Posts Tagged ‘Doubt’

She Seeks: What if I Don’t Believe Anymore?

Monday, November 16th, 2009

SadnessI stood next to the others with my head bowed low. No, I wasn’t praying. I was refusing to look up at the people worshiping with their hands lifted high. A few had tears streaming down their faces. Their gratitude was immeasurable, their adoration sincere.

Me? I was angry at God for not coming through in my darkest hour. I was questioning His authority in light of the desperate circumstances surrounding my life. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if there even was a God on the other side of my prayers.

This season of doubt came not before I was a Christian, but after I had walked with God for years and had even been serving in vocational ministry.

I sobbed into the carpet in the privacy of my bedroom. I beat my fist against tables demanding answers. In a way, I did whatever I could to provoke a response from the silent God. I was convinced I was the only one left in the relationship He and I used to have…

(To read the rest of this post click on over to She Seeks where I’m the featured writer for the week.)

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Posted in Doubt, She Seeks | 2 Comments »

When Your Friends Stop Believing

Friday, September 18th, 2009

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Please tell me I’m not the only one who has been talked into going somewhere with a friend that I probably wouldn’t have gone on my own.

Last weekend my husband and I wound up at the symphony with two of our good friends. Don’t get me wrong. I like classical music. But I don’t love it. Hearing it live is probably not something I would have suggested we do on a Saturday night. But we wanted to see our friends and that is what they wanted to do, so we went. And we had a good time.

Sometimes going with the flow is good in relationships. I’ve sat through more than a few movies that weren’t my favorite. But there are times that going with the flow isn’t a wise choice—especially when your friends begin to doubt God’s existence and slowly lead you away from a faith that was once rock solid (or seemed like it anyway).

I get emails all the time from girls who used to believe—and “still might”—but now their friends don’t believe in God anymore so they just aren’t sure. It’s especially troubling for a girl when the person who no longer believes played a pivotal role in helping her establish her own faith.

When I was in high school my youth pastor’s wife had an affair with the dad of some students in our youth group. My husband’s youth pastor was removed from his later post as a senior pastor due to an undisclosed scandal involving some teenage girls. You don’t have to convince me about how traumatizing it can be when someone you once respected leaves the faith or makes a huge mistake. I know it’s devastating. And it creates questions.

This is why knowing what you believe is so important. Barna Research states that 80% of churchgoing teens leave the Christian faith by their 29th birthdays. If that’s true, I would surmise that the majority of churchgoing teens don’t know what they believe, which makes it easy to stop believing later on. You need to learn what the Bible says, but you also need to see it at work in your life.

I can’t provide all of the answers here for you on the blog (although I try to help you work through things in bite sized chunks). So I want to suggest a few things that will help you stand firm when friends and leaders waiver:

•Get plugged in with a small group this fall. If you don’t have a youth group you are part of, email me and let me know where you live and I will help you find one.

•Sign up for my FREE email newsletter. Although it provides a host of features, one of my favorite things about it is the Bible Bites column where I give you one verse to read each day and three questions to ask yourself that will help you apply and remember it.

•Use an actual Bible study in your quiet time. There are tons out there. But you might be interested in my True Life Bible study series. Each book centers on the life of a biblical teenage girl: Leah, Hagar or Miriam. This series aims to teach you how to apply the Bible to the daily drama of real life.

•Read one of the following books: Experiencing God: Youth Edition, The Case for Christ: Youth Edition, Do Hard Things

It’s one thing to follow a friend to a movie or concert that might not be your taste. It’s another thing to leave a God who loves you just because someone else leaves Him. Experience God in relationship and know what you believe and why.

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Posted in Doubt, Friendship, God, Life Lessons | No Comments »

“God Doesn’t Answer My Prayers”

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

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Have you talked to someone and noticed they weren’t listening? I hate that—especially when what I am saying is important. Nothing makes you feel worse than the indication that your cares are not significant.

Sometimes we feel that way about God. Recently I’ve received a handful of emails or Facebook messages from those of you who feel like your prayers are bouncing off the walls of heaven. God doesn’t listen, you think. God doesn’t care. Then you begin to wonder if He’s even real.

I’ve had my own unanswered prayers. Some I’m grateful for—like the fact I didn’t marry the guy I had a crush on when I was fifteen. Others still break my heart—like the time God didn’t heal my grandpa when he was dying.

In the emails I receive from girls I’ve noticed a pattern. Many of you pull out a verse and use it like a trump card. Jesus says in Matthew 18:19, “Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.”

Then you cross your arms in defiance and say, “I had all of my friends praying with me about this and God didn’t answer. So He must not be real.”

Now, what you are trying to do here is good. You are looking in the Bible to see what God says He will do and you’re holding Him to it (just like we talked about on Monday). Great. But there is a problem.

In most books of the Bible (Proverbs excluded) you cannot just pick one verse without consulting the verses around it and assume you know what it means. Context is everything—it’s true in all written correspondence and even in our speech. I once had a girl write to me to say my book Being a Girl Who Loves inspired her to stay in an abusive relationship because it would give her an opportunity to be more loving.

When I read that I couldn’t respond fast enough to tell her that was not the best conclusion to draw. I then encouraged her to love the person by leaving him and reporting him so he could get help. Imagine if she never wrote to me and kept getting beat up thinking it was what Jesus wanted her to do! The thought makes me sick.

We always need to read in context. Matthew 18:19 is couched between verses on church discipline and how the leadership should handle a member of the church living in habitual sin. They need to pray and come to an agreement on how to proceed. As they do God will be with them and do as they ask.

Unfortunately that verse isn’t a free pass to ask for anything we want and get it. If it was there would be far more millionaires and no more starving people. People would probably never die either. A world where everyone could pray for whatever they wanted and get it would be impossible too since someone’s prayers would most likely contradict someone else’s.

So you can’t call God a liar or non-existent because He doesn’t answer every prayer the way you want Him too. But you should still pray. Why? God invites us to.

Philippians 4:6 says, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”

What’s the point?

Oswald Chambers says it best: “Our ordinary views of prayer are not found in the New Testament. We look upon prayer as a means for getting something for ourselves; the Bible’s idea of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.”

Get to know God. Pray. And trust Him to answer in the best way possible.

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Posted in Doubt, God, Life Lessons, Prayer | 10 Comments »

God on Trial

Monday, September 14th, 2009

Courtroom detailA few months ago I had jury duty. I sat in a courtroom with 100 potential jurors as a young man sat behind a table with his attorney and we were interviewed.

They were picky because the charge was murder and the penalty would be steep.

That young man had one trial to determine whether he did or didn’t kill someone. What if the evidence brought against him was mistakenly from someone else’s trial? Imagine if an innocent man was locked up because a prosecutor brought forth a bloody knife used for a different crime. That man would be deemed a murderer due to evidence that wasn’t evidence at all.

Now, that (hopefully) doesn’t happen in America’s courtrooms. But it often happens in America’s churches. People put God on trial and claim He doesn’t exist by holding Him to promises He never made.

Typically, the teen girls who write to me with doubts about God can point to a reason why: the divorce of their parents, abuse, the death of a loved one, etc…

“If God was good, if He was real, He wouldn’t allow that to happen to me,” they write in frustration. Their hurts are real. And in many cases, their anger is valid. But their argument that if God were real, life would be pain free isn’t a well-founded one.  

This is why knowing what you are looking for is important. What these girls are saying is that they are looking for a god who takes away pain and only passes out blessings. Great! Wouldn’t we all love a god like that?

The problem is, the God of the Bible never promised to make life perfect. In fact, Jesus Himself said, “In this world you will have trouble…” (John 16:33).

So, you can’t use pain to prove God doesn’t exist since He never promised to remove pain from our lives. If you are looking for a god who makes life all sunshine and roses, you aren’t looking for the God of the Bible.

If you want to know whether the God of the Bible exists, then you have to look at what He promises to do. He sets the standard you can measure Him against.

What does the God of the Bible promise us?

  • His plans are to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a future and a hope (Jeremiah 29:11)
  • He works all things together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purposes (Romans 8:28)
  • Nothing can separate you from the love of God (Romans 8:38-39)

Can you look back over your life and see any good? Did you survive a dramatic attack that should have killed you? Do you have at least one parent who still loves you after a divorce? Is there a part of you crying out to God even though something awful happened? Is there still a desire to believe if His existence can be proven?

Those are good things. Glimmers of hope in the midst of tragedy. Small proofs that God is Who He says He is.

Have your bad experiences led you anywhere good? Maybe your parents got divorced, but now your alcoholic dad can no longer beat you or your mom when he is drunk. You are in a place of brokenness, but you are in a place of safety.

If you are going to call the God of the universe into question, and force Him to stand trial over whether or not He exists, you need to make sure the evidence you hold against Him is accurate. You cannot base His existence on whether or not He gives you everything you want. The only thing you can hold Him to is whether or not He provides you with everything He has promised.

Know Who you are looking for.

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Posted in Doubt, God, Life Lessons | 4 Comments »

Doubting God in Tragedy

Friday, September 11th, 2009

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Several years ago I sat at the breakfast table at a camp where I was speaking. The girl next to me didn’t want to talk. But she kept staring at me.

Do I have something on my face? Does she hate my book and not want to tell me? My mind raced.

That afternoon I taught my workshop and noticed my breakfast friend sitting in the crowd. She made me nervous—especially when she walked out in the middle. Later that evening she came to my book table in a blubbering mess.

“My sister loved your book,” she said. “She was killed in a car accident while she was looking for her ringing cell phone. Your book—underlined and highlighted—was the last thing she read. She was living for the Audience of One when she died.”

I took a slow breath as I let the words sink in. She wasn’t done.

“I left the church and was living as far from God as I could,” she said, her voice still shaky. “But they read from your book and my sister’s journal at her funeral, and I saw that God was real to her. And I wanted that for me. I’m back in church now. I’ve changed my life. I want to dance for the Audience of One too.”

By this time my face was wet with tears. I managed to choke out a question about how long it had been since she lost her sister. Four months. In the midst of still fresh pain this girl was clawing her way through the darkness desperately seeking God.

Why do some people find God in tragedy while others leave Him? I still wrestle with this question, but I think I’m beginning to grasp the answer. Tragedy either clarifies or clouds what we are looking for God to be. Those of us who know what we are looking for see Him. The rest of us don’t.

What do I mean by that? If your tragedy is that you have a dad who left your family, or abused you, or is still around but ignores you, then the aspect of God you are crying out for is Abba—the Father nature of God (Gal. 4:6).

But if you don’t recognize that you are looking for God to be a Father to you, you can easily look at your circumstances and think God must surely not be real if He let your dad betray you. Instead of looking for God to meet your need, you’ve expected Him to fix your problem. That doesn’t always happen.

The girl I met at that camp still had a dead sister—but she found a living God. Her problem wasn’t fixed, but her need for a healer was met as God gave her the strength she needed each day to go on.

On Monday I’ll write more about how to identify what it is you are looking for God to be. But first let me make a few things clear: there is only one God, although He gives Himself many names in Scripture. I also want to point out that we are all in need of a Savior. We are separated from God due to sin and Christ is the only way we can bridge that chasm.

But sometimes our perspective is off. We can’t always see our need for a Savior because we don’t understand sin and the gap it creates. But we can see other broken areas of our lives and claim God isn’t fixing them. So we choose not to believe in Him.

God is real. Life is hard. Many times it is when life is hardest that we can see God most clearly—if we know how to look. Next week we’ll talk about how to do just that.

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Posted in Doubt, God, Life Lessons | 7 Comments »

“I Don’t Believe in God Anymore.”

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

SadnessLately I’ve been exchanging emails with a teen girl who doesn’t know if she believes in God anymore.

Despite her lifetime of churchgoing she’s not sure she’s ever really believed. She can pinpoint a moment when she said the sinner’s prayer, but her current doubts are louder than that distant memory.

Yesterday I threw a comment up on Facebook and Twitter asking people to share about their experiences with doubt and overcoming it. Somebody will surely be able to help me, I thought to myself. Then the comments and messages began rolling in: I have doubts too.

Suddenly George Barna’s statistic that 80% of churchgoing teens leave the Christian faith before their 29th birthdays became real before my eyes. That percentage grew faces and names in an instant. Part of me wanted to jump on a tour bus and travel the United States, pen in hand, observing America’s churches and figuring out where we are going wrong.

Why is the church only able to hang on to two out of every ten girls who walk into youth group? Those numbers literally make me sick.

Information transfer doesn’t produce a relationship, and a relationship is the only thing that will get a person into heaven and keep a person in church. Relationship with God through His Son Jesus Christ is the only thing that can change a person’s life. No amount of volunteering at church, Bible knowledge or youth group attendance is going to cut it.

Yet, week in and week out youth pastors around the nation stand before groups of your peers and throw a bunch of information at them from a book. Sounds a lot like what your English teacher, science teacher and even your history teacher do. The difference is America’s high schools have a higher success rate than its churches.

“My church is going through a dry spell but they are praying for revival,” the girl who now questions her belief in God recently wrote to me. “I doubt it will ever come.” It was then that I realized she wasn’t asking me to scientifically prove that God was real. She didn’t want me to debate evolution verses creationism. What she wanted was to feel the breath of God on her face. She wanted to reach out and touch Him.

The church is losing your peers for one reason: you want to experience God and the guys in pulpits want to talk to you about Him. This scene is as old as time. Thomas was a doubter too. You may think you have it bad because you’re a lifetime church attendee and you wonder if God is real. Thomas was one of Jesus’ elite 12—and he didn’t believe in the resurrection until he placed his hands inside of Jesus’ scars.

What was Jesus’ response to a doubter that should have known better? Was it a rebuke for his lack of faith? Was it anger over not being trusted? Was it disappointment in someone He expected more from?

Jesus’ response to Thomas was simple. Come. To the one who needed to see to believe this is what Jesus said: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe” (John 20:27).

Over the next few days on the blog we’re going to wrestle with this issue of doubt, and we’re going to talk about the why behind the startling statistics. Let’s work this thing out together.

To those who want an experience and not a sermon, Jesus holds out His nail scarred hands and says, “Come.”

 What are some of your major questions about God? Why do you think 80% of your peers will eventually leave the church? Does this statistic surprise you? Why or why not?

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Posted in Doubt, Fear, God, Life Lessons, Q&A | 15 Comments »