Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hey, CC Midweek, thanks for joining us on this beautiful sunny night.
[00:00:08] I am going to pray and get us started.
[00:00:11] Dear Father, we love you. We trust you. We are thankful that you are God in whom we can put our confidence. I pray that tonight you would draw us nearer to you. I pray that you would take our minds, our hearts, all that's going on inside of us, and that your spirit would be at work opening our hearts, opening our minds, that you might do a good work in us and through us.
[00:00:31] Pray this all in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:00:34] Growing up, I was a voracious reader of Judy Blume. Anybody a Judy Bloom fan?
[00:00:42] Yeah. I'm aging myself a little bit. I know that's okay. So I sometimes like to go back and reread books from when I was younger or, you know, sometimes I'm like, wow, I still love this. Sometimes I'm like, this did not age well, guys.
[00:00:54] But I did go back a couple years ago. I reread, Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret.
[00:00:59] And it's so interesting because it tells a story of a girl, 1112 years old. Do you remember that face?
[00:01:06] Does anybody still feel like, that awkwardness of being in middle school when you think about that age, like, trying to fit in and trying to be like everybody else and trying to figure out who you are? And in this story, as Judy Blume tells it, Margaret moves to a new city and starts a new school. And she's trying to figure out who she's going to be and trying to be like everybody else. And one of the things she's trying to figure out is religion.
[00:01:31] And her family's religious, her friends are religious. She's not quite sure where she lands. So she tries to go on this, like, hunt for religion. So she goes to the synagogue with her grandma. She goes to the First Presbyterian Church with a friend, the United Methodist with another friend, and she's trying to figure out if God's really there and how is she gonna connect to him.
[00:01:55] So interspersed throughout the story and her life and her discovery are these prayers. And every one of her prayers starts like this. Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. And then she unfolds. And some of it's just the total what it's like to be an 1112 year old. Like, I have a test tomorrow. Please let me get a good grade, right? We've all thrown a Hail Mary out there before. Didn't study God, but I really need an A here. Could you please show up? Anybody else said that prayer at one point in Their life. Thank you. Okay.
[00:02:24] Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. I've been to church, but I don't feel anything special there.
[00:02:29] Even though I wanted to. I'm sure it has nothing to do with you. Next time I'll try harder.
[00:02:34] Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret.
[00:02:37] Don't you think it's time? I've waited patiently. Help me.
[00:02:41] Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. That's all I need. Just a little help. I'll be good around the house. I'll clear the table every night. Please, God, Why can't you help me? Haven't I done all that you wanted?
[00:02:54] Please let me be like everyone else.
[00:02:57] I've been looking for you, God. I've been in temple. I looked in church. I looked for you. And I wanted to confess, but you weren't there. I didn't feel you at all.
[00:03:05] I'm miserable. Everything's wrong.
[00:03:08] I guess it's my punishment for being a horrible person.
[00:03:12] At one point, she just decides she's never talking to God again. What did he want? She was done. She tried. It didn't work. His religions and she was giving up.
[00:03:22] But then life shifts. Life changes. And what she's been hoping and praying for, she finally says. Are you still there, God? It's me, Margaret. I know you're there. I know you wouldn't have missed this for anything. Thank you, God. Thanks an awful lot.
[00:03:37] Now I love the genius of Judy Blum. Whether you're a fan or knower or not, she intersperses in the story of, like, awkward teenage middle school years since something at the heart of what we've all been through, what we've all struggled to understand, what we've all questioned. God, are you even there?
[00:03:54] God, are you even listening? God? I've been doing everything right. It shouldn't be this hard.
[00:04:01] God, are you punishing me for something that I've done?
[00:04:05] We've begged God to do something and nothing happened.
[00:04:10] We've pleaded with God. God, you need to change this. And nothing changed. We've bargained with God, right? God, if you would do this, I promise I'll stop doing this. If you would please just make this work. I'll go to church. I'll stop swearing. I'll do the right thing. I'll read my Bible more. I'll learn all the songs and the words to the songs and I'll sing them.
[00:04:30] And we ask God, save this or change this. And we've struggled with not only wondering if God is there or listening, but Questions and doubts.
[00:04:42] Is this true?
[00:04:44] I hear all these different things, and I'm not sure what I'm supposed to believe.
[00:04:48] And when we have these moments, when we have questions, when we have doubts, when we have things that make us feel not confident, not like we can trust in God, and we're not sure what to do, we feel uncomfortable.
[00:05:01] Or maybe you felt this way before. I look around and everybody else seems to have it figured out.
[00:05:07] Everybody else seems to know, and they're good and they've got it. It must be something wrong with me.
[00:05:13] It must be something I'm doing wrong. Because if they get it and they get it, why can't I?
[00:05:20] And then when we feel this tension or this discomfort or we have questions or things that we don't know how to confront or think our way through or understand, where do we go?
[00:05:33] What do we do with them?
[00:05:35] For many, we either feel the embarrassment and we're like, well, if they have it figured out, I'm just gonna pretend like I do too, and not act like I have a question.
[00:05:44] Or we go to Google because, you know, Google ANSWERS Everything, or YouTube, whichever you like to look for. There's a video somewhere.
[00:05:51] TikTok, I don't know.
[00:05:54] Or we ask somebody, like, maybe a friend, like, hey, have you ever wondered about this?
[00:05:59] And a lot of times, more often than not, we let it drive us away from God instead of toward Him.
[00:06:07] We let the questions, the struggles, the feeling like God isn't there or God doesn't care take us further and further and further away from Him. And a lot of us have found ourselves in positions where we're trying to, like, either deconstruct our faith or work through our faith or not sure what to believe. Like, should I believe what I grew up with? I'm an adult now. Do I have to? Like, does it still hold? Is it true?
[00:06:33] At some point, all of us have felt somewhere in this. And so today I want to change our perspective on doubt. Actually, you are in the right spot. If you've ever been in any of these places before, you're actually in really good company.
[00:06:48] Because the truth is, if you have questions, if you have doubts, you aren't the first person to ever do so.
[00:06:55] And so I'm kicking us off tonight, but this is a series we're going to be working on. Hard questions and big thoughts about faith and God and who. Who we are and who he is and what he does and those hard things we don't know how to confront. But before we do, I want to just Change your perspective a little bit about doubt. In Matthew 28, it's the end of the chapter, and this is what it says in verse 16.
[00:07:18] The 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted.
[00:07:28] Now this is really, really interesting because it's the end of the Gospel of Matthew. So Matthew has spent his whole time building this case about who Christ is, and he's speaking to a Jewish audience. So they knew the Old Testament and they knew the laws and they knew the prophets. And they're like, Matthew's like, here's Jesus, this weighted Messiah that we've been longing for. He's come. And his disciples have been with Jesus for all of these years. And they've seen the miracles and they've seen the hard conversations and they've seen the compassion. And they saw Jesus die on a cross and get buried.
[00:08:02] And then they saw Christ again after he had died.
[00:08:07] And they have this moment.
[00:08:10] And what does Matthew tell us they worshiped?
[00:08:14] But some doubted even after they'd spent time with Christ.
[00:08:19] Some still had questions even after they saw somebody die and come back to life, which nobody does that, right? They saw that and saw. Still, they weren't 100% sure.
[00:08:33] Here we are 2,000 years later, and some of us have questions, some of us have doubts even in the worship. Some of us are like, I'm just, I'm not 100% sure how this Christianity thing works, but I think it's really important when we see something like this in the Bible. How did Jesus respond to his disciples when they showed up at this moment, right when he'd spent this time with them and he taught them and he called them and he gave them all these things to. And they went through these incredible moments. How did Jesus respond in their doubt? He didn't discount them and be like, ah, just get over that. Move on.
[00:09:09] He didn't send them away. Like, you know what? You're not in, you're out, right? That's not how Christ responded.
[00:09:15] He. He didn't even say he was disappointed, right? Could you imagine, like, still, after all we've been through, you don't believe in me, right? Like, he could have responded in so many ways, but right there with this group, what does he do?
[00:09:33] He calls them on an adventure. A lot of us have heard Matthew 28, Go therefore, and make disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to do all that I've commanded. I'M with you even to the end of the age. We know that part. But the words right before that part are, but some of them doubted.
[00:09:56] In their doubt, Christ met them where they were and still called them on an adventure with Him, Gave them an incredible purpose and a job to do, a direction that would change their entire life.
[00:10:09] This matters because a lot of us think, like, I can't ask hard questions at church.
[00:10:15] What will God think of me? Right?
[00:10:18] But Christ isn't offended by your questions.
[00:10:21] He's not disappointed that you don't have everything figured out. He's not afraid of your doubts or worried that, like, ooh, this isn't going to hold up if you, if you ask that out loud, like, somehow it's going to fall apart right where we are. Just like Jesus met his disciples all of those years ago, he wants to meet us.
[00:10:42] He wants to do something in our hearts and in our life, and he has an adventure that he wants to call us into with him. He has a purpose that he wants to give us, to change our entire lives.
[00:10:54] But we have to start with Christ.
[00:10:58] You aren't a bad person for having questions.
[00:11:01] You aren't somehow a bad Christian for not having everything 100% figured out. Actually, what you are is very, very normal and very, very human.
[00:11:12] What you are is exactly where you're supposed to be. What you do with those questions, what you do with those doubts. And that's the game changer right there.
[00:11:24] See, when you read the Bible, the disciples actually weren't the only ones with questions. I've been reading the book of Psalms, and when you read through, it's beautiful, all these ideas about how great God is and who he is and how wonderful he is, but right in the Psalms, interspersed between. God is great. God is amazing. Does God even know what's happening? Have you ever thought that before? Like, God, can you see this? Like, really can you see what's happening right now? In the middle of Psalms, Did I keep my heart pure for nothing? I get nothing but trouble all day long.
[00:11:57] Every morning brings pain, questions like, how long, O Lord, until you restore me?
[00:12:04] Or how about this one? God, why do you stand so far away?
[00:12:08] Why does it seem like you're hiding? When I'm in trouble, write in the Psalms, Lord, how long will you forget me?
[00:12:18] All night long I prayed with my hands lifted toward heaven, but my soul wasn't comforted.
[00:12:25] Do you ever ask, but, like, why are certain things in the Bible, like, if you were going to write a book to, like, start a religion, right? Like, you would want the leaders to be, like, awesome and amazing and perfect, and they got everything right all of the time. And now you should follow. Like, that's not what you read in the Bible. You read about people like, imagine like, the church leaders like, you would be like, man, Peter got it right all of the time. He never doubted God. He just denied knowing him a couple of times, right? If you were going to talk about the disciples, you would never show all of their failings or mistakes or doubts. You'd be like, man, once Jesus called him, they were in.
[00:13:01] But that's not what you read. You read about humans just like you and I. You read about the disciples even spending time with Jesus, doubting. You read about kings who are saying, God, why does it seem like you're so far away? Why do I feel forgotten right now? You read worship leaders. I mean, they're writing songs of worship that we're all like, yeah, that's amazing. My heart is so moved. And they're like, God, people who are evil are, like, flourishing right now. And I'm struggling. How does that work? Okay, why would this be in the Bible?
[00:13:36] First, it shows us that we're all human. If a disciple and a king and a worship leader could have questions, I think God can handle my questions too.
[00:13:45] But it also, especially when you look in the psalms, what do you see in these hard questions, in these things that are hard? And if I had to answer that, I'd be like, I love Jesus, right? Like, they turn to God with these questions, not away from him.
[00:14:03] The psalms are what we get to see of them turning to God, their prayers, their hearts, their hardships. They didn't say, I'm done with God. Instead they said, God, I'm looking to you to help me find the answers for things I don't know how to understand.
[00:14:21] And what do they find?
[00:14:23] They find a God. Not who's mad at them, not who's disappointed in them, but a God who loves them and. And is for them, who helps lead them to answers that make all the difference in their lives.
[00:14:37] But we also get to see how God will handle our questions and our doubts.
[00:14:43] So here's the big perspective shift. I want you guys to see if you have questions. God is not against you. Can we agree on that? If your heart's like, I don't know how to figure this out, or, I've never found a good answer here, or, nobody's been able to help me here, God is not against you. He's for you. His heart isn't disappointed he's not mad at you. He loves you. He wants you to seek him with these questions. He wants us to turn to him and to know him more.
[00:15:14] But we have to confront. It's okay for us to have questions. Doubt isn't the opposite of faith. See, we think, well, doubt means I don't have faith. And if I don't have faith, then, you know, it's impossible to be with God, right? But doubt isn't the opposite of faith.
[00:15:31] In fact, the very questions you have, the very things, like, I always tell when I'm teaching, like the Bible, we're looking at stuff together, and people are like, well, I don't understand this part. I'm like, that's awesome. You know why? Like, lean into it. Spend some time there. Don't read over the things that make you uncomfortable. It may just be that that thing you don't understand, that hard question that you have might be the place God wants to meet you most and teach you something about Himself that you've never known before.
[00:16:00] But if you ignore it or you try to pretend like it's not there, you miss the opportunity for God to amplify your faith, for God to grow your faith, for you to actually know him better, because you spend some time with him.
[00:16:17] So where you feel the tensions, where you feel the hard questions, turn to God and see how he might open up your heart and your mind with Him. I love Craig Groeschel says this. He says, your doubt doesn't disappoint God.
[00:16:31] He says, your doubt doesn't define God. Your doubt doesn't even define you.
[00:16:37] He said, your doubt doesn't deny your faith. Your doubt doesn't even disqualify you. He said, faith isn't the absence of doubt. It's an invitation to a deeper faith. And faith is the means to push through doubt.
[00:16:53] Now think about how powerful this is.
[00:16:56] Christianity isn't just to be. Close your eyes, jump off the cliff, and you have faith that everything's gonna work out okay. Okay. That's not faith. Please don't do that. Actually, that's dangerous. It's not a great idea, okay?
[00:17:11] Christianity is a thinking religion. You're supposed to think your way through big ideas. If you've ever read theology before. I remember the first time I went to a theology class, did not bring my Bible. Bad decision, guys. Don't show up to a class about theology and not bring a Bible. Doesn't go well. I went home and I was like, reading all of this stuff. I had a dictionary, I had my Bible And I had a theology book that was, like, this big. And one of my friends is like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm trying to read theology. I want to know God better. But I was, like, super grouchy because I'm like, I don't understand anything that I'm reading. Because my mind was, like, doing some type of gymnastics that it had never done before. Okay? You're supposed to think hard things. You're supposed to be like this. I don't know how to hold this. I don't know how to think about this. I need dictionaries to look up what these words mean. And then I need you to give it to me, like, in really plain, easy language to understand, okay?
[00:18:05] But we're supposed to think our way through even when it feels a little bit hard. Anybody ever take a math class before? And you're like, this is, like, way beyond me who even thought of this. I'm never using this in my entire life, right? Have you been there?
[00:18:19] Anybody before? Okay, but then you graduate the class and you learn something, didn't you? I know maybe you're not doing algebra or geometry today, but it's necessary. It's making a difference. Somewhere somebody tells me, okay, but it grows your mind and it stretches you to think about hard things. All right? Why would we think that Christianity is any different?
[00:18:39] Why would we think that? It's just supposed to be easy and I'm supposed to understand everything.
[00:18:45] That's not true. You're supposed to think your way through it. You're supposed to wrestle with thoughts and ideas, and you're supposed to hold them up and compare them and talk about them. When you read something uncomfortable in the Bible, you're like, that can't be true. It's not who I understand God to be. But then you look at other scripture and you use scripture to interpret scripture and help you understand who God is, and you think your way through it, which means church should be the best place for you guys to ask hard questions.
[00:19:14] I don't know, whoever concocted the idea, like, don't ask a question at church because it's just garbage. Church should be the best place to ask hard questions. Church would be the place like, man, I was reading this in the Bible, and I'm uncomfortable. I don't know what to do with it. Or, hey, I was at school this week, and my friend asked me this impossible question. I'm a preacher's kid. So typically, what would happen is people would be like, your dad's a preacher. You answer this for me. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. I'll ask my dad.
[00:19:44] I'll be happy to ask him and find out for you, right?
[00:19:48] So when somebody asks you a hard question, one don't feel like you have to be like, well, I know everything when you don't know. My tendency is if I don't know, I want to make it up to protect, pretend like I do.
[00:19:58] You don't have to pretend. You're like, yeah, that's a great question. I don't know the answer, but let's think through it and see if we can find an answer. And then come to church and ask somebody. Ask it in your small group. Ask one of the pastors or a ministry leader and be like, hey, this is something I don't know how to answer or think through. What do you think? And you talk about it and you work your way through ideas together.
[00:20:19] Maybe the question that you're wrestling with that you don't know how to answer, somebody else has it too.
[00:20:25] And maybe just by you being the one to say it out loud, like five people are like, oh, my gosh, I've always wanted to know that too. What's the answer? Right. You being the one to ask it. I promise you, you're gonna be surprised. Not everybody has it figured out.
[00:20:39] Not everybody is like, hands down, easy peasy. I got this. Cruising through life, no problems, no questions, no hardships. Bam. Right? That's just nobody's life experience.
[00:20:50] The most faithful religious people I know have struggles.
[00:20:54] I've read book after book about intelligent people wrestling with hard ideas. I love C.S. lewis. If you've ever read C.S. lewis before, he wrote a book called the Problem of Pain. And he wrestles through the idea, why would a good God allow suffering? Either God isn't really good or he's not powerful enough to stop it. And it's totally intellectual. He was an academic, so he's big, level thinking, why would God allow suffering? There's a problem of pain, okay? But then later in his life, he'd been a bachelor his whole life. He got married and fell in love, and she died of bone cancer.
[00:21:29] And he wrote another book, A Grief Observed. And he wrestles with the emotion of pain. It's not intellectual anymore. It's absolutely heart wrenching. God, why would you even let me fall in love if you were just going to take her away?
[00:21:44] Like, he wrestles through the emotion of pain and loss and heartache, but he shares it with us so that we can wrestle through it together, that those of us who've been in places like that and experienced things like that, like, one, we're not alone in this. Somebody else has asked what I'm struggling with. Somebody else has been where I'm at. What did they discover?
[00:22:09] What did God do in their life? Maybe he could do that in mine as well.
[00:22:14] But it starts with us asking questions, talking about it, voicing our doubts together.
[00:22:20] It's where we learn and our faith grows and we get to know God better. See, it's interesting because so many times we think doubt is the opposite of faith, right?
[00:22:30] It isn't. Doubt might be the very thing that grows your faith, amplifies your faith, helps you know God better.
[00:22:36] Apathy is the opposite of faith. Apathy is, I don't care.
[00:22:40] I don't care what's true. It doesn't really matter. I tried that before. God didn't show up, and now I'm done.
[00:22:46] Apathy is I can't be moved to even spend time or energy on it. I've just moved on and I'm done. Now that is the opposite of faith.
[00:22:55] Because we're no longer wrestling with God. We're no longer talking through ideas. We're just like, I don't care.
[00:23:02] I got other things to worry about, other things to focus on.
[00:23:07] See, God wants us to bring these ideas to him, not to hide them or keep them or pretend like everything is okay. We care enough to talk about it, we care enough to study.
[00:23:19] We care enough to say, like, man, I thought this my whole life, and it turns out I'm really wrong. Also, I would answer questions in my theology class. Guys like, oh, my gosh, I'm a preacher's kid. I've grown up in church modes my whole life. And it'd be like, bam. I know that. And why do you ever. You answer a question somebody asks you, why be like, oh, I don't know.
[00:23:40] I don't actually know why that's true, or why I even think that I was really wrong. A lot of times I'm like, I'm just gonna stop answering questions now. Listen a whole lot. Why do I believe what I believe?
[00:23:52] Why have I accepted something to be true my whole life? Because I actually know why? Or because somebody once upon a time told me it?
[00:24:00] Or because I picked it up here and there and kind of pieced and mashed it together. Or it was a really lovely story on a felt board one time when I was a little kid. I know I'm old again. You don't use felt Boards anymore. Guys, I gotta stop aging myself. In Sunday school, we have, like, little felt boards, and they put little people on there. Okay, it's fine. All right.
[00:24:18] We can care enough to bring our thoughts, our questions or doubt to God. He isn't disappointed. I love Tim Keller said this. He said, 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.
[00:24:46] A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she's failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, and which should only be discarded after long reflections.
[00:24:57] He said believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts not only their own, but their friends and their neighbors. It's no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them. Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive. Of isn't that powerful?
[00:25:21] We can wrestle with these things, and it gives us something to stand on because we've thought about it before.
[00:25:28] I know I, I, I'm not just repeating something I've heard and I don't know why. I've actually spent some time thinking through the hard questions.
[00:25:38] So the other perspective of doubt we have to confront is okay, Doubt is okay. I can ask hard questions. God's not mad at me. But the other side is, where do my doubts come from? Because in life, we pick up doubts in different ways. Some of us, we just grew up in church and we picked up pieces here and there. We grew up believing, we went along with it. We're like, yes, this is great. I'm in. Until somebody brought something up.
[00:26:01] Maybe it was a point or something in the Bible that we're like, oh, no, God would never say that. And then we look at something in Bible, we're like, I don't, I didn't, I don't even know what to say about that.
[00:26:10] Or somebody asked a hard question and you didn't know how to answer it. And it made so much sense the way they talked about it. You're like, you feel your faith. You've never asked that hard question before and you don't know.
[00:26:21] Or maybe you took a comparative religion class.
[00:26:24] And in your religion class, the professor said, let's talk about creation stories. And they talk about the creation myths throughout the world. And in different religions. And you're like, wait, Creation is a myth. It's not real.
[00:26:36] Is Genesis not real? And then if Genesis is not real, is the whole Bible not real? And we start having questions and doubts.
[00:26:44] For some, doubts creep in. When life gets hard, everything's good. You love God, you love people. You're doing your thing. You're doing all of your stuff. And then something really, really hard and inexplicable happened. Maybe you lost somebody that you loved.
[00:27:00] Maybe you got sick and it didn't go away, and it was hard.
[00:27:05] Maybe you didn't get the job that you really, really wanted. Maybe the person you thought you were going to be with forever, you broke up.
[00:27:13] Maybe one of your parents lost their job and money got tight.
[00:27:17] Something really, really hard happened, and you were pleading with God, God, do something. Change something, Fix something. This hurts. Make it better. God, we need you. Can you hear us? Can you help us?
[00:27:29] And nothing changed. Or the person who was sick passed, or you didn't get better and the pain didn't go away.
[00:27:37] And we think if God was good, he wouldn't have let this happen. Or if God was powerful enough, he would have stopped it. So maybe he's not really powerful enough.
[00:27:46] Maybe for some, doubt's just kind of how you've always thought about it. Like you've never been able to wrap your mind around it. You can't make sense of it. You never really felt connected to God or felt what other people felt, and. And you're just not even sure why you need to.
[00:28:02] Maybe for some.
[00:28:04] You saw what Christians say on social media, and they're mean and judgmental and hypocritical. And somebody who said, I'm a Christian and then did terrible, horrible, awful things, and you're like, if that's what it means to be a Christian, I'm out. Don't give me that label. Don't give me that title. I don't want to be like them.
[00:28:24] Here's a really tough one. Another idea from Craig Rochelle. He said, sometimes our doubts may be driven by decisions we make, decisions that we know aren't good for us. We do things we know aren't healthy for us, and they're not part of God's plan for us.
[00:28:41] And so we start to feel distant from God. Where is God? Why can't I feel his presence? Is God real? The issue, he says, isn't with God. It's with our decisions that separate us from God.
[00:28:53] And he said, I love this. Our doubts can't be diffused until they're defined.
[00:28:59] We can't really start piecing together our doubts until we really define, like, how did I get here? Right?
[00:29:05] Where did this come from in my life? That's kind of leading this.
[00:29:10] So then the question is, what do you doubt?
[00:29:14] What do you have hard questions about?
[00:29:16] What's the thing you're not sure about and you're not sure where to go or how to get the answer?
[00:29:21] Don't be afraid to lean in there. Don't be afraid to define it and put words and ideas to it. It might feel uncomfortable, there might be tension in it. But I'm going to challenge you this week. I really want you to spend some quiet time and ask yourself, what are the hard questions I don't really know how to answer?
[00:29:39] What are the things that maybe I don't know enough about to really feel strong or confident in my faith there?
[00:29:46] And then your starting point is, turn that to God. Be like God. I have questions about this.
[00:29:52] I'm. I'm asking you to help me, God. I'm not sure where to go to the answer for this, but would you please direct me, God? I'm not sure what the Bible says about this or this, but I want to spend some time with you. Could you help me to know more rather than turning away from God? Spend some time with God this week. Write it down, put it on a piece of paper, and then lean in to see what God might do, what light might shine in that darkness. That's kind of keeping us a step back and helping us go all in.
[00:30:21] So, one, ask yourself what your doubts are. Write them down and turn to God with them. But then, two, I want to give you a couple of resources. I like to read.
[00:30:31] So usually when I'm trying to wrestle through big ideas or understand hard things, I'm like, how many books can I find about this that I can read?
[00:30:39] So I'm going to give you one that I've already read and one that I'm reading through. The first one is the Benefit of Doubt by Craig Groeschel. And if you've ever read Craig Groeschel before or listened to his sermon, he's real, down to earth, real talks about stuff like it is. And he asks questions in the book, like, why should I believe God is good?
[00:30:58] Why doesn't God answer my prayers?
[00:31:00] Why would God provide only one way?
[00:31:03] Why believe in Jesus if his followers are hypocrites?
[00:31:08] Why does God feel so far away?
[00:31:10] Why would God send people to hell?
[00:31:13] Why believe in the Bible if science contradicts it?
[00:31:16] And then his final question is, why would God love me? I'm about halfway through this one. If you've never really worked through hard stuff or doubts or questions before, this is a really good toe in the water. You're gonna see some really interesting ideas and connections. Connections to Christ. And he at the end of each chapter has like questions and things for you to work on and verses and ideas. The second one is the Reason for God by Timothy Keller. I read this book, I don't even know, a decade ago.
[00:31:45] We did a small group with our high school girls and we met at Panera's at like, I don't even know what time, like six o' clock in the morning before high school, you guys. My high school girls came and we read this book together and it was really, really hard and I understood like 10% of it. But we did. We met at Panera's and we talked our way through it. And I've read it a couple of times since then. I'm a huge fan of Tim Keller, but he actually talks about belief in the age of skepticism. And he confronts the seven biggest objections and doubts that people have for Christianity. And he says, these are the objections. There can't just be one true religion. How could a good God allow suffering? Christianity is a straight jacket.
[00:32:24] The church is responsible for so much injustice. How can a loving God send people to hell? Hasn't science disproved Christianity? And you can't take the Bible literally. Maybe you've thought this before, you've seen some of these objections. And he does it from a very intellectual with theology and philosophy. In the first half of the book, he confronts these objections. What have we learned throughout history and time to talk about these ideas is. And then the second half of book, the book, he just talks about the gospel in Christ and our relationship to him and why the gospel is greater than religion and who he is. And it's just this beautiful, beautiful book. If you've maybe spent some time and you want to go deeper, dive, I would recommend that one. Both of them are good. What if you spent a little time asking your questions with God and then maybe get a book to help guide you as you learn more about this. Okay.
[00:33:18] We aren't the first people to ask hard questions. We aren't the first people to have doubts or questions or concerns. And turns out we probably actually won't be the last people either.
[00:33:29] The question isn't are you going to have doubts or things you're not sure of. The question is, what will you do when you get there because if you turn to God, you're going to find a God who loves loves you and is for you and wants to help you grow in your faith.
[00:33:46] If you turn away from God, you're going to find yourself more distant, further and further away from a God who wants to help you and be there with you.
[00:33:56] See, it turns out when we're trying to grow and know and ask hard questions, it doesn't have to destroy or ruin anything. I promise you the gospel has held up for thousands of years. It's going to still hold up when we dive in and ask hard things.
[00:34:12] It's not going to come crumbling and falling apart. You might have to deconstruct the ideas you thought were right. But that's me, not God.
[00:34:22] God can handle my big thoughts and my big emotions. And I promise you the Christian faith can hold up to even the hardest ideas.
[00:34:34] God loves you. He's for you.
[00:34:36] We're going to dive into this together. So my other thing is come back to CC midweek because you're not going to want to miss it and maybe bring one of your friends or family member who's asking you the hard questions and let's wrestle through it together and see what God might show us, what we might discover about him and what could happen in our lives when our faith is amplified and we really, really know him better.
[00:35:01] I'm going to pray for us. Dear Father, I love you. I trust you. I'm so thankful that you are a God who is for us. I'm thankful that you are a God who can handle our tough questions and our big thoughts and our hard ideas. I pray for every heart here, Father, that this would be an opportunity to know you better. I pray right where we are that you would meet us and that your favor would shine upon us. I pray that as we think through big ideas and wrestle through hard questions, I pray that we would know Christ better than we've ever known him before.
[00:35:30] I pray that we would love him more than we've ever loved him before. And I pray that your light would shine in us and through us and we would be awesome forces for good for you in this world. I pray this all in Jesus name, Amen.
