Preached in Markham Baptist Church, July 17, 2005

DEALING WITH DOUBTS

As you may have guessed, I feel a certain closeness to the disciple named Thomas. Besides the fact we happen to share the same name, my appreciation for Thomas runs deeper than that. I appreciate Thomas because of the honest picture we have of his struggles with his faith.

He is mentioned only briefly in the Gospels but in our passage this morning he is centre stage and his actions and words recorded here have earned him the nickname of Doubting Thomas. When the other disciples come to him and tell him, “We have seen the risen Lord,” he says in verse 25: “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”

He doubted the testimony of the other disciples.

I have always appreciated this honest picture of Thomas – a man who in the end was a man of great faith, but one who struggled with his beliefs.

And I cannot help but think that there are many people who are like myself and Thomas who at times find it a battle to believe. Perhaps you have heard the good news of Jesus Christ and you know deep down that there is something in it all, but you just can’t bring yourself to accept it.

You witness Adam’s testimony in baptism today and you say to yourself, “I wish I could say for sure that Christ died for me. I wish I could say that I belong to God. But I am plagued by doubts.”

Perhaps you see the things that are happening in this world, you see the injustice and the inhumanity and you doubt the very existence of God, let alone the idea that you can be a child of God who inherits eternal life.

Well this sermon is for you. And we have much to learn from Thomas’ experience. For Thomas is one of many who reached the faith only after he travelled through a long dark tunnel of doubt. He was one who wrestled through his doubts and came to the place of great faith and was able to say to Jesus in verse 28, “My Lord and my God.”

Consider Thomas’ situation. The tragedy of Calvary has left Thomas broken and disillusioned. It wasn’t always this way - indeed when Jesus went back to the region of Judea facing certain death, Thomas quite valiantly and bravely said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” He had followed Jesus for the past three years. Where Jesus went, Thomas went. When Jesus sent him out to preach the coming of the Kingdom, Thomas went with enthusiasm and faith. He trusted Jesus, believed in Jesus. But then Jesus is crucified and that is the end of it. His world comes crashing down. You can imagine the questions that run through his mind at this point, questions that many people who wrestle with doubt have asked – Where is God in all of this? How could God let this happen? What about the dreams of the future? What about the promise of the Kingdom? Why didn’t God intervene and stop this great tragedy?

And Thomas’ only desire was to be alone with his grief.

We read in verse 24 of our text that when Jesus appears to the other disciples Thomas was not there. Where was he? I believe he was alone with devastating doubt. So that when the other disciples came to him and said, “We have seen the Lord”, Thomas glumly replied, “I don’t believe it.”

Now it needs to be said that there are different kinds of doubt.

There is ignorant doubt. By this I mean the kind of doubt that arises in people who have no desire to search for the truth. They allow themselves to rest on popular opinions of Jesus gleaned from such popular books at The Da Vinci Code and other such fiction. They have never given serious attention to the Christian faith - the fact of Christ and the evidence for the resurrection. They may sweep aside the faith of scholars and saints all through the ages with contempt, without seriously studying their claims. They doubt in ignorance.

There is also sinful doubt. This kind of doubt really is called unbelief. And you need to understand that doubt is different from unbelief. Doubt is a problem of the mind which says, I want to believe but I can’t. And please understand that Jesus has infinite patience with you and longs for you to discover the truth. If you are dealing with doubts, do not despair. God loves you and seeks to bring you through that dark tunnel of doubt.

On the other hand there is unbelief. Unbelief is a problem of the will which could believe but refuses. The Bible sees this as a sin. Michael Cassidy defines unbelief this way – “It is the problem of the person who is quite unwilling to follow the facts where they lead because he or she is unwilling to make the moral changes of lifestyle to which such a pursuit of truth might lead.”¹

It is not reason but sin which prevents many people from believing and growing in the faith. The story is told a young man who came to his pastor with all sorts of intellectual difficulties with the faith - if it wasn’t the inspiration of the Bible, it was the miracles. If it wasn’t the miracles, it was the divinity of Christ. If it wasn’t the divinity of Christ, it was the inconsistent lives of church members.

For a while his pastor listened patiently, sympathetically and did everything he possibly could to help. But the impression began to grow on him that the difficulties had another source, and one day when a fresh intellectual difficulty was presented, the pastor looked the young man in the eye and said, “Tell me, do you by any chance have difficulty with the Ten Commandments?” It turned out in that particular case the crux of the difficulty was not intellectual at all, it was moral.

You see sometimes, SOMETIMES, the problem, the reason why faith in God is not accepted and nurtured is not because intellectual difficulties but it has to do with the heart, the will, the character. There is a sin, an evil habit, which we will not give up, an illicit relationship, which we will not break, or a life attitude, so selfish, so arrogant, and so hostile that it is poisoning the spring of our spiritual lives.

If this is your situation, you know it, you have heard God’s voice again and again to leave that old way of living, but you just won’t do it. My friends pray that God will show you the true nature of sin, how it binds and blinds and how it comes between you and him and keeps you from the most powerful and the most transforming relationship in the world. For when the thing is recognized and confessed, done with, the barrier between God and you will have gone.

So there is ignorant doubt, sinful doubt or unbelief, but there is also genuine intellectual doubt. This is the kind of doubt that seeks to wrestle with the tough questions of the faith and will not rest until it is satisfied that it can go no further.

Perhaps the best proof of genuine doubt is the sense of anguish. Do your doubts make you sad or glad? Do your doubts cause you distress? Try that test and you will discover what kind of doubt you are dealing with.

The kind of doubt I want to address this morning is genuine intellectual doubt. And again, I want you take heart, and understand that God loves you and is patient with you and longs to help you through and over your doubts. He has not turned His back on you. I want you to realize that you are not alone.

I have always appreciated the preaching of Dr. John Gladstone, one time pastor of Yorkminster Park Baptist Church in downtown Toronto. He would preach the reality of Christ with great boldness and confidence. However he was always realistic about the faith and the difficulty of doubts. I remember him saying that the Christian faith is not always easy to find, and not always easy to hold. For in life, he would say, we all meet inevitable riddles that no intelligent person can ignore. We’re always coming up against difficult times and situations and most of us in the church have been faced with times were our faith has been strongly challenged and we have been showered with doubt and we almost wonder if we can call ourselves a Christian any more.

And then he concluded, “If anyone tells me it’s easy to hold on to Christian belief and that I’m just skating over the surface of life I want to tell them that’s rubbish.”

Belief, doubt, skepticism are present in us all, you are not alone.

The challenge then is what do we do with our intellectual doubts. Do we have the courage to move beyond our doubts and to have faith in spite of our doubts?

So how can we move through our doubts? How are we are to address them?

First, don’t ignore them. Thomas was honest about expressing his doubt. He did not skip lightly over them, he did not walk away from them hoping they would be resolved on their own. He addressed them saying, “I don’t believe that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. I need some proof.”

My friends, don’t ignore your doubts. Many people do. They come to a point in their faith where belief is difficult and rather than deal with their doubts they suppress them and as a result they don’t grow, they stagnate.

Have you ever considered that the strongest faith comes out of agonized doubt? This is Thomas’ experience. He goes through this time of doubt, but he addresses it and he comes to a place where he can say to Jesus, “My Lord and my God.”

And as history is studied, we discover that all great believers were all great doubters. Augustine, Luther, John Wesley, C.S. Lewis. All great men of the faith who were great believers but were also great doubters. They were great because they did not stop with the unbelief they never sought to ignore or suppress their doubts, rather they wrestled with them until at last they saw the impossibility of their own doubts.

Doubt that is wisely addressed can lead to deeper insight, a stronger faith and conviction. Alister McGrath put it like this: “Suppose you want to see the stars or catch a glimpse of the Milky Way. You can’t do this in broad daylight. You have to wait until it is dark. The stars don’t need darkness to exist, but we need darkness in order to see them. We can be told about the existence of the stars, but only in the night do we see them. Just so, it is often in the darkness that we see God.” ²

Don’t ignore your doubts - address them.

Second, share your doubt with others. Now listen carefully, I appreciate Thomas because he didn’t make his doubts known to the whole world. He didn’t stand up and shout to the whole world his skepticism, but he did share his doubt with people he trusted and could confide in. I like that. I get so tired of men and women who stand up and confess their doubts about the reality of God, the truth of Scripture, the divinity of Christ in the public press and in popular books and magazines. What good does it do? It just causes so many genuine seekers to stumble and makes their journey in the faith more difficult.

But I do believe that we should share out doubts with others, with close and trusted friends. Let’s be willing to talk about our doubts and express them - not with the view of tearing the faith of another down, but with the view of seeking help and encouragement along the Christian journey. Get yourself into a small group in our church where you can discuss the issues of the gospel, where you can express your doubts and wrestle with the big issues of life and faith with a group of people who wrestle with the very same things. Those of you who are not in a small group are missing a great means through which your faith can be strengthened and you can wrestle with your doubts honestly and without fear that you will be looked down upon.

Don’t be afraid to share your doubts with others so that you can work through them.

Third, when it comes to dealing with your doubts, please, please don’t depend on your feelings. Imagine what would have happened if Thomas had trusted his feelings. His emotions were raw, Jesus was dead. The whole endeavour was finished, it had all come crashing down on him and he was feeling disappointment with God, disillusionment with Christ, and there was nothing more that could be done. His feelings told him that there was no hope.

But his mind was working in spite of how he felt, so that we read in verse 26 that he stayed with the disciples, he continued to stick with them and this time when Jesus appeared Thomas was there and saw with his own eyes and his faith was strengthened.

Don’t rely too heavily on your feelings. That is what many of us do. We long for the warm fuzzy feeling we get when we are with a large group of believers singing praise songs and we can feel the presence of God. Thank God for such times, they are genuine and real, but to rest our faith upon such times is wrong.

We must remember that there are some things that are true in this universe regardless of how I may feel about it. For instance I may not feel like I want to believe in the reality of gravity and so throw myself off the roof – but that does not change the reality of gravity. Gravity is real, regardless how I feel about it.

So with the reality of God. He is here, He is present. His heart pounds with love for you, He has demonstrated His love through the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ and all of that is true regardless of how you my feel about it. It may not make you feel warm and fuzzy all over but it is true nonetheless, regardless of how you feel.

Understand too that feelings are fickle; they shift according to the day, the weather, the situation, to your level of tiredness. It is a mistake to identify your faith with an emotional thrill. What we must look for is not intensity of feeling but depth of conviction. The Scottish preacher, Robert McCracken used to say, “Remember, emotions stale, convictions ripen.”

When dealing with your doubts don’t rest too heavily on feelings. Of course emotion is part of our faith. I worry about some people who never express anything beyond a dull monotone in their devotion to God, but understand that the human character is made up of emotion and intellect and the will.

Fourthly, when dealing with your doubts, be sure to give God a chance.

Thomas, even though he had great doubts, continued to be with the disciples. Surely he continued to consider their testimonies, he continued to pray with them and seek hard after God. He gave God a chance.

I have met so many people who are tossed away their faith because of the tragedies of this world, because of the injustice of this world, or some awful tragedy has occurred to them, and what do they do? They stop praying, they stop worshipping, they stop reading their Bible, they stop associating with people who live the Christian life. They don’t give God a chance! And is it any wonder that they are lost in doubt? After all, if you spend 16 hours of your working day thinking about this world and being concerned about the things of this world – then this world, the here and now will naturally seem to you 200 times more real than the other world, however real the other world may be. It’s impossible to be worldly-minded six days of the week and expect that you will discover God with a warm fuzzy feeling, and intellectual power in an hour on Sunday.

People say, they don’t pray anymore because God isn’t real to them, the truth of the matter may be that God isn’t real to them because they don’t pray anymore.

So we ought to be honest with ourselves about this. Do we really want a faith that is alive and vital, and if so, are we prepared to toe the line and pay the price for it?

Perhaps the trouble with so-called atheists in our society is not so much that they do not seek God, but they do not let God find them.

Give God a chance.

Now, Thomas was one who addressed his doubts, shared his doubts, did not rest on feeling alone, gave God a chance and then finally, this he discovered that God was seeking him.

It is the last truth I want to leave with you this morning. If you are searching after God, if you are wrestling with doubt, please know that God is seeking you with a passion and a strength of will that puts to shame any kind of effort you may be making to find him. Sometimes people talk about God as being hidden, hard to find, always just beyond their grasp. But the truth is that He is always on our track, never giving up on us, His love refuses to let us go, so that one poet long ago called God the Hound of Heaven. So Scripture compares God to the father who lost his son, and is always searching the horizon for us. He is like the Shepherd who lost one sheep, always seeking us out. He is like the woman who lost one of her coins, searching for us with a diligence and a passion that will not be quenched.

So we read in Deuteronomy, “If with all your heart you truly seek God you will surely find him.” (Deuteronomy 4:29)

And isn’t it true? This is what happened to Thomas. He discovered Jesus Christ and was invited to come experience the reality of Christ for himself and Thomas moved from Doubting Thomas to Faithful Thomas making that great confession, “My Lord and my God!”

I pray that this would be your experience as you deal with your doubts honestly, not depending on your feelings alone, giving God a chance to work in you through prayer, the study of His Word, and worship. So that you come to the place where you can say, “My Lord and my God.”

ENDNOTES:

1. Michael Cassidy, Chasing the Wind. (Connecticut, Morehouse-Barlow: 1985) page 42

2. Erwin Lutzer, How you can be sure that you will spend eternity with God? (Chicago, Moody Press: 1996) page 134