048 Faith and Doubt: Living in the Tension

A young man once asked me, “If believing in God is such a big deal to him, why doesn’t God make himself more obvious?” 

That’s a great question! You’d think that if God would part the heavens and reveal Himself with a thunderclap, knocking us to our knees, that even the harshest skeptic would become a believer.

But I don’t know that that would work. I think that over time, the shock would wear off and the memory fade away, and as time passed, they’d dismiss the experience as a hallucination or a strange dream.

The reason I think that is because people have been able to dismiss dramatic encounters with God for a long time.

 People can believe in the supernatural, but still be moral or spiritual disasters.  That’s why more times than not God chooses to forgo grandiose displays and forces us to grapple with faith and doubt.  Rather than such demonstrations leading to faith, more times than not they simply create a demand for more displays and leave people unchanged.

The challenge that God faced wasn’t merely to get the human race to admit that He exists.  God’s challenge was to win them back to Himself.  And that is not a function of the head but the heart. 

We don’t merely need information. We need transformation.  This is also why the issue of faith must ultimately include the person of Jesus Christ.  Jesus is not only the “evidence” that skeptics are looking for; He is the “solution” that all of us need. 

One day your doubts will be answered.  But that will be the day you walk through the door marked “Death.”

Before that day you have to decide which “leap” to make – the leap of belief or the leap of unbelief.  And here’s the thing.  That leap will not only determine your eternal destiny, it will guide your one and only life in the here and now. 

Text: Exodus 19:16-21; 32:1-7; James 2:19; Matthew 28:16-20

Originally recorded September 19, 2010, at Fellowship Missionary Church, Fort Wayne, IN.