What’s Driving Your Doubt

It’s so avant-garde; it’s so hip these days to be in a holding pattern of doubt.  “I’ll just doubt.  I’m just not sure about Buddha.  I’m not really sure about Jesus or the reliability of Scripture.  I’m not really sure.  Do science and faith even have a correlation and a relationship?  I’m not really sure about the depravity of mankind.  I’ll just live in a perpetual state of doubt.  I’m just a skeptic.”

You’re going to run out of gas one day.  You have got to land the plane, baby.  You have got to land it on belief or unbelief.

Have you landed the plane?  I asked myself that.  “Ed, are you just going to go around and around and around?  Don’t just circle just to circle.  Find the runway and land.”

Do research, do study, do some scholarship.  The answers are there.  God is using that doubt to deepen our faith.  So pinpoint those doubts.

What’s Driving Your Doubt?

Ask myself this question when I’m doubting.  What’s driving my doubt?  What is really driving it?

There’s a book by Dr. Paul Vitz entitled Faith of the Fatherless.  It’s a very fascinating read, because Vitz chronicles the life of the most influential, most popular atheists imaginable—Stalin, Hitler, Madeleine Murray O’Hair, Sigmund Freud, and Bertrand Russell, just to name a few. There were many, many other famous atheists.  And Vitz points out that in almost every situation these men and women experienced severe father pain.  Most of their fathers either abandoned them when they were young, were perverts, or died when they were young children.  And Vitz says that they’ve taken this father pain and placed it on the shoulders of God.  Thus, you have doubt, unbelief, anger, denial, and you have an atheist.

Don’t feel guilty when you are blessed.  “…instruct them to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share.”  Don’t miss that word share.