You Are Not the Only One Who Doubts

On Psalm 73, honest questions, and why doubt was never meant to be carried alone.

Scripture: Psalm 73 · Matthew 26:39 · Adapted from a sermon preached February 12, 2023.

Have you ever doubted something? I think we all have. Maybe doubt crept in even today. It can be a lonely road, leaving you to wonder whether you have handled a situation rightly, or made the right choice, or believed the right thing. What I have learned in forty years of life is that doubt is always going to be there. It is simply part of the terrain. But the harder thing to learn, and the more freeing one, was that I am not the only person in the world who doubts. A Barna study a few years back found that about a quarter of people who call themselves Christian say they wrestle with spiritual doubt, and that the number climbs among those who have been to college and bumped up against a wider array of ideas. Doubt is common. The question is never really whether we will doubt, but what we will do with it when we do.

That same study asked people what they did with their doubt, and the answers are sobering. The most common response, from nearly half, was to leave the church. Many quietly stopped reading their Bibles and praying, and a good number stopped talking about God with anyone at all. In other words, when doubt came, it drove them away from the very people and practices most able to help, and they were left to sort it out alone, or not at all. That is the tragedy of the story, and notice that the tragedy is not the doubt. It is the leaving.

Here is what I keep coming back to. Faith is not a light switch that is either on or off. It is more like a muscle that grows stronger the more you use it. All of us are somewhere between complete faith and complete doubt, and most of us live a lot closer to the middle than we admit. We are the father in Mark 9 who cries out to Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. So doubt is not bad simply because I feel it. Doubt only becomes dangerous when I run from it, or when I leave it sitting untended in a corner of my heart. Doubt handled in the presence of God is one thing. Doubt nursed alone in the dark is another.

For a picture of doubt handled well, look at Asaph in Psalm 73. He is not some average guy on the back row. He is a worship leader in the temple of God, and he is full of doubt. I find that oddly comforting. And this psalm is not finally about his doubt. It is about how a person of faith carries doubt to God, and it shows us three moves.

The first move is to face the frustration and say it out loud. From verse three through verse fourteen, Asaph simply laments. He lays a whole buffet of complaint right in God’s lap. The wicked are prospering. Their bodies are healthy and strong, untroubled by the aches that wear the rest of us down. They have everything their hearts could wish for, while the people trying to live righteously seem stricken all day long. What is the point, he asks, of keeping my heart clean if this is what it gets me? It is a real question, and a real doubt, and he does not dress it up.

I read something this week that will not leave me alone. When a sea cucumber is attacked, it throws up its own insides and lets the predator feast on its guts until it is full and swims away. Then, once the danger has passed, it draws the rest back in and regrows what it lost. It is a strange fact, but there is wisdom in it. Sometimes doubt just needs to come out. It needs to be named and put on the table. And because we belong to a God who is relational, he actually wants us to bring it to him and trust him to sort out what needs sorting. David, Asaph’s own king, wrote, pour out your heart before him. Peter says it plainly, cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you. Some translations say cast your cares, others say your worries. I do not think it is a stretch to add, cast your doubts on him too. He can take them.

The second move is to reason with the doubt and ask the hard questions. In verse sixteen Asaph says that when he tried to understand, it was troubling to him. He is wrestling now, turning the thing over, pressing on it. And here I think of children, who have a way of reminding us that asking questions is allowed. Jesus said that unless we turn and become like children, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. I have come to believe that one reason God fills our lives with children is to keep teaching us that we are never too old to ask. It is ok to doubt. It is ok to reason through it. It is ok to raise your hand and say, I do not understand this yet.

That is the quiet gift of walking this out together. It is why we gather to pray and to read and to ask each other the plain questions, how can I serve you, how can I pray for you. It is awfully hard to let doubt freeze you when you are busy adventuring toward the truth alongside other people. So let me ask it this way. What if the point was never mainly about landing the right answer, but about walking the road together in Christ, and enjoying his company and each other’s along the way? What if worship and relationship were a large part of the answer to our doubts?

Because notice what is really wrong with Asaph. He is troubled not because he lacks the answer, but because he has taken his eyes off the One who holds it. He kept trying to reason out a spiritual problem with a worldly mind, and no matter how he turned it, he came up stuck. Then everything changes in verse seventeen. I went into your sanctuary, O God, he says, and I finally understood. The sanctuary here is not a building. It is the presence of God. That is where the doubt finally found its proper size. Worship reframes the way we see God, the way we see ourselves, and the way we see everyone around us, and once Asaph’s heart was aligned in worship, the things that had troubled him fell back into their right places next to who God actually is.

Look at what he finds when he draws near. In verse twenty-three he says, yet I still belong to you; you hold my right hand. There is that small, enormous word again. Yet. It is the same word Jesus prayed in the garden, my Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not as I will, but as you will. Asaph is saying, I may not understand, I may still be doubting, yet I belong to you, and you have my hand. I have learned in my own walk that I sometimes need to stop being a doubter and start being a debtor. Doubt turns me inward and makes everything about me. Debt turns me outward, toward God and toward the people he has given me. And in verse twenty-four Asaph is being led, you guide me with your counsel, like a child held by the hand, like a flock walked to still water by its shepherd, his eyes off the destination and on the One doing the leading. His whole conclusion comes in verse twenty-eight. But for me, it is good to be near God.

I will be honest that God can still be hard to find. Sometimes we seek him and do not sense him drawing near, and in the searching it becomes easy to doubt he is there at all. But I have slowly learned that it is often less about God making himself obvious to me and more about the joy of the journey to find him. And here is the detail from that study that moved me most. When people finally did go looking for help with their doubt, the largest share of them, about four in ten, went to friends and family. The journey to find God was never designed to be walked alone.

Think of Mary and Martha. When Jesus finally arrived after Lazarus died, people had already gathered into the grief with them. What if, instead of standing at the crossroads of our doubt by ourselves, we gathered as a body, worshiped together, and let God take the whole company of us by the hand and lead us into himself? That is what I pray for the church. Every one of us has had a season when God felt unfair, or righteousness felt pointless, or our prayers seemed to bounce off the ceiling. Those seasons grow much heavier when we are convinced we are the only ones who have ever felt them. In that same study, most of the people who carried their questions to a friend, to the church, to the Bible, came out saying their faith had grown stronger for it. I do not know what doubts you are carrying today. But I can tell you this with confidence. You are not the only one. And perhaps what you need, along with the rest of us, is simply to worship.