We are to pray 'lead us not into temptation' but in a sceptical age, how do we deal with the temptation to doubt? Peter Lewis shows us how.
Satan's primary and most persistent temptation is the temptation to unbelief and rebellion: opposing God's will with our ambition, his sovereignty with our self-advancement, his glory with our pride.
There are many turnings from the road of faith which deviate gradually until we are going in a quite opposite direction. Satan often tempts us not at first to defiance, but to doubts. He tempts us to doubt God's existence on the one hand or God's commitment to us on the other hand, the reality of his threats or the validity of his promises, the wisdom of his laws or the truth of his gospel. Temptation now, as ever, is usually prefaced by 'Did God really say ...?'
Faith always has to deal with doubts from early youth to late age. Doubt is often waiting round the next corner with the unexpected, or lurking in the undergrowth of a new argument, or curled up in a bad experience, or tracking our footsteps alongside an old problem. Satan never gives up. If he cannot destroy you he will try to disturb you. And he knows that doubts disturb us deeply; they hurt us precisely in proportion to our love for God, our longing for him, our surrender to him. That is why the best of us will be beset with doubts from time to time.
A world-famous missionary leader, George Verwer of Operation Mobilisation, said recently to our congregation, 'I've lived my whole life on the edge of agnosticism. So you people who talk of your doubts all the time, look, any idiot can doubt; faith just costs a little bit more.' After thirty years of faithful, fruitful but not peaceful service, he should know! Hence we all need to learn to handle doubts in a mature, stable way: not pretending, not panicking and not pitying ourselves into spiritual depression and vulnerability, but coping with the strong winds of temptation and dealing patiently with the grit that gets into the eyes of faith at times so that we cannot see too well for a while. And this means that it is indeed faith that must handle doubt: not fear, not an enforced neutrality, not a helpless complaisance, but faith.
Understanding your faith
The way to approach your doubts is first to understand your faith. And when I speak of your faith I mean the faith, that is, the great historic facts and the glorious spiritual realities of the Christian faith. Not, in the first place, your believing, but your beliefs. That way you don't start with the negative and you don't start with yourself! Faith grows strong by looking to God and to what he has done, by listening to God and understanding his will and way.
This was the Psalmist's way in Psalm 73. There he tells us how he nearly lost his faith when he saw how the godless prosper. He felt guilty about this but could not shake it off 'till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny.' Before the massive reality of God the judge of all the earth, and in the perspective of final judgments and ultimate things, he saw how hollow the pride of the unbelieving was and how foolish he had been to quarrel with God. He saw that what mattered supremely in his own experience was that he was loved by God and held in an eternal relationship. The rest could wait God's time, God's hour and God's resolution. So the Psalm begins and ends with statements of triumphant and joyful faith: 'God is good' and 'it is good for me to be near God.' This is faith's 'bottom line'.
We must always be aware that we live our lives, even as Christians, in the world of the Fall. A global catastrophe has distanced our world from God's heaven, wrapped it in silence from the sight or sound of supernatural realities. Our world is not normal, and God's dealings with it are not normal. Even with believers, God's dealings are to a very real extent conditioned by sin in the world and in ourselves. Hence while he is the God who speaks he is often silent, while he is the God who is near he is often felt as far away, while he is the God of many mercies we must go through many hardships to inherit the kingdom of God, and while he is the God who heals yet, 'if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin (still subject to death, doomed to die), yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness (the righteousness of God that is given by faith)' (Romans 8.10).
If faith is to cope with the world as it is, it must realise that the world as it is not the world as it was meant to be. It is a damaged world, and ours is a broken humanity, kept in the mercy of God yet reaping the fruit of its own Fall in the judgment of God. God, as Isaiah so beautifully shows in his prophecies, has a wonderful future for our world, a future in which it (and we) will be healed and glorious. Yet in the present so many times we have to say, as he does, 'Truly you are a God who hides himself' (Isaiah 45.15).
Doubts come as we look at the shadows, at the apparent absence of God in situations, but faith listens to the promise, looks forward to the reconciliation and rejoices in the light.
For the New Testament believer, the Christian, much more is clear, for while 'the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.' He is the great antidote to doubt, and his stature dwarfs all doubt. So when you are tempted to doubt, start with your objective faith, not your subjective doubts. Is your faith well-founded in the historic reality of Jesus, on the reliability of his claims and on the coherence of his gospel? The way to approach your doubts is to understand your faith: is it reasonable, is it well-founded, is it effective? Often Christians know too little about the faith they profess. They carry a Sunday School faith into a university world, they are experts in their field but amateurs in their faith.
And if your faith is intellectually developed, is it put into practice, is it an active faith? Doubt is only properly dealt with by faith developed in understanding and obedience. Passive intellectual cogitation is not enough. Faith must be put to work; it cannot remain strong and healthy kept only in the inner life: 'My teaching is not my own, it comes from him who sent me. If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own'(John 7.16,17)
What do you prefer?
We must distinguish between our doubts on the one hand and our attitude to them on the other. Christian people are often deeply upset by the presence of doubt. They begin to ask, 'If we doubt, does that mean we are not Christians at all? Does doubting damn us?' The answer to that last question is probably that one kind of doubting does; another kind does not.
If you prefer doubt to belief, if you hide behind your doubts as convenient excuses to keep you from facing God and his call on your life, if you cherish your doubt and side with it - then you show that you are not after all on the side of God, but still running from him, ranged against him and without claim on him. Your doubt in that case is really unbelief and it is unbelief that damns. James' 'double-minded man' is not the true believer, faithful but fighting. He is rather the man who still hasn't decided where his loyalty lies; he is 'unstable in all he does', and his doubt is not a troublesome relic of the old life but a fundamental ambivalence about God.
However, if quite differently from this, you struggle with doubt in hope and fear, longing to be altogether God's child and hating everything which comes between you and him, including especially doubt and disobedience, then your struggle with doubt is not a sign of unbelief but its opposite! It is a sign of faith. Your very fear is your comfort!
It is not the presence of doubt but the absence of faith which is the damning thing. Faith can and often does coexist with doubt, but it is not equalled by it nor need it be crippled by it. Faith by its very nature is stronger than doubt, as light by its very nature is stronger than darkness. We are 'justified by faith', not by the amount of faith but by the truth of faith. If it leads to Christ as Saviour and Lord it is saving faith, however small and frail it may be. This is because ultimately it is Christ as the object of faith who saves, not faith in itself, and a strong Saviour can say to a weak faith, 'Daughter/son, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering' (Mark. 5.34).
Fear and flattery
We must get our doubts themselves into proper perspective. When we struggle with doubts, we must not blindly give them a credit they do not deserve. We are inclined to flatter our doubts and to be afraid of them because of a reputation we ourselves have given to them. We often give them a character for honesty and uprightness and intellectual strength that they do not deserve. Often we are fooled into respecting our doubts more than our beliefs, as if our doubts were free of any prejudice, of anything irrational or even of anything mistaken.
The fact is, of course, that your doubts are no bigger or stronger or more formidable than your own little intellect. They are as susceptible to your very unintellectual sinfulness and weakness and instability as anything else in your life. Often our doubts (which we sometimes run away from instead of facing down) are not nearly as formidable or as unanswerable as we think at first. Like some small dogs which set up a furious barking as we pass their gate, making us jump nearly out of our skins, but which beat a hasty retreat when we take a step towards them, so it can be with the doubts we fear to voice and examine: they can be poodles pretending to be alsatians!
What is of supreme importance in this whole matter, whether our doubts are few or many, weak or strong, is what we do with them in relation to Jesus Christ.
The shelf life of doubts
Some years ago, a young man from a fine Christian family came to me. He was about to go up to Cambridge to study but he knew he was leaving behind a matter which had never been resolved. All his life he had shown great respect for his parents' faith and consistently joined them in church attendance, yet he himself had not made a profession of faith. 'You see,' he said to me with a slight smile, 'I can't shelve my doubts.' I replied, 'No, but I see that you can shelve your Saviour.' He looked startled but interested, and I continued, 'You see, something has to be in the centre of your life and some things have to be on the shelves - and you've chosen to put Jesus Christ on the shelves.
My point is that he ought to be in the centre and the doubts on the shelves, but you have exactly reversed that. Now I want to ask you whether you really believe that Jesus is small enough to be on the shelf. Personally, I think that ought to be your biggest doubt, and that you should transfer most of the respect you are giving your doubts to him, and that you should put him in the centre and your doubts on the shelves. Isn't it time to do that?'
I am glad to say that one week later he made an appointment to see me and tell me that Jesus was off the shelf and at the centre! You see, it isn't having doubts but what you do with them that matters most.
Extracted from The Lord's Prayer by Peter Lewis (Hodder & Stoughton), and used by permission of the author.
Home
Archives
Subscriptions
Adverts
Find a church
About us
Contact us
Site Map
Printable