When I Doubt

                                                            When I Doubt

 

Dear Champions,

 

The short excerpt is by Andy Stanely, and the Scripture is from Hebrews 11:1  Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

 

When I doubt is when I am focused on the pieces that are missing.  I doubt when I get all hung up on what is unexplainable and lose sight of what is undeniable.  I doubt when God does not act the way that I think that He should act.  When God gets outside of my little omnipotent box that I have crammed Him into, when He lets things happen that I do not think He should allow, when He does not answer a prayer, when He is unexplainable to me, or when He does not do what I would do if I was God, then I begin to doubt.  But when I shift my focus from those things that are unexplainable to those things that are undeniable, my faith soars even in the face of unanswered questions and mysteries in God that will not fit or stay in my little bitty box. 

 

What is undeniable is that we are here, that the only alternative to creation is that something came from nothing.  It is undeniable that there is a Creator, and there is a creation and all of the Earth shouts of His glory and presence and existence.  There is a God, and that is the starting point.  What else is undeniably true is that 2000 years ago a man showed up on the earth named Jesus.  He was a carpenter s son, a nobody that should have come and gone like everybody else of that age, but He began to teach strange things and perform miracles.  From Roman history this man died on a Roman cross, and He rose from the dead.  The eyewitnesses wrote about it and gave up their lives not because of what they believed or because of what Jesus taught but because they believed that a dead man rose from the dead.  What also is undeniably true is that this message spread throughout all of Europe and all over the world.  Today one third of the world s population believe that a Jewish carpenter rose from the dead; and the reason that they believe it is that at some point in their life they placed their faith in his death on the cross as the salvation for their sins, and they changed from the inside out.  You can go to every continent on this whole globe and you can find Christians in all kinds of different cultures speaking all kinds of different languages.  If you pressed them as to what happened they will tell you the same story.  I needed the forgiveness of sins and when I received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior something happened on the inside and it has revolutionized how I have lived my life.  I have peace and joy, and my fear has disappeared.

 

Champions, have a great week!-David Vining