Doubting Faith

1. Faith is lived in tension
If your hope was to use faith in order to rid yourself of tension and worry, you may be disappointed to hear that faith is lived in tension. The focus text is Matthew 28:16, right after the greatest crisis the world has ever known: the crucifixion of the Messiah.

Matthew 28:16-20 (New Living Translation)
16 Then the eleven disciples left for Galilee, going to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw [Jesus], they worshiped him—but some of them doubted!

Another story from Mark 9 illuminates this struggle to live your faith in the middle of tension. A dad wants Jesus to heal his son, and Jesus asks him if he really believes he (Jesus) can do it. The dad's response? "I believe! Help my unbelief."

2. Your Teeny Bit of Faith: Mustard Seeds and Children
In Matthew 17 Jesus explains to the disciples that they just need a teeny bit of faith, mustard seed-sized. So many times Christians say, "Here's a list of all of these things you must believe in (OR) can't believe in if you want to be a Christian." But the One Thing that puts the power to your mustard seed is Jesus Christ. Then faith takes root in you, and grows to become much larger and complex and beautiful. So if you're sitting there thinking that you don't have much faith, it doesn't take much.

Jesus also talked about childlike faith (Luke 18:17). Kids have this faith that they can do anything, change the world. When you ask them what they're gonna be, kids never tell you, "Ah, I'll probably just, I don't know, enter data." They have passion!

Moses' had a pretty cool epitaph in Deuteronomy 34:7: "Moses was 120 years old when he died, and his eyes were not weak nor his strength gone." Moses was a guy who lived a tense life. He was nearly murdered at birth by the very family who later (unknowingly) adopted him; he was a convicted murderer, on the run for many years; AND, not co-incidentally, the first leader of God's people (over 2 million of them before the church got big). At 120 years old, he still had a passionate faith in God.

3. Exercise for Teeny Faith
Here's a very counter-intuitive fact about living well in the tension with your mustard seed-sized faith. In order to physically exercise, I use resistance to my advantage. In the world of spirituality resistance is called doubt.

Most people are missing an experience of God because their spiritual life is so atrophied. I'm spiritually stronger at 41 than I was at 21 because I've worked through a LOT of doubts. How do you exercise your faith? You can question (hang out on The Voice of Friends!), you can serve, you can do lots of things. And more than anything else, it helps to hang out with a community of faith. It's just like with motorcyclists: one may not get noticed, but not only will every driver will see a group of forty bikes on the highway, but they'll hear them coming a long way off!