What can I do? Hopefully, this will help. Okay, I’ll start with the very first issue before us this afternoon. What is the definition of doubt? We throw that term around all the time? What are we talking about? When we talk about doubting the Christian faith? Now you need to realize the term doubt has a wide semantic range. In the common vernacular, we use it to refer to lots of different emotions and feelings, and a wide range of states of mind. So when someone says they doubt they could mean that they’re anxious, can means they worry, they have fear, uncertainty about God and His Word and His truth, it could refer to questioning, it can refer to despair, it can refer to depression. So there’s a whole wide range of what anyone could mean when they talk about doubt. But there’s some scholars that have offered definitions. And we just mentioned two. One is by Gary Habermas, who’s a well known apologist, he has a very simple definition of doubt, I think is very useful. Here’s what he says, doubt is doubt is a lack of certainty about the truthfulness of Christianity, one’s own faith, or how it applies to real life situations. So you’ll notice in his definition, it’s not just doubt about whether Christianity is true sometimes when you have doubts about whether you’re a Christian, okay, which is a whole nother species of doubt. And also as Habermas indicates, sometimes the doubt isn’t really about whether you think Christianity is true, but how does it apply over here and I don’t understand why God did that, or why God didn’t do that. So sometimes it’s a mix of things. Oz Guinness also has a very helpful book on doubt. I would recommend it to you. Here’s his definition of doubt. And I like this a lot. Here’s what he says, doubt is a state of mind, in suspension between faith and unbelief. So it is neither of them wholly. And each of them only partly, in other words, according to Oz Guinness, to doubt is to simply be of two minds. It’s to waver. Think of the story I’ll mention in a moment in Mark nine when Jesus is brought, my father is brought their his sick child to Jesus, and Jesus asked the father do you believe? You recall the story was the Father say, I believe Help my unbelief.

I can’t imagine a better way to capture doubt than that little story. You can imagine Jesus saying, Well, which one is it? You know, do you believe are you asking for help for your unbelief and the guys like yes, the all the above? Right? I do believe but I realized I struggle I want to believe but I realized I doubt and you find yourself in two places at once. Now here’s the reality. As I said at the beginning, everyone, at some level experiences this, some of us experienced it in a very cute ways. Some of us experienced out in very subtle ways, but all of us at some point, experienced. So if that’s the definition of doubt, we mentioned a second thing and our time together, and that is to mistaken approaches to doubt. So once you have doubt in your head, I want to suggest you that there’s two extreme approaches out there to how to handle it. And I think both are wrongheaded. I think both have done significant damage, actually. And I would venture to say that not only these two approaches wrongheaded in causing damage, but they’re far too common in the evangelical church today. Part of my goal today for you is to hopefully recover a place in your own ministries for talking about doubt. Because it we’ll see in a moment, I think we have lost that category. In our churches. Okay, so what are these two mistaken approaches to doubt? Now that we have a definition under are are in hand here, two mistaken approaches first is what I call doubt shaming, doubt, shaming. Some of you have grown up in churches like this, where if you have a question about the truth of Christianity that you’re looked at suspiciously, if you have a question about whether the Bible is all true, you’re looked at like you’re a threat. You’re considered an enemy of the church, be treated like a second class citizen. We don’t ask those questions around here, you’re not allowed to raise those complicated issues, you need to just believe what we tell you and accept it. There’s no place for questions, no place for skepticism, no place for wandering, no pays for struggling. It’s all or nothing. In fact, some of you have grown up in churches like that where you felt stifled and shut down, as if there’s no place to voice your questions. Of course, when we do that to people, one of the things that inevitably happens is that the questions don’t go away. It is simply learned that in the culture of that church, you can form and you just keep it to yourself. We all know what happens when you keep something to yourself, it doesn’t go away, it often grows and festers. Is it perhaps any surprised in churches like that, that many students who leave high school go off to college, and suddenly we have this exodus of people away from the faith? Because they hear things in college and never heard in church? Because they’re never allowed to explore things in church? And we’re scratching our heads going, why are we losing so many students to Christianity? Why are they leaving the faith in such great numbers, maybe because we never allowed them to ask the tough questions in the first place. Almost like that protective parent that thinks that any theological germs are going to ruin my child or my church, some of your parents and maybe you do this with your actual children, you ever met a parent that’s like super concerned about germs, and you know that all they do is fall around their kid all day with hand sanitizer and make sure they wash every meal, and you never complain, the dirt never get dirty. And then those parents usually pride themselves on little Johnny made it to 15 and never got sick once. And then you realize that at 16, when Johnny gets six and ends up in the ER, because the first time he got sick, his immune system never got kick started in the first place to ever deal with it, because he never got exposed to any germs. And so what you thought you were doing when you were protecting him is you’re actually just setting them up for the fall. Is there not a spiritual analogy there that in some ways we so protect our churches from theological germs that no one ever hears any questions about the faith never hears any opposite, opposing views about the faith and they get to college and they hear at all for the first time, their theological immune system, their spiritual immune system never got kick started, what they need is a little bit in one sense of inoculation in churches like this don’t provide it. They are doubt shaming cultures. Now, that’s a wrongheaded response. Before we leave it, let me tell you why it’s wrongheaded. Because the Bible over and over again, makes it very clear that God is amazingly compassionate on doubters. I encourage you with with this today, as you sit here, no matter what your circumstances, no matter who you’re here for yourself or another person, God is incredibly gentle, and patient, with those who struggle with their beliefs. You can’t but think of doubting Thomas and John 20. When Thomas says, Well, I know all the rest of you believe but not me. I’ve got to wait to see the the wounds and aside and so of course Jesus shows up and what does he do? He doesn’t doesn’t shame Thomas doesn’t wag his finger at him as a scold him, he simply invites him, okay. Come and see the wounds in my side and in my hands. I think of the story of John the Baptist, you may not realize that John the Baptist had a period of doubt. You think about the most assured person in the entire Bible? Surely John the Baptist is somewhere high up on the list, right? I mean, here’s this guy, the firebrand preacher in the desert or the one who you think Man, this guy believes it like nobody, if anybody is always going to be absolutely firm in what they believe, surely as John the Baptist what we read later in Matthew’s Gospel chapter 11, that off after John One was thrown in prison. And he began to doubt. In fact, so much so he sent a message to Jesus and the message was simply this or are you sure you’re the Christ? Should we wait for another? You realize, wait a second couple chapters before, there was no doubt that you thought this was the Christ and after languishing in prison for a while you’re like maybe, maybe he’s not the Christ. One of the things we’ll realize later is that one of the biggest causes of doubt, is suffering. John the Baptist himself as amazing as his faith was, was not immune to what any human being would be immune to what you think also of Matthew chapter 12, when Jesus is very clear, they are quoting the book of Isaiah that A bruised reed, God will not break a smoldering wick, he will not snuff out what does that mean? Is it it means your fire may not be burning hot, it’s just a smoldering wick, but God doesn’t come and go, Well, let’s not miss out on a hot fire. I’m just going to snuff it out. No, that’s not what God does. God is gentle. He is compassionate. If you think that great saints don’t struggle with Darrell think again. We’re not only talking about John the Baptist, what about Elijah? After that great showdown in Mount Carmel on First Kings, we think Bill Wagner is off fire come down from heaven. What more certainty do you need? Can you not be the most certain guy in the world that God is God and he will do what he says he will do. And then one chapter later, Elijah is absolutely despondent, depressed so much. So he’s like, God, we’ve lost it’s over. There’s no other believers, but me just take my life. Effectively suicidal. And then, of course, there’s Jude 122. Listen to this verse. You know it. This is what God tells us in verse 22, have mercy on those who doubt. Make no mistake about it. The reason the doubt shaming approach doesn’t work is because it’s simply unbiblical. All throughout the Bible, God is very compassionate to doubters all throughout church history. Even the great saints have doubted. And not just the saints in the Bible, even the saints of the whole of old I dug up this amazing quote A while ago from ch Spurgeon. You think about someone like ch Spurgeon, the great Baptist, English preacher. I mean, this guy would thunder from the pulpit every Sunday, surely, he’s the most certain guy ever. Here’s what Spurgeon says at one point, listen to these words, this is his own confession. Spurgeon writes, on a sudden, the thought crossed my mind, which I abhorred, but could not conquer that there was no God. No Christ, no heaven, no hell, that all my prayers were but a farce, and that I might as well have whistled to the winds or spoke into the howling waves. But some of you will hear that from Spurgeon and think I could have written that ever prayed and think, talking to the wind. There’s nothing out there. We could go on here, Martin Luther had bouts of doubt, you would not believe other saints of old so doubt shaming doesn’t work. I think that’s a mistaken approach. It’s all too common today. Unfortunately. Here’s another mistaken approach though. The other extreme, if we want to know how to handle doubt, doubt shaming is not the option. The other approach is out there too. And this is what I call celebrating, doubt. Or doubt celebrators. And we have a lot of these in our culture, too. This is amazing. Some people will tell you that the ultimate Christian virtue now is doubt that the thing that’s wrong with Christianity today, and the thing that’s particularly wrong with Evan Jellicle, Christianity today is everyone’s far too certain on what they believe. And it’s ruining the church, they say, that is the duty of every person to be more skeptical, more questioning, you should doubt everything you believe, and that the church has been ruined by all these people who are just far too sure about their faith. In fact, there was a book that came out not long ago, listen to the title of this book, the title of the book was the sin of certainty. The sin of certainty. The problem with you people is you’re all too certain about what you believe and that the real way to go as a Christian is just to doubt everything you believe so now it’s not the doubters are shamed out or celebrated. And it’s lifted up as the ultimate Christian virtue was one where you question everything you believe.

Now make no mistake about it. One partly part thing they get right this second mistaken view, one thing they partly get right is it is true that not every doctrinal view we hold is equally as certain as every other. This is a mistake people make and we need to reckon with this mistake too. Yes, Christians can be certain about what they believe. Yes, Christians can be certain about the core truths of the Christian faith that were saved by grace that Jesus lived, died and rose again and so on. But people think that that means you’re equally certain about every doctor Am I equally certain about my eschatological view, as I am about the resurrection? Is that a certain Scripture as other things will certainly not. And actually, the history of Christianity says it shouldn’t be. Some things are more certain than others. So acknowledging that caveat on this particular second view, though, still struggles against biblical warnings because we see in Scripture over and over again, that doubt is not to be celebrated. Doubt is not something we strive for fact time and time again. Jesus warns his disciples against their doubt pushes them towards faith. In fact, James one says, you don’t want to be the doubter. He’s just tossed and threw to throw a ball the waves and you can have no assurance of anything. And so there’s a sense in which the second view misses the reality is that doubt left unchecked, can do real spiritual damage. What do we want to do? We want to avoid both these extremes. We don’t want to become doubt shamers. We also don’t want to become doubt celebrators doubt can be a problem. If it’s not dealt with, just like any challenge and struggle in the Christian life, left unchecked, could bubble up into something more significant in someone’s spiritual walk? Okay, so the first thing we’ve seen is the definition of doubt. The second thing we’ve seen is these two mistaken approaches to doubt. And by the way, as I say, these I’m sure some of you are like, when I say the doubt shaming, you’re like, Yep, that’s me. I grew up in that church. And some of you when I hear about the sort of doubt celebrators like, Yep, that’s me, I grew up in that church. And we want to argue that neither of those views is the biblical view. So what do we do, then with doubt when it comes our way? Let me suggest, first thing, first is that we need to understand the cause. And here’s we move to my third point in our time together, various causes of doubt. If we’re going to fight doubt, you need to have at least a little bit of an analysis. Remember, I’m trying to give you this little theology of doubt, you have to have a little bit of analysis of how you got there. Right. So you’re sort of diagnosing how you ended up with a doubt that you’re ending up with. Let me suggest to you a few of the primary causes of doubt that float around out there. This is not an exhaustive list. There’s much more that can be said than this. But I think these are some key things that you need to have in your repertoire. Because when you understand a cause, you can help figure out the solution. So what are some of the reasons people doubt we mentioned? A few. One reason people doubt is they simply have unanswered questions. Some people have legitimate intellectual problems, and no one’s ever explained how to solve them. I can tell you many times I see this because I go and speak at a number of churches around the country and conferences. And I’m amazed how many people have like just never heard some of the basic stuff. I’m telling them about why you can trust the Bible and why Christianity is true and why God exists. And I realize that some people struggle, not because they’re diabolical people out to buck against God, they don’t struggle, because they’re bad Christians, they struggle because they haven’t been taught. No one’s ever explained it to them. No one’s ever given them a reason to believe they’ve been told to believe. They may have even been told what to believe. But so rarely, they’re ever told why they believe or why they shouldn’t believe. It’s amazing. I think how this needs to be recaptured and preaching and this isn’t a session on preaching. But I think this is one of the big gaps in our preaching in churches, today we preach, telling people what the Bible says, proclaiming what the Bible says, announcing what the Bible says, And all those are good things. But we never really think about how to persuade people about the truth of what the Bible says. I think we can do better here, in our churches. I see this all the time. You know, one of the things I do is, when I travel is I get on airplanes a lot as you might imagine, and whenever you get on an airplane, you always end up in a conversation with the person next to you. And if you’ve had this happen to you know, the first question everyone asks you, when you sit down on a plane, it’s always the same question. So what do you do? And then I think to myself, alright, here we go, you know, every time you know, I’m like, you know, kind of tighten my seatbelt? Well, actually, I’m a, I’m a professor of the Bible and, and also a minister. And then you can just see their face change. Usually, they’re like, Well, I go to church, and I do my best to be a good person, and then it quickly morphs away from excuses into objections. Well, you know, the Bible is filled with contradictions. You know, that. There’s all kinds of reasons why we think the scribes have corrupted the scriptures, you know, in the manuscripts and on and on, they’ll go, and then I think to myself, yeah, I’ve heard some of this before. And then I try to explain them the answers to the questions and I can’t tell people just never heard the answers to their questions. So one of the reasons people doubt is no one’s ever told them what to believe. Now, one, one caveat here. Some people pretend to have intellectual objections when they really don’t I just want to call it a smokescreen objection. They just simply want to have a throwaway objection. And when you ever try to solve it, they’re not really interested in solving it because they just really liked the life they have. And that little objection gives them an ease of conscience that Christianity is probably not true anyway. And so if someone says, Well, you know, there’s a contradiction in the Bible, because you know, there’s two stories of creation in Genesis one and two. And then as soon as you explained to them, that’s not really the case, you’re like, Well, I’ve got other problems too. And then what they realize is that you’re just chasing around problems, you don’t really want to solve them. It’s all smokescreen. So keep in mind that sometimes people don’t really want answers to their questions. But some do, for the some that do we want to help them? Okay, that’s one cause of doubt, here’s a second cause of doubt, and I looted this alluded to this earlier. And that is the problem of suffering. I probably should have mentioned this first, for going in the order of commonness. The most probably without a doubt, and the number one reason people doubt their faith is because they’ve suffered personally or watched a loved one suffer personally. And they will have the questions that all of us have. Where were you God? Why didn’t you stop it? Why aren’t you fixing it? I thought you were good. I thought Christianity was supposed to work. So suffering is one of the things that really derails people. In fact, if you look at some of the major deconversion stories out there, some of the most popular ones, there’s always a story of suffering behind many of them. I can tell you actually a number of stories of people in the biblical scholarship guild, who have left the faith and then when you when you poke around a little bit, you’re like, oh, there’s a there’s a tragedy there. By the way, that’s a reason why you want to be compassionate and gentle, right? Why is God gentle was suffering because sometimes we there’s real pain there. You find someone who’s struggling with what they believe because of their suffering. This is not the time to scold them not to sign it’s time to say, what’s your problem? Don’t you see obvious the truth of Christianity is the only people who talk like that are people who’ve never suffered. If you’ve never suffered, Well, God has blessed you with a life of ease so far. And that’s, that’s great for you. But I can tell you, it does keep you from understanding certain things if you haven’t. People who suffer understand people who doubt when they do. Here’s the third reason people people doubt. And this is a big one recently, corruption in the church. This isn’t personal suffering, necessarily. And it’s not even answering intellectual questions. This is a wholly different thing. This is when Christians who tried to follow Christ faithfully and try to follow the teachings of the Church faithfully realize how much corruption is in the church. We could talk about the recent revelations of abuse throughout the church, where people realize that some of the good guys turned out to be the bad guys. And maybe there’s a lot more bad guys. I never thought there were and what do I do with that? And how do I handle that? And maybe, maybe the church isn’t the good thing I thought it was and maybe this whole Christianity thing isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. And maybe the whole thing is a farce. You can realize how one thing quickly reason leads to the other. This is exactly why corruption in the church has to be dealt with abuse in the church has to be dealt with not because it’s a it’s a mercy to those who’ve suffered under it. That’s one reason to do it, because it damages the reputation of Christ in the world. Here’s a quote from John Chrysostom. fourth century church father, but this one St. Ken, here’s what he wrote a long time ago. Christians damage Christ cause more than his enemies and foes. Oh, I wish that were not true. There’s a reason why people doubt. Here’s a fourth reason why people doubt unrepentant sin. Here’s an interesting thing about theology, is it lots of times it’s much more nuanced and complicated than you think it is. There’s a very common truth we all believe in it is true, which is what you believe affects how you act. Right? What you believe affects how you behave and affects how you live. Okay, that’s absolutely true. But you know, what also is true, the reverse how you live affects what you believe. Don’t think for a moment it doesn’t. The more you follow Christ obediently the more natural it is to believe. And the more you disobey Christ, the more easy it is to not believe I can’t tell you how many pastoral situations I’ve been in where someone comes to me and says, You know what,

I don’t know if I believe the Bible anymore. You know what, I don’t know if I believe in God anymore. And then you as a pastor kind of probe around and realize, oh, there’s some sin in their life they won’t let go of and you realize that how they behave actually affects what they believe and not just the other way around. Make no mistake about it. Lots of doubt is caused by people just simply doing what they know they shouldn’t do. And the more you do what you know you shouldn’t do the less plausible Christianity starts to look. So sometimes, unrepentant sin leads to doubt. There’s one last thing that leads to doubt in people’s lives. It’s what I Just call irrational worry. Another way to say this is some people doubt Christianity because they doubt everything. ever met anybody like this? Maybe you’re like this right? Maybe you’re a person that just worries about everything. Is this plan going to crash? Am I gonna get fired from my job, you’re gonna come back up, I’m not going to catch COVID I’m going to catch monkey pox, not gonna pack. You know, you might be the kind of person that doubts and worries about everything. And guess what, if you doubt and worry about everything, eventually are going to doubt and worry about your faith. Some people doubt their faith because they doubt all kinds of things. Again, that’s all the more reason we have compassion, and mercy on them. Now, once you look at those potential causes of doubt, and there’s more, right, that’s not exhaustive. How do we battle it? This is the final thing I want to talk with you about in our session today. So we’ve talked about the definition. We’ve talked about two extreme and mistaken approaches. We’ve talked about various causes. And now we come to it. And maybe this is all that you’re waiting for. Anyway, what do I do? Once you start with this, Mike, because maybe what you said, you know, why wait to the end? Well, I want you to stick around, perhaps I don’t know. Here’s some suggestions on battling or doubts. By the way, as I go through these, there’s no there’s no magic bullet here. There’s no there’s nothing in here you’ve never heard before. If you come to this session, thinking Oh, finally, I’m going to hear some piece of advice. It’s just completely from who knows where because no one’s ever thought of it. Now, I’m going to give you some basic stuff here, but don’t dismiss it for that reason. Here’s some thoughts for you on your battle your doubts first. And that’s first for a reason. Don’t go it alone. Don’t go it alone. This is what I call my horror movie advice. I love scary movies. Probably makes me a bad Christian. Can ask my kids whether they think that’s true or not. I don’t know. I love scary movies. Lots people love a good scare and you know, Halloween movie or something jumps out at you. Well, maybe not everybody, lots people hate horror movies. Here’s the reality and horror movies, though. The protagonist always makes exactly the same mistake. They’re being chased by who knows what and what do they always do? They go off alone and in the dark. And you’re screaming at the TV and you’re yelling in the theater, you’re like, What are you doing right? This is common sense. Something chases you, you stay in the group. You stay in the light. Now, same thing applies spiritually. Look, when people doubt and they struggle, you know what they do? They’re like a wounded animal. They want to go off alone. They want to hide in the corner and just implode. The way you bow your doubts is you do it in community. You do it in fellowship, you do it in the body of Christ, you stay in the group, you stay in the light. Almost everybody that’s lost their way, has lost the way because they first lost the fellowship that can keep them on the path. Second thing to do is you battle your doubts, study, study, study. What am I talking about? Here? I’m talking about theology matters. No your Bible, no biblical truth, what is the weapon against the doubts of the enemy, the word of God. And I don’t mean just memorizing verses, although that’s a very good thing to do. I mean, understanding why things are the way they are, why God works the way it works. Don’t underestimate how good theology can solve many of the reasons you doubt. It can solve many of your questions about the problem of evil, about suffering about corruption in the church, about the way sanctification and sin works, all those causes I gave you up a moment ago, even the irrational worry can all be dealt with at some level with the truth of God’s Word with good theology and good doctrine. We will think what I doubt the last thing I need is theology know when you doubt you need good theology. Maybe you doubt because you’ve had bad theology, I can’t tell you how many people doubt because it is simply mistaken understanding of the way God is the way people are or that the world should be. helping them manage that is a really key way to help their battle against out. Here’s a third suggestion for you. Get wise counsel. Already mentioned the stain in community but this is more than that. This isn’t just staying in community. This is going to the people who can help you go into people who have some level of expertise in your area. If you have questions about the reliability, the Bible, we are blessed in the church to have lots of scholars and thinkers in the evangelical world that can help you with that. If you’re dealing with the issue of abuse or trauma, we have people that can help you with that your pastor can begin that can be a beginning place to help you with that. I mean, that’s not the only place you can go but certainly that’s a place that you can go to sit down with people and get the kind of help you need. Eat. This is one of the things that I find remarkable again is that people don’t avail themselves of the thing that is there most aptly for them. God has put those people in our lives to help us, we want to make sure that we seek them out as we fight against our doubts. Now, let me mention one final one. And this is one that Tim Keller mentions a lot, I’m gonna give him credit for it. He describes this as doubting your doubts. Let me explain what I mean by this. And what he meant by this. One way to fight against your doubts, is to recognize that when you doubt, you’re tempted to replace your Christian belief with another belief. So you hold a particular Christian belief and you’re thinking, this belief over here looks a little better. You’re thinking about swapping the two out, right? I’m gonna take away my Christian belief, I’m gonna replace it with this non Christian belief or this new belief. That’s what doubt is, it’s wavering between these two particular polls. What Keller points out, though, is that when you doubt your Christian belief, I’m gonna replace it with the second belief, this new belief, you also ought to doubt that belief. You want to doubt the doubt? In other words, the only reason you’re thinking about replacing your Christian belief with the second thing is do you think it’s more sure? But what if it’s not? Doesn’t it have challenges doesn’t have holes doesn’t have problems. Now why even example, let’s imagine that you believe that God created the world and you read the book of Genesis, and you think that he did it? Directly. And then you take a class, your university about how evolution is the better way to think about this and you’re thinking maybe we ought to abandon the Bible and replace it with evolution. Okay. Lots of people doubt, because of things like evolution. But what Keller would say, well doubt the doubt. In other words, are you sure evolution is really worthy of your assent more than the Bible, you think it doesn’t have holes, you think it doesn’t have problems, have you if you subjected it to the same level of scrutiny, that you’re objecting the subjecting the Bible to? I’m amazed at how often the Bible is subjected to immense amounts of scrutiny. But yet the thing that’s replacing it is not as if it’s something that’s absolutely sure when you start looking at it, and you realize that it has its own problems, in fact, that has bigger problems than you think the Bible had in the first place, and you’ve jumped out of the proverbial frying pan and into the intellectual fire, doubt, your doubts. Here’s the whole summation of all of this is that it’s a fight. When you battle doubts, it’s a battle. Make no mistake about it, battles are rarely over quickly. Battles rarely happen without casualties. Battles are never easy. Here’s my challenge for you today, as you take some of these thoughts out of here. And that is to survive in the hostile world we’re in and keep your faith intact, there has to be a recognition that you’re in it for the long haul, hear that there’s going to be those ups and downs, but you’re going to stay in the fight. In other words, you need to keep your eye on the finish line, even in the midst of these challenges that come your way. If in fact, the first little skirmish we hit we waved the white flag doesn’t bode well for the perseverance of our faith. What I think happens in the Christian life is that no one ever told us we would have the skirmish. And suddenly, there was a problem and we’re waving the white flag thing and well, there’s a problem. I guess Christianity isn’t true. waved the white flag. Well, hold on a second, whoever told you that that’s the way the Christian life worked. Of course, you’re gonna have doubts, of course, you’re gonna have problems of course, you’re gonna have worries, of course, you’re gonna have things you can’t answer. And I was always telling my students just because you don’t have an answer, doesn’t mean there’s not an answer. Don’t confuse you not having an answer with there not being an answer. Stay in the fight. I started with my story at UNC Chapel Hill. My, by God’s grace, I was able to find the answers. So I started doing some very serious research and the things I was hearing in my religion class, and I realized, wait a second. This has all been answered before. What does that mean? These aren’t even new arguments. In fact, they’re really old arguments. And not only the arguments old, the solutions are even old.

But yet, I was never told any of that. Now, of course, on one sense, I don’t fall urban for that. He didn’t have a vested interest in telling me that. But I do wish my church had told me that. So here’s my final encouragement for you as you go out the door, whatever ministry you’re in. I trust all of you are in some ministry out there in some fashion, maybe it’s women’s ministry, maybe it’s youth ministry, college ministry, who knows the ministry you’re in. But you’re gonna have doubters create a space for them to come. Bring their questions, bring their queries, to have a dialogue. along about their struggles, what they put you don’t want to create as a space for you to give more lectures and more answers necessarily as if that’s the only you want to hear the questions then provide the answers. The church needs to do a better job of listening to those people who struggle so I pray that there’s nothing else you take away from this talk today. That you will also take that away