Have you ever spoken boldly about your faith, only to find yourself later asking if any of it is real? Even John the Baptist, who once pointed everyone to Jesus as the promised one, sends messengers in Luke 7 to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
John the Baptist’s Doubt in Context John the Baptist had boldly proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, yet later sent messengers from prison to ask, “Are you the one who is to come?” What circumstances in John’s life—specifically his imprisonment by Herod—may have triggered this shift? How does the sermon distinguish between intellectual doubt about God’s existence and emotional doubt about God’s care during suffering? When have you spoken confidently about your faith only to later face circumstances that made you question beliefs you once felt certain about?
The Limits of Proof and Evidence The sermon argues that logical arguments, historical evidence, and intellectual proofs—while valid and important—cannot ultimately resolve deep spiritual doubt. Why does the pastor suggest that arguing someone into faith (especially on social media) rarely works? What does the parable of the rich man and Lazarus teach us about the relationship between evidence and belief? The pastor even notes that if we had a time machine and watched Jesus raise the dead, it still wouldn’t eliminate all doubt—because people who did see those things still doubted. If more evidence isn’t the ultimate solution, what does the sermon say actually addresses our deepest uncertainty?
Doubt as a Sign of Faith, Not Failure The pastor emphasizes that experiencing doubt does not mean God has abandoned us or that we are disqualified from His kingdom. How does Jesus’ treatment of John, Thomas, and Peter support this claim? What does it mean that “God honors honest doubt”? How might churches and Christian communities be failing people who experience doubt by treating it as a spiritual weakness rather than a normal part of the human experience?
Head Arguments vs. Heart Questions The sermon distinguishes between healthy skepticism (crop circles, fake news) and the deeper, more personal doubt—”Is God there? Does He care about me?” Which type of doubt do you encounter more often, and why do intellectual arguments often fail to quiet the heart’s questions in a moment of crisis? What is the difference between trying to convince ourselves through evidence versus seeking an encounter with God’s presence?
Living in the Light During Doubt Using the plant-and-grow-light analogy, the sermon suggests we cannot “keep ourselves going” any more than plants can stop a frost—but we can ask God to “turn on the light.” The pastor acknowledges that God doesn’t always eliminate every doubt, but rather “dwells with us in it,” as He did with Job and Peter. What comfort or challenge do you find in this perspective? In practical terms, what does it look like to bring yourself before God in a season of doubt rather than trying to argue or prove your way out of it?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
You may be seated. Praise God! Indeed, every one of us is made in God’s image. Every one of us is a child of God. That is the good news that gathers us here. We’re not here just to have a social club. We’re not here so we can drink the delicious church coffee, and it is delicious. Actually, my mom remembered to bring some filters this week. I can’t take credit for that, but we have coffee filters again so you can smell the delicious church coffee. You saved the day! But it’s not because of that. We’re here because we are children of God, and we have a good God that we serve.
If you’re here for the first time, we would love to get to know you better, whether you’re in person or online, and you can get to know us better by texting HI to 833-356-4032. That’s 833-356-4032. And here’s why you want to do that, because you can also send in a prayer request any time during the week using that line. So if you go ahead and use it today, it’ll be in your phone, and if you ever need a prayer 24 hours a day, you can use that same very line. We gather as those who are called by God, who are children of God, and who are provided to by our God. Everything we have, our very breath, and everything we need, our clothes, our food, everything is provided by God.
And so we come to giving, and as we talk about giving, we’re not talking about money because we just want to talk about money. We talk about it because God calls us to give a portion of what he’s given us back to him. You can use the QR code, the website address, or the box by the door to do that. As we do that, we declare our confidence in his provision that, God, I trust you enough. I want to give to your work, not because you need it, but because you’ve enabled me as the child of God to be a part of it. Do you ever wonder, do you ever wonder if God has actually done that for you? Has God called you? Is God listening to you? We’re going to begin a brand new series right now. We’re going to talk about that. Let’s go ahead and prepare our hearts.
I think that plane had a problem, don’t you? Maybe a little bit. It does now. It has a problem. And here’s the thing. We may not always feel like that plane. We may feel like we’re sailing. But I think something that we can confidently say is that all of us have a problem, too. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about in this series. What problems do we face as human beings? There’s no shame in saying we have problems because that is a part of the human experience. We have problems. And tonight we’re going to talk about the first one of those problems. We’re going to look at four problems over the course of the next month. And the one tonight is doubt.
I’m not going to ask you to raise your hand, but ask yourself this: Do I ever have a problem with doubt? That can be taken fairly broadly, right? We could talk about being cynics in the world in general. I don’t believe anything may go to the extreme. Everything is just an illusion. I live in a simulation. I’m just in the matrix. Nothing’s real out there. Be that kind of doubt. The kind of doubt that I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve set up my life in this direction. I’m doing these things, but I don’t know if it’s going to work and I’m wrapped with doubt on that. The sort of doubt that comes to us when we talk about God as well. And those actually tie together because often I believe the profound doubt that most of us will face at some point is: God there? Does he care?
Maybe you’re at the first part there. Is God there? Is there a God? Is there anything? Is there a reality beyond what we’re going to look at right in front of us right now? And again, if you’re thinking, well maybe it’s all a simulation. Is there reality at all? But on top of that, is there a God? Is there anything that backs up that reality that gives it a purpose? Or are we just going through the motions until we die? Here’s something that we don’t need to doubt and I don’t think most of us do doubt. Maybe we don’t internalize it entirely, but I think most of us realize that at some point we are going to die. And so that doubt lingers in there to figure out, well what happens here? Where am I going? What is the purpose of everything I’m doing? Is there any reason to do anything at all? Or do I just pass by time until I die and I’m forgotten?
There are some things that are healthy to be skeptical about. We hear a lot of information in our world today that simply isn’t true. It seems like there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t have a conversation with someone who is profoundly convinced of things that are definitely, unequivocally, unquestionably—go check the evidence that’s right there in front of you—it’s not true, kind of not true. You probably have the same experience. And sometimes there’s the things that are somewhere wedged in the middle. There was a lot of media coverage in England not too long ago about an asteroid. And I think most of us are fascinated, at least a little bit to some extent, with asteroids and meteors and things from space, right? I mean, what is out there? That’s part of that question of meaning. We look at this vast universe and wonder what’s in it.
And so people were fascinated when it was claimed and the media showed a giant hole in the beach. This big crater right there on the beach. And so it wasn’t just any kind of meteor. This meteor went to the beach. And this meteor must have had a good time at the beach. There wasn’t really anything left of the meteor, so people were questioning that. But the media that caught hold of it, they had an exclusive story, they were gonna run with it. One of the British news channels, they were all excited about this meteor and they’re reporting it. Meteor at the beach, oh boy! Right, let’s do wall-to-wall coverage. Maybe we’ll investigate if anyone got contaminated with space particles or something while they were on the beach after that, that kind of thing.
Until it was revealed, someone, I believe, posted on YouTube the video of himself digging that hole the day before. Specifically to cause people to think that something had crashed into the beach that hadn’t. So we have reason to doubt a lot of things. And when we talk about God, some of us might be thinking, is that a meteor on the beach? Just a hole. I’m trying to fill in the holes in my life, I’m trying to add meaning into my life, but I don’t want to just chase after something that someone digging out a hole to trick me.
And probably most of you, if you’ve been around churches, at some point, if you go online and you’re scrolling through your social media and you have friends who are believers, at some point you’ve seen, here is the evidence, it can be proven that God is real. And I’ve heard, and I bet many of you have heard sermons that have spent a lot of time on, it’s going to be proven, here it is, here’s the proof, you can know that God is real. And then you hear that, a lot of it’s really quite good. Maybe you even think objectively, that sounds feasible. And yet it can leave us really empty. Even some of us who are convinced in the trueness of who God is, you can hear that sometimes, and in those really hard moments of life we think, it still feels a bit like a meteor on the beach.
Now tonight I’m not going to go through all those things. I’m going to make a reference to a few of them, but I’m not going to go through all the classic proofs of God. I’m not going to go through the evidence of the trustworthiness of Scripture or any of those other things. I’m not going to do that tonight. I want to talk about doubt itself. And I think the reason that we need to start there is, I believe one of our challenges in trying to wrestle with what to do with the Bible, what to do with God, what to do with the church, and whether we should be there or not, all these sorts of things, what it really fundamentally comes down to is, if I’m not a pillar of confidence, if I don’t have it completely locked in, if I don’t know exactly that everything here is true and constantly, if you wake me up in the middle of the night after a really hard day, if I’m fearful in this moment, if you say, but didn’t this happen? If I have the moment’s hesitation, if I’m not that pillar of confidence, then I’m doomed and God has nothing to do with me. I think that’s often what really troubles us with doubt.
I believe it’s why God over and over again in Scripture shows us examples of some of the great heroes of the faith having doubt, because it’s not unusual. And if you’ve experienced doubt, doubt in purpose, doubt in God’s love, doubt in God’s existence, if you have experienced these things, you’re not alone, you’re not weird, and it doesn’t call into question God’s love for you. And that’s what we’re going to think about tonight. So let’s go ahead and come before our God, ask for his guidance as we look into his Word, and then we’ll dig into Luke chapter 7.
Let’s pray. Father, we come before you as those who, all of us as human beings at times have doubt. Sometimes we like to put on a very confident exterior to look like we have everything under control. We don’t. Lord, I know I don’t. Would you help us that as we study your Word that we would feel your presence, that we would know that you are with us, and that you would remind us that you are with us even in our doubts, that our doubts, our feelings, we care about them. And our moment, our place in this moment doesn’t determine your care. Let me pray this in the precious name of our Savior Jesus, amen.
Let’s turn to Luke chapter 7 verse 18. I’m just gonna, there we are. We read in verse 18, the disciples of John, that’s John the Baptist incidentally, John reported all these things to him. And John calling two of his disciples to him sent them to the Lord saying, are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another? And when the men came to him, had come to him, they said, John the Baptist has sent us to you saying, are you the one who is to come or shall we look for another? That’s a logical question to ask Jesus, right? Are you the one? Are you fulfilling? But it’s a little bit more peculiar when we remember who John is, because if you turn back to the beginning of the story, if you look just, well, just past the Christmas story, if you’re in Matthew or Luke, or if you look at the beginning of Mark, what do we find? John the Baptist is the one that says, hey everybody, look at Jesus, he’s the one. He’s the one that’s been promised. He’s the one that the Bible has been telling for centuries is coming. He’s the one that fulfills all of God’s promises. He’s the one.
And now a few chapters later, a month later, fast forward, John says, hey Jesus, are you the one? We think, well, John, do you have amnesia? Do you not remember what you said? But I don’t think it’s that at all. I think it’s exactly what many of us have experienced. Have any of you, and again you don’t have to raise your hand, this is just something though I think many of us can identify with, have any of you ever had that experience? Maybe you’ve spoken about your faith. Maybe you’ve said, I believe Jesus is my Savior. Maybe you’ve been at a camp, or you’ve been at a special event at church, or you’ve been with some really on-fire believing people, and you speak these bold claims. You look at God’s Word and you say, I believe this and I want everyone to know it. And then something happens and you find yourself confronted with a problem. You find yourself in a difficult moment. You think, is Jesus really the one? Is there really anything to this? That’s what we find with John. John asks that question. And he’s spoken boldly of who Jesus is, but he’s probably looking at it to an extent and saying, okay, I said that Jesus is the Messiah, but I was expecting someone who was going to make everything right, and things are still profoundly not right. Maybe this is all a mistake.
Now I think if you press John, I don’t think he would have said, I don’t believe. I think John knew, but I think John also needed to hear from Jesus. He needed a reassuring boost there. He needed to hear, yes, yes, even though everything isn’t solved right now, even though there’s still pain, even though things aren’t immediately just right, and there’s rainbows and unicorns and everything’s good, even though that’s all true, yes, yes, God is here. Yes, I am working. You haven’t been misled.
Sometimes we can go a very long time and invest a great deal of our energy into something believing it’s true, and it’s not. I don’t think it’s as big a deal now, and that’s partially because of this particular story that I was refreshing myself on this week, but I remember a time when one of the big things, and they made a big news story out of it fairly often, you see in the newspapers, crop circles. Anyone remember when crop circles were a big thing? Yeah, and I was fascinated as a kid by crop circles. This mysterious alleged phenomena from outer space, someone was coming, and they sailed across the galaxy, and they arrived so they could do agricultural art on earth. Pretty amazing stuff, right? If you haven’t ever seen a crop circle, here’s one. Yeah, isn’t that pretty? I mean, and I have to say, I mean, that’s pretty neat, isn’t it? Wow, okay, so we have some artistic aliens that have come to earth. They haven’t come in war, they haven’t come in peace, they’ve come in art, apparently.
I remember that this was a big deal, and people say, how could you explain this, these massive things out in the middle of a field that you can only see what they really are if you go up in a plane? They didn’t have drones back then, so you only go up in a plane, and you look at it, and wow, how could this be? Someone drew the answer and sent it into the British Defense Ministry. Here’s a ship making a crop circle there. As you can see, it has nice little laser beam things that push down the corn, some kind of orbs that help it to float. Okay, so here is the explanation of how you get a crop circle, right? And so people invested a lot of time and emotional energy into how this could be the explanation, and people thought, well, maybe we’re finally making contact with those from outer space.
What did it turn out for many of those very crop circles, the ones that fascinated people so much in England, that led to someone drawing that? It turned out that Doug Bauer and Dave Chorley, two self-proclaimed pranksters, had figured out how they could take some string and some boards and a specially modified baseball cap that had a hook on it, and they could run the rope across the field, and then they could stomp it down and stay on the rope so they wouldn’t accidentally go off course, and they could make these giant patterns in the middle of the night. And they did so for about a decade and a half without getting caught. Not everyone believed them. They said, well, you’re just trying to take away our confidence that the aliens have come and made this communication to us.
So what they did was they coordinated with a reporter who had a camera, and they filmed the process of Bauer and Chorley making one of these crop circles, and then they brought in an extraterrestrial expert who was going to diagnose, without being told what this was, whether this crop circle was really not in the experts; yeah, this is clearly something a human didn’t make. And they showed him the video. Hmm. All comes crashing down, doesn’t it? And when we’re in the moment of doubt, we wonder, have we just been following a few pranksters with some rope and modified baseball caps? Is anything real? Is anything that we believe real?
I saw an atheist this week who posted online. He was getting all kinds of reaction that absolutely no one in the Bible was real. None of the characters were real. None of the people that we talk about were real. And a lot of people were explaining why this guy was right. Of course, none of them were real. And it kind of feeds that desire to be skeptical, to pure superiority and skepticism. But like I said, I’m not going to go through all the proofs, but if you actually want to dig into the history, and incidentally we have a few books over there on tough questions. I think one or two of them actually address part of this, and I can recommend some more, but we’re starting to form a church library, and there’s some books over there if you’d like.
Even many atheist historians, all atheist historians of any credibility that I know, would affirm that many of the things that we read in the Bible are real. You can find historical evidence, for example, that King David existed, King Solomon. You can find historical evidence that is as good as we would use for any other ancient figure, that Jesus lived, that John the Baptist was there, that people like Pontius Pilate actually were in power. You can do all that. That’s the profound thing that someone couldn’t do with crop circles. No one has ever actually found a spaceship hovering over a cornfield, pushing down the corn into a beautiful pattern.
They have seen someone prank it. But we can go back to in history, and using the same process that we’ve used to talk about Julius Caesar, or William Shakespeare, or any of the King Henry’s, or whomever else we might want to pick out of history, that likewise the figures in Scripture are there. In a sense, that’s sort of in a nutshell what Jesus responds at first to John with. He doesn’t go through all the history of Scripture, because John isn’t really asking that. He’s asking specifically about Jesus, and here’s what Jesus says. Actually, what Luke says, I should say, “…in that hour he healed many people of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many who were blind he bestowed sight.
Now Jesus answers to those messengers of John, and he answered them, go and tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.” So Jesus does provide evidence, and so just as a starting point, there is nothing wrong with asking the hard questions about the Bible. In fact, if you never have, I encourage you to ask the good questions about its history. Ask if these things have happened. John is asking Jesus, are you actually doing the things that the Messiah is said to do, or the one who was foretold, the one who’s going to make everything right, are you doing those things? And Jesus does some of them and says, messengers of John, take this back to John so he can hear this is actually happening.
And God today, in some sense, says the same thing. He’s given us minds, he’s given us scholars, and he says, go, go ask the tough questions. I’m not afraid. Go ahead. I’m real and I’m here. And so now it is answered by God’s history. God works in history, and that’s one of the key things that the Christian faith has always said. It’s not merely mystical, it’s not merely a feeling, it’s not merely something that you experience in some spiritual realm. It’s something that God has done in this world, in history. Just because there are pranks. And there are lots of spiritual pranks out there, including people who claim the name of Jesus. And this is incredibly despicable. People who will take the name of Jesus, claim to do a miracle, claim to have a prophecy, and they do it because they want to get rich, or they want to get famous, they want to be important. They make it look like the whole thing of a sham.
But if we actually look at what God claims, what he says in his word, we find something profoundly different. It can be answered. For myself, in those moments of doubt, I’m a bit more philosophical about it rather than historical, oftentimes, ironically, even though I love history. I just want to know, is there really a God that started everything? And I start to think about that, and I go back to the argument from causation that something had to start everything, because everything is caused by something else. Everything here has been caused by something. That chair has been caused by something. You and I have been caused by something. This building has been caused by something.
As we look at the scientific method and we examine the world, what do we realize? Everything is caused by something else. And Christians over the centuries, philosophers over the centuries have said, well, if we know that’s true, but something had to start everything, we know there was a God who did that. And I find that comforting. Some people find that comforting, some people find that very abstract. And that’s as we look at these different things, whether it’s looking at the accuracy of the Bible, or we look at those more philosophical arguments, some of them are going to really resonate with us and some of them are going to fall very flat.
But what is it trying to tell us when we do that? It doesn’t answer everything, but what it does do is it says, as we look at that meteor or that asteroid and we see that hole on the beach and we say, should I be skeptical or not, what it’s saying is that, yes, I can go and I can talk to scientists, say, we actually do see asteroids, we actually do see meteors, these are real phenomena, they’re not just crop circles. Maybe that one isn’t real. Maybe some of the spiritual claims people make aren’t real. We can actually look at evidence of something that is real. And that’s the key difference from crop circles and other things that people do to make us think something’s happening.
But even for those of us who find this comforting at times, does it always hit right there when our hearts beating fast and we’re scared and we’re uncertain and we don’t know what to do? The answer’s no. It’s not then so much a question, is there a God, but does that God care? Will that meteor crash where I need it to crash, so to speak? I think that’s part of what John’s going through. I don’t think John really wonders if there’s a God at all. Is God really doing what he hoped he would do?
Let’s go back to Luke chapter 3. We can understand a bit more why John is feeling this way. It says, but Herod the Tetrarch, who had been reproved by him, that is John, for Herodias, his brother’s, Herodias rather, I can’t speak today, Herodias, his brother’s wife, and all the evil things that Herod had done, added this to them all. They locked John up in prison. So John had come speaking God’s judgment to Herod. Herod had an illegitimate marriage. He’d done lots of other immoral things. And John speaks boldly. He speaks because he knows he’s a prophet of God and he’s called to do that. And he speaks presumably with confidence that God’s working through him.
He goes and he speaks the truth of God to Herod and Herod locks him up. I don’t know if John thought, oh, fire is going to come down from heaven and protect me. Oh, Jesus is going to overthrow Herod and establish his kingdom and it’ll all be okay. I’m not quite sure what John thought, what John felt that God was going to do, but clearly I believe that what John didn’t think was that he was going to get thrown in prison and spend his life in prison. That’s what happens. And so it’s not just that everything isn’t right. In John’s life at this moment, the things of his own life are profoundly not right. And so it’s not that intellectual question, does God exist? Is the Bible true? Is Jesus the Messiah? At that level, it’s more, God, my life is really broken. Things really hurt right now. I’m really scared right now. I don’t understand what’s going on right now, God. How do I make sense of it?
Sometimes we put too much stock on, I’m just going to prove. Maybe you’ve had the conversation with someone who has doubts and you think, okay, I’m going to argue them into belief. Maybe you’ve tried this. I bet if you have, you don’t have a hundred percent success rate. Ah, yes, I will prove to you, I will argue you. I’m going to get, you know, where this really works well incidentally, go on social media and argue with people. That always works really well. Go on there, you’ll just enlighten them and they will believe and everything will be right, right? Not so much.
And Jesus, millennia before social media existed, basically said that. Because we have a story, a parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and basically Jesus is telling something that fits very well in our own moment. He talks about a man who dies and he’s in torment, eternal torment, because he didn’t believe, he didn’t do what God had called him to do. And he says, he sees, he can see across the gulf into heaven and he sees this beggar that he always ignored and he always just showed no pity at all for, who is in God’s presence. And he says, send him back, resurrect him so at least my relatives, at least they can know the truth and they’ll believe and they won’t end up like me. He’s told it’s not going to work. The dead can rise, prophets can come, if people aren’t willing to hear it, if their hearts aren’t ready for it, it won’t work.
Jesus, we’re giving that parable today. No matter how convincing your TikTok is, it won’t work. Even if your arguments for the existence of God are set to the latest pop song, it won’t work. Believe it or not, it’s amazing, I don’t know why, but it won’t. Why? Because it’s something more and really what it comes down to, I think most people, the real struggle isn’t, is there a God? The vast majority of Americans, if you poll them, is there, isn’t there a God? We’ll say, yeah, I think there’s a God out there. Is that God in any way relating to me? Is there anything there to know?
Even if we confess Jesus, even if we say, yes, there is, and here’s this Bible, and I believe it, I think there’s oftentimes that gnawing feeling inside of us in those crisis moments that we say, is he really hearing me? Does he really care about me? It gnaws at us, and it gnaws at us, and we think about what Jesus said about what had happened before the eyes of the messengers of John the Baptist, and we go on in verse 23, because John isn’t there, and he says, blessed is the one who is not offended by me. Could translate that, scandalized by me. In a sense here, Jesus is saying the same thing he later says to Thomas when he doubts whether Jesus has been resurrected.
Jesus honors Thomas’s request. He shows him his wounds. He comes and demonstrates, yes, I am alive, Thomas, but he says, blessed is the one who doesn’t see and believes. John’s going to have to decide if he’s going to do that, because he’s in prison. He can’t go and see what Jesus is doing. He’s going to believe. And in that, John is very much like us today. Unless you have a time machine. Anyone here have a time machine? If so, take me for a ride. I’d enjoy that. Oh, Kayla, do you have a time machine? Great, let’s go. We can come back and we’ll even know that you showed me the past, because we’ll be back, we’ll just come five minutes early, and anyway. Unless you have a time machine, though, you can’t go back and see the things of the Bible.
Oh, Hayden has it. Okay, Hayden, come on, fire it up. Come on, admit it. We can’t go back, but we have to ask, okay, here is the evidence, here is the sort of thing, and this is what we can know about the Bible. The sorts of things that we find in the Bible, if we are going to reject them, we might as well reject all of history. Bless you. So we know that. Now what am I going to do with it? Am I going to believe that what I can see in here, what I can read, speaks to the truth enough that I also believe that God cares about me right now? Or that doubt really is a choice? And if I have that doubt at times, no matter how much I try not to, no matter how many books I read, is that okay, or is God going to ignore me? Because I’m like John the Baptist, I don’t know. I’m doubting. I’m like Thomas. Might as well just call me Doubting Tim, right?
That’s what Jesus goes on to say in verse 28. So they tell you, among those born of women, none is greater than John, yet one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. Now, you might say, well that sounds like he put John in his place. That’s not what Jesus is doing there. There’s two different things we need to unpack there, and the first one, notice, is that Jesus speaks as glowingly as possible of John as a person. Every person’s been born, every person has a mother, and so what can we say? John is right at the very pinnacle of people. Jesus doesn’t say, well, you know, John was doing really good until he asked whether I was really the one to come, and now I’m going to knock him down a few pegs.
Thomas doesn’t get demoted from being an apostle because he doubts. Sometimes that’s how I think we treat doubt, though. Oh, if I have any doubts at all, if there’s ever times in the middle of the night I really wonder about everything, then God has no interest in me. That only makes the doubt worse, doesn’t it? It just makes us anxious on top of that doubt. Oh boy, what am I going to do? I love what Askinos says. He says, if ours is an examined faith, we should be unafraid to doubt. If doubt is eventually justified, we were believing what clearly was not worth believing. But if doubt is answered—oops, that wasn’t supposed to move on—doubt is answered, our faith has grown stronger. It knows God more certainly, and it can enjoy God more deeply. God honors honest doubt. He doesn’t encourage us, let’s just be as skeptical as possible.
I think if we think about life in general, that’s not healthy. We shouldn’t want to constantly be skeptics of everything, but if we actually have genuine questions, like John had here, he doesn’t demote us, doesn’t throw us out. It’s okay. Take a look at Peter. What better example could we do than look to the Apostle Peter? Jesus is walking across the water, and Peter answered him, Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.
Ah, here is the great hero of the faith, right? Jesus said, come. So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. When he saw the wind, he was afraid. Beginning to sink, he cried out, Lord, save me. Jesus immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him, saying to him, O you of little faith, why did you doubt? When they got into the boat, the wind ceased.
You know, Peter had been with Jesus for a long time at this point. He should have known, and his first impulse is a great, great impulse. I mean, if you are serving alongside God incarnate, don’t you think it’s a good idea to go ahead and do some spiffy things like walking across water? Why not? Demonstrate that faith to people. And if I were God and the people that were with me did that and then start to doubt, I might feel a little temptation to just say, okay, see you, you know? That’s the, you know, sort of like survivor-disciple edition. We’ll just go ahead and let the ones who don’t have enough faith sink. That’s really getting them off the island. But Jesus doesn’t. He grabs his hand. He corrects Peter and he puts him back on the boat. And he sends him on to his mission.
That’s what Jesus does for us, too. What if we continue to struggle? What if everything doesn’t always feel perfectly in place? It’s okay. We just need to turn back to him. Today is Reformation Sunday when we remember Martin Luther nailing the 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Church. This actually was originally a Wittenberg door from a prop years ago, this back of our altar. It says Castle Church Wittenberg up there, so it seems appropriate to be standing in front of it talking about this.
But here is a great hero of the faith. He’s sort of like Peter. He goes boldly forward. He challenges the religious leaders of the time with gusto. You need to answer these questions. What do we also know about Luther? There was an awful lot of the time when he was alone, when he was running for his life, that he battled. He battled doubt. He battled the questions. He battled fear. God still used him. God uses us. What did Luther do in those moments? Why did he write a song like A Mighty Fortress that we sang at the beginning of the service today?
Because, not because everything was going well, but because he knew exactly the only place he could go that was going to provide him with any relief at all from what he felt and what he feared: Jesus.
We look at verse 35 of Luke 7. Jesus wraps up this section saying, Yet wisdom is justified by all our children. He’s talked about all the people that are skeptical, all the people that are doubting, but wisdom is justified by all our children. And we say, well how do I get wisdom? Colossians 2, 2-3. Paul’s talking about the people of God. He says that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding in the mysteries, excuse me, in the knowledge of God’s mystery which is in Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
That goes back to what Jesus says in response to John when he says he’s the greatest, but the one in God’s kingdom is going to be greater. It’s not because the people in God’s kingdom are smarter than John, more gifted than John, less plagued by doubt than John, because what Jesus is doing is inviting all of us to trust in him and he provides the wisdom. He provides the righteousness, not you, not me. Doubt is solved by Jesus alone. All the proofs in the world will not eliminate the doubt that wakes you up in the middle of the night.
If Hayden will let me in his time machine and we go back and we see Jesus raising people from the dead, it would not eliminate the doubt in our minds because what do we know? We know people actually saw Jesus. Saw Jesus doing these things and what did they do? They still doubted. So it’s really the question is does God care? We can’t tend to ourselves. We can’t fix that in ourselves. We need God to provide his light to us.
We’re going to have the first frost of the season tonight, if the meteorologists are correct, and I have every reason to believe they are, and so it’s going to kill all the plants outside that are annuals. It’s always sad to me that all the beautiful flowers have been growing all summer will pass, although thankfully they seed themselves, so we look forward to next year in faith, but they’ll pass. They’ll go away and they can’t do anything about it. The plants that I grow, including ones that have lived for years, they can’t do anything about it, but what do we do if you have some plants and pots that you take outside every year? What do you do when you know the frost is coming? You bring them inside so they don’t die.
Here’s a… oh, it went away. Well, you’re gonna have to believe in faith that there was a picture there. I was gonna show you my plants. Oh, thank you. Isn’t that a great picture? Yeah. I now have my plants under a grow light. Now, I could bring my plants in and put them in the dark, utter darkness, and you know what they would do? What would they do? They’d die. They would die. If I left them outside, what would they do? Can they do anything to change that? No, probably not. Yeah, that’s a very good assessment. Yeah, they cannot do anything about it, but what can I do? I can bring them inside and I can give them light, and if I do that, what happens? They’ll stay. They’ll live, right? And next year they’ll see the light again.
And when we feel like we’re in the darkness, here’s the thing. There is something we can do. We can’t eliminate all the doubts. We can’t argue ourselves or anyone else into faith, but what we can do is say, God, would you turn on the light for me? Would you remind me that you’re there? Plants can’t keep themselves going, and we can’t keep ourselves going, but God is faithful to hear our prayers, and if you’re dealing with doubt right now, if you’re wondering the meaning of life right now, if you’re wondering if God cares about you right now, he will honor your prayer. Not necessarily eliminate every bit of doubt, but he’ll dwell with you in it.
Job, when he doubted what was going on in his life, what did God do? He didn’t answer everything. He dwelt with him. Peter, does Jesus solve his problem? No. Peter’s gonna make a lot more mistakes and doubt other times, but Jesus keeps working with him, and he works with us. We sometimes focus on how we need to experience something, something to prove things to ourselves and to others, but what we really need is the experience of someone. We need the experience of Jesus, and he’s faithful to provide that.
Let’s pray that he provides that for all of us tonight. Lord, we come before you as those who are constantly plagued with uncertainty and doubt in our lives. There’s a very uncertain life out there, Lord, but we know that you are the one who is faithful, and I pray tonight that for all of us, that you would remind us of your presence. Whether we confess and believe, and we say that all the time, but we still have those secret doubts we don’t really even want to admit, or we say that we’re skeptical, Lord, whatever it might be, would you come and provide the only comfort that we really need, which is your presence? Pray this in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.
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