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 · 1 Peter 5:7 · Adapted from a sermon.

Everyone doubts. A Barna study a few years ago found that about a quarter of people who call themselves Christian say they wrestle with spiritual doubt, and the number climbs among those who have been to college and bumped up against a wider range of ideas. So the real question was never whether a believer will doubt. It is what a believer does with doubt once it arrives. But doubt itself is not the danger. The danger is what most people do with it, which is to carry it away alone. Handled in the presence of God and in the company of his people, doubt strengthens faith. Nursed by itself in the dark, it hollows faith out. The difference is not the doubt. It is the direction a person walks with it.

The tragedy is the leaving

The same study asked people what they actually 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 Scripture and praying, and a good number stopped talking about God with anyone at all. In other words, doubt 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. Notice where the tragedy falls. It is not in the doubting. It is in the leaving. Faith is not a light switch that is either on or off. It is closer to a muscle that strengthens with use, and everyone lives somewhere between complete faith and complete doubt, most of us nearer the middle than we admit. This is the father in Mark 9 who cries out to Jesus, I believe, help my unbelief. Doubt is not dangerous simply because it is felt. It becomes dangerous only when a person runs from it, or leaves it sitting untended in a corner of the heart. Doubt carried to God is one thing. Doubt nursed alone is another.

Asaph names it, and reasons with it

For a picture of doubt handled well, look at Asaph in Psalm 73. He is not a man on the back row. He is a worship leader in the temple of God, and he is full of doubt, which is oddly comforting. From verse three through verse fourteen he simply laments, laying a whole buffet of complaint in God's lap. The wicked prosper. Their bodies are healthy and strong while the people trying to live rightly seem stricken all day long. What is the point, he asks, of keeping a clean heart if this is what it earns? He does not dress the question up, and that is the first thing worth learning. Sometimes doubt has to be said out loud, named and put on the table, because it belongs to a relational God who invites it. David wrote, pour out your heart before him. Peter says plainly, cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you, and it is no stretch to add doubt to the list of things he can take.

Then comes the second move. 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 that pressing is allowed. Jesus said that unless we become like children we will never enter the kingdom, and children are the ones who still know it is permitted to raise a hand and say, I do not understand this yet. But here is the detail that has to be faced: reasoning alone did not get Asaph out. He turned the problem every way a worldly mind can turn a spiritual problem, and he came up stuck. The questions were right to ask. They simply were not, by themselves, enough.

The turn is the sanctuary

Everything changes in verse seventeen. "I went into your sanctuary, O God," he says, "and I finally understood." The sanctuary is not a building. It is the presence of God, and that is where the doubt at last found its proper size. Worship reframes how a person sees God, sees himself, and sees everyone else, and once Asaph's heart was aligned in worship, the things that had troubled him fell back into their right places beside who God actually is. Watch what he finds there. In verse twenty-three he says, yet I still belong to you; you hold my right hand. That small enormous word, yet, is the same one Jesus prayed in the garden: my Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass, yet not as I will, but as you will (Matthew 26:39). Asaph is saying, I may not understand, I may still be doubting, yet I belong to you, and you have my hand. The move is from doubter to debtor. Doubt turns a person inward and makes everything about the self. Being held turns a person outward, toward God and toward the people he has given. His whole conclusion lands in verse twenty-eight: but for me, it is good to be near God. The resolution was not a better argument. It was a nearer presence.

Doubt was never meant to be carried alone

An honest objection has to be met here: does this not simply dodge the intellectual questions, sending people to worship instead of answering what they asked? It does not, and the structure of the psalm is the answer. Reasoning is the second move, not a forbidden one; Asaph really does wrestle. The claim is only that reasoning by itself left him stuck, and that the questions found their proportion in the presence of God, not before it. And there is one more piece, because the presence of God is rarely found in isolation. The same study that tracked people leaving also found that when they finally went looking for help, the largest share, about four in ten, went to friends and family. The road to God was never designed to be walked alone. Think of Mary and Martha, who did not stand at the grave of their brother by themselves, because people had already gathered into the grief with them. The seasons when God feels unfair or prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling grow far heavier under the conviction that no one else has ever felt them. In that same study, most of the people who carried their questions to a friend, to the church, to the Scriptures, came out saying their faith had grown stronger for it. That is the whole point. Doubt handled alone tends to end in leaving. Doubt carried to God, in the company of his people, tends to end in a faith that is stronger than it was. You are not the only one who doubts, and part of what you need, along with everyone else, is simply to worship.