On Doubt

Doubting God is such a universal Christian experience, at some point in their walk almost every single christian has doubted. And yet when we doubt its still so difficult to get out of it, we read books and blogs about how to stop doubting God and yet its still so hard, well, here's yet another blog post about it, hopefully it helps.

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In Matthew 14:22-33 we get the story of Jesus walking on water out to the disciples who he sent on ahead, a storm kicks up. All of a sudden, in the middle of the night the disciples see a figure walking on water. They think he's a ghost but Jesus just calmly says, "Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid" and then in verse 28 it starts getting wild. "And Peter said to him, 'Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.' He said, 'Come.' So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and beginning to sink he cried out, 'Lord save me.' Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him." (ESV).

Now Peter gets a lot of flack for this account, but let's just all agree that the fact that he stepped out of the boat took an immense amount of faith. However its what happens after he steps out of the boat that relates to what we're talking about today. Peter steps out of the boat and begins to walk towards Jesus, but then he takes his eyes off of Christ, he sees the wind and the waves, he begins to doubt and because of this he begins to sink.

When we doubt we're doing the same thing. We have taken our eyes off of Christ and begun to think that the situation around us is bigger than him. We look at the wind and the waves and we think to ourselves, "there's no way Jesus can handle those," or even worse, we forget about him completely and think, "there's no way that I can handle that." What we've done is forgotten two of the amazing truths about God. 1. That he is bigger than anything we could ever conceive, and 2. That he is always with us.

1. God is bigger than everything I could conceive.
    The Bible has tons of stories about the absolute massiveness of God, in fact the entire Bible is about how awesome he is, but here's some highlights to remind you have his greatness:

• Creation: God didn't need tools, or even blueprints to create the entire universe, he just speaks it into being. Psalm 33:8-9 says, "Let all the earth fear the Lord; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him! For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm." The story of creation always leaves me in just absolute awe of who God is, if you really want your mind to be blown watch this video. Take a moment to read Psalm 8, take a walk through nature and just bask in the glory of what God has made.
• Bringing the slaves out of Egypt: Exodus contains a lot of stories about how just ridiculously strong God is but few are as telling as the 10 plagues. God uses Moses to bring down 10 different plagues on Egypt, all of which target and absolutely destroy a different Egyptian idol: Hapi the Nile god, Heqet the frog goddess of fertility, Geb the god of the earth (dust into gnats), Khepri god of the sun (he had the head of a fly), Hathor goddess of protection, Isis goddess of medicine, Nut goddess of the sky, Seth god of disorder (makes you think twice about people named Seth huh), Ra the god of the sun, and finally the 10th plague which attacked the deity of the Pharoah whom the Egyptians worshipped as a god. I usually think of the 10 plagues as the story about when God told the Egyptians to "get rekt." (Ex 7-12) source.
• Elijah and the prophets of Baal: Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to a show down to see whose God is stronger, they both get a bull, put it on an altar and pray to their respective deity to light it on fire, Elijah to God, and the prophets of Baal to Baal (I know shocking right?). Baal's guys get the first round and after a while of praying, self mutilation, and Elijah trash talking them, nothing has happened. So Elijah decides its his turn, but before he starts praying he has them soak the bull and the altar to the point where the water has filled a trench around the altar (that's a lot of water, 12 large jars worth to be exact). Elijah shoots off a little prayer and God just freaking nukes the offering, the bull is on fire, the alter is on fire, the water around the altar is on fire, there's a lot of fire and then the people slaughter all the prophets of Baal. (1 Kings 18:20-40).
• Jesus: Jesus performs a lot of miracles during his time on earth, but I'm just gonna talk about his biggest one, the resurrection. After sacrificing himself on the cross Jesus raised himself back to life, defeating death once and for all. Satan thought he had won, that God's plan had finally been foiled, God himself had died, but three days after the cross Jesus walked right out of the grave. Nothing is more powerful than God. The way Peter phrases it in his sermon at Pentecost is one of my favorites, "God raise him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it." (Acts 2:24 ESV). Its not like it took Jesus three days to shake fight off death, it wasn't a struggle for him to bring himself back to life, it was literally impossible for death to hold him once he decided it was time for him to come back to life.

2. We've forgotten that God is always with us.

It can be pretty easy to forget that God is with us sometimes. Even though we know in our heads that the Christian life is full of trials and tribulations it still gets pretty hard to see God in the middle of one. Speaking from experience, when you're in the middle of something like depression, or you're looking around at the world and all the evil in it, it gets pretty easy to say, "how could a loving God let this happen?" There's no easy solution to feeling like God isn't there, there's no one size fits all, but here's what works for me:

• Pray: It might feel like talking to a wall when you feel like he isn't there, but prayer is one of the most important parts of the Christian walk. Prayer is how we talk to God, if I didn't talk to my friends for a while I'd probably start feeling like they didn't exist either. In 1 Thessalonians 5:17 Paul encourages us to, "pray without ceasing" (ESV). In Philippians 4 when Paul is talking about how he figured out how to have joy in all circumstances he exhorts the church at Philippi to pray and give thanks in all circumstances.
• Read the Bible: Many times in the Psalms David cries out to God that it feels like God is very far from him, while prayer is how we speak to God, the Bible is where God has revealed himself to us, where we can learn about who he is, what he is like, all of his promises are there, as well as everything we could want to know about him.
• Remind yourself of all the times in your life that you have seen God working: Every so often, just to remind myself that God is good, and that he is working in my life, I sit down and make a list of every single time I've seen God work in my life. The older I get the more time this takes, but I always come away feeling the peace and assurance that only comes from being reminded that there is a God who loves and cares for you.

While doubt may be something that all Christians experience, it shouldn't define us. And the good news is that even when we do doubt, God is still there, he still loves us, and he still working in our lives.