Prayers for Being Human: Doubt

Hey everyone, so one more week of this mess and then it's a mess at a different house. So that's exciting. That's fun.

Hey, before I get into where we're about to go, let me tell you where we're headed. We spent this series, Summer in the Psalms, in the emotional basement of the Christian life — we've been talking about anxiety and anger and shame. And now, this week, we're going to go lower still, and we're talking about doubt.

I want to suggest that doubt isn't really one thing, similar to how biblical Greek has four words for love, which just gets translated into English as "love." I think that's kind of how we interact with and experience doubt — in more than one way. So we're going to cover it through three different questions wearing the same word.

The first one we're going to be talking about is: is God real? I remember in my undergrad, I went down a research hole on evolution and biblical inerrancy and infallibility that, truthfully, I haven't climbed out of yet entirely. Everything I believed about God came from one book — the Bible — and so now, if I'm starting to pull the threads on it, if I'm starting to question this book, well, what do I actually believe about God? If I no longer hold certain doctrinal stances about the book, do I believe these stances about God? Do I believe God Himself exists? That's the first question.

Second, is God good? There was a stretch of years in my life where both my marriage and my calling to ministry were falling apart at the same time. I remember lying awake some nights, wrestling with a question I found harder to answer than "is God real" — is God good? Wondering if He is actually for me, or if I had just assumed that my whole life without ever really putting it to the test. It felt like I had been faithful, I was holding up my end of the deal, and now He wasn't holding up His.

It's God real, is God good, and last but not least: is God here?

A childhood friend of mine, Sean, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at birth, and when he was around 22 — I may be a little off on the years — he had a double lung transplant. They told him this would probably last about five years before his body started rejecting the lungs, and after that, he'd be pretty low on the list for getting another transplant, since he'd already had one. It was about ten, eleven, twelve years later that he finally needed a new pair of lungs. And he got them. For us, this felt like a miracle — an answered prayer, which is in itself a strange thing to sit with, because it meant someone healthy had to die for this prayer to be answered.

I was there with Sean when he met his wife, Sam — they were working together at a Taco Bell. I was a groomsman at their wedding. And then, what felt like just a few short years later, I was on the phone with Sam, planning his funeral, after his transplant diagnosis had gone from worse to even worse to getting better to emergency surgery he didn't survive.

On the phone with her, I asked if she wanted to pray. At first she said yes, and I got about a sentence and a half in before she interrupted me — not rudely, not angrily. She said something like, "Yeah, I don't want you to pray for me right now. I want to know where God went."

Where did God go?

Three questions we're talking about this week, three kinds of doubt: Is He real? Is He good? Is He here?

Fair warning — I'm not going to resolve any of them for you this morning or this week, because A) that's not what the text does, B) I don't think that's the point of sermons, and C) a faith that only holds up because it can win an argument is one new discovery, or one new tragedy, away from falling apart again anyway.

So what I want to show us is that scripture already has a place for all three of these questions. None of this is going to be an apologetics argument — apologetics being the field that tries to prove God or prove faith through reason and evidence. What we're going to explore instead are three prayers, prayed by people standing exactly where you are.

Is God real? — Psalm 73

"I was envious of the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked, all in vain I've kept my heart clean." The Psalmist isn't just jealous here — at least not in the way we normally think. He's watching his whole framework, his whole worldview, fail to predict reality. In the ancient world, there was no concept of atheism as we know it — the idea that God, or gods, simply don't exist wasn't really a thing.

So the psalmist isn't just being jealous. He believed faithfulness gets rewarded — good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. But the world in front of him wasn't cooperating. It was less "jealousy" and more a kind of spiritual vertigo.

In the psalm, he never actually gets his answer. There's no verse where God shows up in a whirlwind and explains the math to him — for that you'd have to go to Job, and you'd end up just as confused there too.

Watch what happens instead. Verses 16–17 say it seemed to him a wearisome task, until he went into the sanctuary of God. He didn't think his way there. He went and stood among people who worshiped anyway, and something was given to him that thinking alone hadn't produced. A few verses later, in verse 25, he lands in relationship, not logic: "Whom have I in heaven but you?"

I think it's amazing that we have this long tradition of people who were honest about the gap between what they believed and what they experienced — and instead of being punished for it, they were formed by it. I think of the disciple Thomas, commonly known as "doubting Thomas," who wasn't excommunicated or kicked out of his friend group for saying he wouldn't believe until he could touch the wounds of the risen Christ himself. Tradition holds he carried the gospel all the way to India. His doubt wasn't a footnote, or something to hide away in scripture — it became almost a hinge in his life, a wall he had to get through for a more fruitful faith on the other side.

When I was wrestling with my own doubts about scripture, what helped me wasn't more biblical scholarship. It was people who let me keep asking the questions, who let me stay in the room with them without having to suppress what I was wrestling with as the price of admission into their company. That mattered more to me than answers would have.

So — is God real? I don't think certainty is the resting place. I think proximity is.

Is God good? — Psalm 88

Let's turn to the darkest, most depressing psalm in the whole book. "You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. Why, Lord, do you reject me and hide your face from me?"

The Psalmist doesn't doubt that God is there — he's convinced God is there, but that God is the one doing this to him. That's a different question than Psalm 73. He's not asking "does this add up?" He's asking, "are you actually good, or are you the one doing this to me?"

The psalm has a lot of language about wrath, and it's worth pausing on, since we've been arguing the past couple weeks that God's posture toward us is love, not wrath. I want us to realize the Psalmist simply has no other category for why bad things happen. In his framework, good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people — both come from God's hand. So if something bad is happening to him, it must be coming from God Himself. He has no other way to conceptualize it.

He's not handing us a careful systematic theology. He's handing us his honest experience — and what suffering feels like from the inside, and what's actually true about God's character, may not always be the same thing. But what's beautiful about the Psalms is they give us permission to name the first one out loud without having to get the second one totally right.

I actually think that might be a precondition for asking this question honestly — you can't seek the answer to whether God is good while you're still just performing okay-ness. You can't get to the truth of it if you're not willing to ask the question truthfully.

I had a season like this. I mentioned the stretch where my marriage and my ministry were both falling apart. I wasn't just anxious or ashamed — some nights I was genuinely angry at God, convinced that if He were actually good, He wouldn't have let this collapse happen, especially not all at once. I tried to be faithful, but being faithful didn't protect me from it. I didn't have a job at the time.

Friends of mine, Cade and Rachel, took us in during that stretch. Cade never told me God is good. He never explained the situation or handed me a theology to hold all of it. He took me to play basketball every week. He got me a drink afterward, whether I'd earned it or not. And then one night, when I was just kind of sulking on his couch, he hit me on the knee and said, "get in the car." He took me to get some sun, get some drinks we didn't need, and we drove around the block — I don't even know, forty-five minutes, maybe two hours — just two guys and a couple of cherry limeades, talking about the whole gamut of life.

I didn't see it until years later, but it never actually answered my question about God's goodness — something in me had just loosened up. And it wasn't because of anything Cade said. It was because Cade kept showing up. He wasn't running a ministry at me. He didn't have a church brand on. He was just a friend circling the block with me. And I think that's exactly what Jesus does. Jesus shows up in the pit without announcing Himself, without needing credit for it. Even though I didn't feel Jesus in that season, I believe it was the spirit of Jesus driving that car.

So — is God good? I can't promise you a life with no pit. I can tell you He gets in the pit with you. If you're lucky, with some cherry limeades.

Is God here? — Psalm 22

The last question. Psalm 22 starts with that famous line from Jesus on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" You may recognize that not just from the cross, but as the spirit of Sam's question to me — "where did God go?"

This is the loneliest version of doubt, because it doesn't even get to argue with God — it can't find God at all. But partway through the psalm, there's a pivot. It doesn't explain where God went, but it turns outward: "He, God, did not hide His face from me, but heard when I cried to Him... the poor shall eat and be satisfied."

The cry doesn't stay a private transaction. It becomes a reason to go looking for whoever else is crying out. Doubt doesn't get resolved by new information — it gets metabolized by loving somebody who needs it. Not as a distraction from the question, but maybe as the actual answer to it.

That's what Cade was for me, without knowing it. And I think it's what I got to be for Sam — just by staying on the phone with her, having proximity. I didn't have an answer for her in that moment. I still don't, really. What I have is proximity — I got to stay in that season with her, and loving her in her sense of forsakenness somehow helped heal me of mine.

So — is God here? I can't always sense or feel His presence. But I can always go and be His presence for somebody else.

Bringing it together

Three questions, three psalms, not a single clean answer among them. Psalm 73 relocated instead of resolving. Psalm 88 kept accusing God instead of reaching a conclusion. Psalm 22 turned a cry into a search party for others who are also crying out.

Because here's today's big idea: faithfulness, not faith, is the opposite of doubt. Faith can be lost for a season. But faithfulness is a way of living — a way of showing up and loving like Jesus, regardless of whether you currently trust God's existence, God's goodness, or God's presence.

So here's this week's formation practice. First, name one person in your life who has shown up for you in a hard season — someone who's been in the pit with you. You don't have to write them a psalm or anything beautiful. Just one sentence: "I don't think I ever told you what it meant to me that you kept showing up." Thanks.

Second, go and do that for someone else. Find someone in your circle who's having a hard season, and start walking with them — start showing up and being the presence of God for them, regardless of how you're feeling about your own doubts in this moment.

That's it for this week. God bless, and we'll see you next week.