Praying our Doubts

Series: Disillusioned: What To Do When We Doubt

March 21, 2021

JRCC Online

  • Disillusioned
  • “Doubt and Prayer”

Text: Psalm 73

  • Focus: God invites us to pray our doubts as a third way of processing our feelings.
  • Hello friends, my name is Wally and I am on the pastoral team here at Jericho Ridge Community Church.
  • One of the roles and privileges I have as a pastor is being invited to participate in people’s life experiences.
  • Often these life events are celebratory highlights such as weddings, child dedications, graduations, baptisms…
  • But I’m also invited into life events that are painful and tragic like unemployment, divorce, illness, abuse or death.
  • Recently I sat in the living room of a person going through a tragic and devastating loss.
  • As we talked it was an extremely emotional time.
  • Understandably, pain, anger and unanswered questions repeatedly erupted to the surface…
  • “If God exists, then why this? Why that? If God is real then how could he let this happen to me?”
  • We sat and mourned together.

 

  • Toward the end of our time, I invited this person to bring all the expressed emotions and questions to God.
  • The response was one of surprise, “You mean I can do that? I can be angry at God? I can question God?”
  • And I assured this person that God created them with all their emotions and that they could bring their entire self to God … anger, hurt, doubts … because he was inviting them to have this conversation.
  • As the realization of this reality sunk in, the floodgates of relief and pent up emotion poured out.
  • This person thought that they could never fully process certain emotions, because they could never talk to God in the midst of their anger or doubt.
    • Friends, what do you think was underlying this person’s, and many people’s understanding of our emotions in relation to God?
  • Quite often we find ourselves working from one of two constructs.
  • The first is “religion,” which says you need to earn God’s attention, and if that’s true, then you will never bring your full range of feelings to God because some of those emotions are somehow “wrong,” “bad” or “unholy”.
  • The second is the idea in our society that says your feelings are who you are, which raises the significance level of your emotions to a defining status.
    • In other words, this is what I am feeling, so this is what is true for me, and hence, this is what I am.
    • If I feel doubt, then my doubt begins to define who I am and what I believe … and nothing else is true and therefore, God doesn’t exist.
      • Both of these options will actually lead us to unhealthy places and so God offers us a third way of processing our emotions.
    • If we look at God’s word, one of the most prevalent places we find this third way is in the Psalms.
    • The Psalms are a compilation of 150 songs, poems, personal conversations with God that include many powerful feelings…
    • …so much so that they often disturb us, making us question, “How can it say that? What is that doing in the Bible?”
    • The answer leads us to this third way: the writers are not suppressing or expressing their feelings apart from God.
    • The psalmists are “praying their feelings” … they are processing their feelings in the presence of God.
    • The writers of the psalms model a third, life-giving way to engage our feelings, particularly those feelings that we may deem “negative, challenging or troublesome”, which by the way is not an accurate or helpful descriptor at all.
      • Our current teaching series is called “Disillusionment”, which is a very challenging emotion.
    • What do we do when we are racked with doubt?
    • Where is the place for doubt in following a perfect God?
    • How can a Christian process doubt after decades of faith?
    • We all experience it, we all wrestle with it, it’s part of our created emotional design.
    • And yet, often we don’t know what to do with doubt when we experience it, so we end up going to a place of supressing it or elevating it beyond what is healthy…
    • So let’s look at the third way, a life-giving model of someone who is praying his doubt.
      • Turn with me in your Bibles or on your devices, to Psalm 73.
    • The writer of Psalm 73 is processing his doubt and faith in God… and in doing so, we get to see the details of his condition, the cause of his doubt, and the remedy.
    • The writer’s name is Asaph.
    • And when in doubt, Asaph doesn’t suppress it, or let it define him; instead, he engages God with it.
    • Asaph is wrestling deep in his soul.
    • He reminds us that more than an intellectual matter, doubt is a matter of the heart, and as such it’s inevitably real for every age and stage of life.
      • So let me pause and say to those of you who are younger in life and/or starting your faith journey, please know that Jericho Ridge is a safe place to be yourself, your entire self; including your struggles, questions and doubts about faith and God.
    • Nothing is off the table because, as we see in Psalm 73, God does not shy away or reject the matters of the heart.
      • Let’s read Psalm 73:1-5, 12-26 and I’ll be reading from the NLT.

A psalm of Asaph.

Truly God is good to Israel, to those whose hearts are pure.
But as for me, I almost lost my footing. My feet were slipping, and I was almost gone.
For I envied the proud when I saw them prosper despite their wickedness.
They seem to live such painless lives; their bodies are so healthy and strong.
They don’t have troubles like other people; they’re not plagued with problems like everyone else.


12 Look at these wicked people—enjoying a life of ease while their riches multiply.

13 Did I keep my heart pure for nothing? Did I keep myself innocent for no reason?
14 I get nothing but trouble all day long; every morning brings me pain.

15 If I had really spoken this way to others, I would have been a traitor to your people.
16 So I tried to understand why the wicked prosper. But what a difficult task it is!
17 Then I went into your sanctuary, O God, and I finally understood the destiny of the wicked.
18 Truly, you put them on a slippery path and send them sliding over the cliff to destruction.
19 In an instant they are destroyed, completely swept away by terrors.
20 When you arise, O Lord, you will laugh at their silly ideas as a person laughs at dreams in the morning.

21 Then I realized that my heart was bitter, and I was all torn up inside.
22 I was so foolish and ignorant—I must have seemed like a senseless animal to you.
23 Yet I still belong to you; you hold my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel, leading me to a glorious destiny.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you? I desire you more than anything on earth.
26 My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart; he is mine forever.

  • Immediately in v.2 we are introduced to Asaph’s condition … h’'s on the verge of losing his faith in a good God.
  • Psalm 73:1-2
    • Truly God is good to Israel, to those whose hearts are pure.
      But as for me, I almost lost my footing. My feet were slipping, and I was almost gone.
  • Picture someone climbing and about to fall, they’re on shaky ground; they are teetering one way or the other.
  • In the Bible, the idea of your foot slipping to the point of falling, is a way of saying that you are eternally lost.
  • Asaph is saying that he almost lost his faith.
  • He was questioning his faith and was about to go over the edge into the abyss of no longer believing in God … it’s an incredibly powerful image of doubt/losing your footing.
  • Your experience, your eye betrays you and causes you to misplace your foot … you miss your foothold, the ground becomes shaky and it almost causes you to fall.
  • In other words, doubt is a spiritual condition where your heart cannot process something your eyes are witnessing.
  • Asaph says in vs. 1, God is good, but something I saw (vs.3) took away my belief in a good God.
    • Friends, this condition of doubt happens to all of us… it’s not just for non-Christians or those in a new relationship with God.
  • Paul Tillich says that “doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith” for all of us.
  • Asaph was an author of Scripture, so think of where he probably was in his relationship with God… and he is filled with doubt.
  • We have this Psalm, preserved by God, because of Asaph’s doubt.
  • And Asaph is not the only model for doubt in the Bible.
  • Francis Bacon says regarding learning, “If you begin with certainties, you will end in doubts. But if you are content to begin with doubts, you will end with certainty.”
  • In other words, if you never question the teacher, you will not make it your own … and reality will hit you outside the classroom and it will shatter the textbook.
  • Asaph is questioning, processing with the “Teacher.”
    • And he can do that because God has an incredibly balanced and healthy view of doubt… it doesn’t scare him, he created it as one of our emotions.
  • Asaph knows what he’s experiencing, and he knows that he can deal with his doubt face to face with God.
  • He’s not going to suppress his doubt and he’s not going to let it dominate him either.
  • He’s at the point of losing his spiritual footing and he says to God, “I’m almost gone.”
    • So what caused such incredible doubt in Asaph?
  • In vs. 3, Asaph tells us what caused his condition,

I envied the proud when I saw them prosper despite their wickedness.
They seem to live such painless lives; their bodies are so healthy and strong.
They don’t have troubles like other people; they’re not plagued with problems like everyone else.

  • Now, countless things can create doubt.
  • In this example, it’s seeing injustice, suffering, evil, which gets described in vs. 4-11, and the fact that people are benefiting from it.
    • Friends, doubt is never just a matter of thinking.
  • We often express it only as an intellectual piece.
  • But Aspah sees it and experiences it… it goes beyond his intellect.
  • The Apostle Paul says, “we walk by faith, not by sight…”
  • Friends, the opposite of faith is not reason.
  • As Christians, we walk by faith despite how things appear to us.
  • We believe even when our eyes tell us something different.
  • But we have doubts because our heart has a personal experience that contradicts what our mind knows.
  • Faith is not opposed to reason. Faith is not holding on to something in spite of the evidence. Faith is holding on to something in spite of the appearances.
  • Doubts come when personal experience makes what your mind knows, unreal to your heart.
  • What your mind believes becomes unrealistic to your heart because of what you are personally experiencing.
    • For example, I might say, “I know there’s horrific suffering in the world … I know other people experience it.”
  • “But there’s probably a good reason behind it … I’m sure God is with those who are suffering and He’ll use that for their good. I don’t know the details but I’m sure God’s got a game plan for horrible unjust suffering.”
  • …until it happens to me.
  • And I’ve experienced this first hand; where my thinking, my theology, told me one thing and my reality overrode what I thought about God because of what I experienced.
  • Theologically and rationally one thing was true, but experientially and emotionally it couldn’t be real.
  • And guess which trumped which?
  • My experience trumped my beliefs, which resulted in conflict and doubt.
  • It was more a condition of my heart than my mind.
    • Asaph was in that condition because he was witnessing great injustice.
  • People were suffering in front of him, probably himself included, and wicked people were prospering as a result.
  • And if his experience was real, then his beliefs in God must not be.
  • Yes, there are real intellectual questions within doubt.
  • But doubts never come just through thinking, they come through experience.
  • We learn something and then it is tested in our daily experience.
  • Doubt comes when your personal experience makes what your mind knows, unreal to your heart.
    • So when that happens, and it will for all of us, what do we do?
  • We know Asaph’s condition is doubt.
  • We know his experience of injustice is causing him to doubt.
  • Let’s look at what he does to process and remedy his doubts.
    • Asaph engages God with his doubt and as he does, four things emerge … and I need to acknowledge that I am adapting these from pastor and author, Tim Keller as my source.
  • Aspah does four things in praying through his doubts:
    1. He doubts his doubts, vs. 3
    2. He enters God’s sanctuary, vs. 17
    3. He compares footholds vs. 18
    4. He feels for God’s hand vs. 23
  • Without these, we may acknowledge our doubt, we may understand the cause of our doubt, but ultimately, we will get stuck and consumed in our doubts.
    • First, doubt your doubts.
  • In other words, be fair, yes, we will doubt God, we will doubt our faith, but we must also doubt our doubts.
  • Look at what Asaph does… amazing honesty.
  • He says in vs.1-2, I believed in a good God, but then I started to doubt…
    • For I envied the proud when I saw them prosper despite their wickedness. They seemed to live such painless lives…

 

  • Asaph is reminding us that our motives are never pure when it comes to doubt.
  • Asaph looks at injustice … now the Bible takes injustice seriously and speaks against it.
  • But what he’s saying is that when injustice didn’t affect my life, I wasn’t really bothered by it.
  • In other words, I never would have been angry at God for allowing the wicked to prosper, if I hadn’t started seeing it first hand and wanting a piece of the same pie they had.
  • I’m angry and doubting because I’m not prospering.
  • Asaph is hit with the emotional force of what he’s seeing, BUT, he’s willing to distill out the dishonesty within his doubt.
  • Later in vs. 21 he says, “I realized that my heart was bitter, and I was all torn up inside.”

 

There are always honest and dishonest parts to your doubts.

  • So, you have to deconstruct your doubts and distill what is true and what is not.
  • Even when we are experiencing suffering and pain, our motives are never fully pure.
    • Jeremiah 17:9, “the heart is deceitful…
    • Proverbs 16:2, “all a person’s motives seem pure to them, but motives are rightly weighed by God.”
    • Psalm 153 & 51, “search my heart O God … create in me a pure heart, O God”
  • We are human and on our own, our hearts are not pure.
  • And our doubts can be loaded with selfish motives because we are using them as a means of escaping what we really need to face internally.
  • Our instinct to focus on self, is present in our doubting.
  • Even in suffering, when you say you can’t believe in a God who would let this happen to me! What you are really saying is, because I can’t see a purpose in this suffering, then there can’t really be one. My experience trumps all.
  • There’s always some pride, some desire to control, or some sense of needing to re-establish myself, renovate the veneer of who I am so I don’t look damaged.
  • So no matter what my circumstances, I bring myself into those realities and if they cause me to doubt, I need to sift my doubts and check to see, what isn’t true within my doubts.
  • Which of my motives are not pure, untrue or inaccurate? Which are God’s Spirit working in me to draw me toward Him?

 

Friends this is hard work, especially on the heels of suffering.

  • I know this personally.
  • At age 7 I was severely traumatized.
  • One of the many unhealthy remnants of that experience surfaced as an adult/a long-time follower of Jesus, with all my degrees and pastoral experience… when I could not reconcile Jesus being present at the time and place of my abuse.
  • Of course he wasn’t there because it was such a terrible and evil situation.
  • But with the help of my counselor, I began to doubt my doubts.
  • If God is everywhere, he had to have been there.
  • And yes, theologically speaking, Jesus was there.
  • But I doubted he was there because he didn’t do what I wanted him to do. If I were Jesus, or if Jesus was who I said He should be, then…
    • Do you see the self-focused motives guiding my thought process?
    • God says in Isaiah 55:8-9 that His thoughts are not my thoughts and neither are MY ways His ways.
    • Who am I to “construct” and “direct” God?
    • I needed to wrestle this aspect of my doubt with God.
  • You see, there’s always some desire to establish myself as more powerful than I am, to be in control, especially if there’s abuse of power, pain, suffering.
  • So the first thing I need to do is doubt my doubts … what about my doubt is not true because it’s coming from a place of self, pain, power, wickedness.
  • Wrestle with yourself and God, ask Him to reveal the impure motives of your heart, to reveal what the pain is masquerading, to reveal the source of your doubt.
  • And then confess them to yourself and to God, which leads us to the second thing we can do in our doubt…

 

Vs. 17, enter God’s sanctuary.

  • Asaph entered into God’s sanctuary; in the Old Testament that was the physical temple where God dwelt.
  • Why did he go there? What did he go there to do?
  • Asaph went into the sanctuary and he participated in worship.
  • Here’s the principle: you do not get into doubts only by thinking, and therefore, you are not going to get through your doubts only by thinking.
  • You got into the doubts, as we talked about earlier, through experience.
  • It’s never just raw data that influences your thoughts.
  • There’s always personal experience attached to the data.
  • And that was the case for Asaph.

 

He takes his soul/heart and he worships in God’s sanctuary: he probably prayed, sang, read Scripture, he approached God with his whole being, not only his mind.

  • Worship is not only an intellectual and spiritual act, it’s also a physical act … the physical act of going toward God, going into his presence, praying, lifting hands, singing, crying out before God, at least as much as we can do so in our brokenness.
  • It’s not fair to process your doubt without this step.
  • The world gives you all sorts of “sensory experience” that says God is not real.
  • So you have to do something to balance that, to engage not only your intellect, but to also engage your senses in an experience of God’s presence … sing, take communion, pray “God, I’m here. Are you here? I need to meet with you.”

 

So the second thing we do is not reduce God to only an object of theory, speculation, and doubt.

  • We also need to elevate him as an object of our worship … engaging him, moving toward him even before you find him, even before your doubt dissipates.
  • In fact, precisely in the midst of your questioning and doubting… seek God,

Isaiah 55 

“Is anyone thirsty? Come and drink— even if you have nothing to offer!
“Come to me with your ears wide open. Listen, and you will find life.

 

  • So secondly, you go into the God’s sanctuary, into his presence, and you engage all of your senses, not just your thoughts/doubts.

 

Then third … Psalm 73:18, you compare footholds.

  • Remember that Asaph likened his faith to putting your foot on something that is slippery.
  • In other words, if your climbing up the mountain and you see rocks in front of you, every time you put your foot on a rock, you’re putting your faith in that rock.
  • If the rock doesn’t give you sure footing … down you go.
  • It’s a great image.
  • Asaph likens faith to putting your foot on something that is shaky or slippery.
  • And surely, he says, you/God have put the wicked on slippery ground and they actually go sliding over the cliff to destruction because they do not believe in you.
  • 17-18,

17 Then I went into your sanctuary, O God, and I finally understood the destiny of the wicked. 18 Truly, you put them on a slippery path and send them sliding over the cliff to destruction.

Now here’s the principle behind what Asaph is saying… and I’m quoting Tim Keller,

  • “You never have to choose between belief and nonbelief because there’s no such thing as nonbelief. Doubt of Christianity always masks the fact that doubt itself is also a leap of faith. You cannot disbelieve in God without believing in something else in that moment… be it your own intellect, your intuition, something else…”
  • In other words, you can’t prove there’s a God and so you may doubt; but you equally can’t prove without a doubt that there is not a God.
  • And therefore, no matter which direction you go, you are placing your footing on something in an act of faith.
  • So what Asaph is doing is comparing footholds before he takes his next step.
  • He’s saying the reason I can trust my faith even if it’s shaky, is because the faith of the wicked is impossible.

 

In his book, A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken (a friend of C.S. Lewis) recounts his process of becoming a Christian and the leap of faith it took.

  • Once he had been presented with the person of Jesus, he wanted proof that Jesus was the risen Christ.
  • But the gap of irrefutable proof was impossible to cross so he couldn’t move forward toward Jesus.
  • But then he realized that in order to go back to his former way of thinking, there was also a gap behind him.
  • Vanauken writes, “I suddenly realized that I would have to take a leap of faith because while I couldn’t prove that God existed, I could not prove that he was not. Therefore, to even go back was a leap of faith… And when I realized that it would take enormous faith to accept or reject Jesus, I knew what to do … I flung myself over the gap in front of me toward Jesus.”

 

Asaph is acknowledging that the faith he stands on has issues … issues that require a leap of faith.

  • “I believe in a good God, yet I see all this injustice around me. But the place that the wicked stand on is even worse and that’s why I choose to put my feet where I do.
  • He’s comparing the footholds of his faith, with the footholds of the wicked and he’s saying that their foothold leads to destruction.

 

  • Yes, if you believe in God, injustice/suffering is a big problem.
  • Your footing is shaky because if God is good, why is he allowing all this wickedness? It’s a real question.
  • But if you do not believe in God, suffering and wickedness is a bigger problem.
  • Because if there is no God, you are left with natural selection where the strong consume the weak.
  • And at some point, someone stronger, faster, smarter is going to come along and impose themselves on you and shove you over the cliff to destruction.

 

Friends, whenever we say we cannot believe, as Sheldon Vanauken put it, we are faced with a gap in front of us and a gap behind.

  • Either way, you will take a leap and put your faith in something.
  • You are either going to leap toward God or away from God.
  • And as Asaph did, before you leap, it’s wise to check your foothold … will it hold you and remedy your doubts or will it cause you to slip toward destruction?

 

Now lastly, when we doubt, we need to “feel for God’s hand.”

  • In vs. 23, Asaph says, “yet I still belong to you, you hold my right hand.”
  • Here’s what goes on in the processing of our doubts … if you doubt your doubts, enter God’s sanctuary, compare footholds/compare the problems of Christianity verse the problems of a life without God…
  • If you work through these steps, you will eventually realize that you have a fear of meeting God in your doubts.
  • That in my doubts, I am actually afraid of meeting God because of what he might do to me, afraid of what he might say to me, afraid of what he might think of me, afraid of not being accepted … afraid to meet God!
  • And “Yet,” Asaph says in vs. 23 … I was grieved, I was bitter and full of envy, I turned my back on you God…
  • And “yet” I am still your child and you have been holding my hand through all my struggles, rebellion and doubts.

 

Friends, God doesn’t let go of us when we doubt.

  • Asaph says, I walked away from God and focused on other things, and yet God treated me like a son or daughter.
  • How can Asaph know that?
  • Because ultimately, he received assurance of his God when he went into the temple and sacrifices were made on his behalf, which is what they did in the OT… a priest interceded on your behalf so you could have access to God.
  • If you never get assurance of a gracious God, you are not going to get through your doubts.

 

Thankfully, we live under the new covenant ushered in by Jesus.

  • When we go into God’s sanctuary, into his presence, we are told in the New Testament that we can enter without the sacrifice of a human priest.
  • We enter personally because of grace.
  • We have something much more direct/personal than Asaph had.
  • How can you know that despite of all your doubts, even your anger/bitterness toward God, how can you know that God will still accept you, that he holds your hand?
  • Grace! The same grace that enabled Jesus, God’s own son, to die on the cross in our place.
  • Jesus took on everything that we deserved, gave the priestly sacrifice once and for all on our behalf, and then He rose from the grave, conquering sin.
  • Grace won that day!
  • And the same grace that won that day, assures us that God will not let go of our hand when we are on shaky ground.

 

  • Ephesians 2:8 says we are saved by God’s grace because of what Jesus experienced and accomplished on the cross.
  • We need to accept this truth of a gracious God who never let’s go of our hand, even when we doubt.
  • Without experiencing this reality, we will never have the ability to move beyond our doubts.

 

Are you ready to process your doubts in this reality and let grace come to bear on your doubt?

  • Psalm 145:14
  • Feel the hand-hold of a gracious, loving God who invites you to enter into his presence and pray your doubts.
  • A God who says come: doubt your doubts, come into my sanctuary, compare footholds of life with or without me, and then feel for My hand … it’s holding yours.

 

We do all of these four things in prayer.

  • So if you find yourself in a place of doubt today, I invite you to reach out and pray with someone.
  • If you are watching live on our Jericho Ridge interactive platform, you can press the prayer button.
  • Otherwise, at any time, you can email and one of our pastoral staff will engage with you in prayer.

 

In just a moment, Tammy, Katelyn and the team are going to continue our worship together with singing.

  • As they do, let’s start the process of praying our doubts together. Please pray with me.
  • O God, we are human. We are not perfect. Our world is not perfect. And so we struggle with doubt. God, would you help us in our times of questioning and unbelief. Would you help us process our own doubts, and would you help us know how to help others with their doubts. God, you welcome all doubters into your presence. Help us to take that leap. We want to experience you holding our hand. Amen.

 

How do you process your doubts? Religion usually suppresses doubt as unhealthy, while society often elevates such an emotion to a defining status. But God offers us a third way as he invites us to pray our doubts. The writers of the Psalms model how we can enter God's presence with our questions and doubts.

Speaker: Wally Nickel

March 21, 2021
Psalms 73:1-26

Wally Nickel

Transitional Pastor

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