On Doubt
How do you follow Jesus when you’re fighting tooth and nail just to believe?
Some of us will make it through our faith-journey never having to walk through the dark valley of doubt. Praise God for that. Others of us are not so lucky.
Doubt can feel like a sickness. In some sense, it is. It can creep up, seemingly out of nowhere, and attack the faith we hold so dearly. Doubt can come in all shapes and sizes, and it can last for minutes, days, months or even years.
I’m not talking about stubborn skepticism or cynicism. I’m talking about the doubt that “hurts”—the doubt that feels like fear.
Persistent doubt can feel like a Wilderness; a place you don't want to be but don’t know how to leave. You don’t even know how you got there, and you can’t retrace your steps.
Maybe doubt is a Wilderness. And the Wilderness has always been a place where the people of God are faced with a choice: trust God and live, or trust yourself and die.
In the Wilderness, you are stripped of your ability to provide for yourself. You can’t “figure it out” in your own strength, and you can’t “fix” your situation with old habits.
When Israel was in the Wilderness, God provided them with bread for food every day. They were only allowed to gather one day’s worth of bread each day—and they were explicitly forbidden from gathering bread for the next day (Exodus 16).
Why? Because God wanted Israel to depend on Him daily for food. Every day, Israel had a decision.
Should I take matters into my own hands and keep food for the future? Or should I trust God to provide for me day-by-day?
Will I risk on His faithfulness, or trust my ability to figure this out on my own?
In seasons of doubt, faith feels like a risk. It’s in that place of felt-risk where faith—real faith—grows.
In the place of felt-risk, you have the opportunity to trust. To believe.
The doubting man in Mark 9:23-27 took that risk. He cried out to Jesus, “I believe! Help my unbelief…”
And Jesus did.
The Promised Land can only be reached by faith. And what does faith look like? It looks like praying for daily bread, and trusting in the Lord’s provision for you in the Wilderness one day at a time. That’s all we can really do anyways.
