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20 entries for this category: | We need to act on our beliefs |
We need to act on our beliefs to see that they`re real. This is the most important thing about doubt. We`ve got to act on our beliefs to see if they`re real, that`s the only way we`re going to know. When Jesus calls Peter to get out of the boat and walk on water he doesn`t say to Peter, "but first you might want to conduct some experiments on water tension and weight dispersal to see if it`ll work." He just says, "You`ll find out if you try it." We become convinced of Jesus not so much through evidence and logic, but by doing the things he tells us to do and seeing that they`re real. When I was a kid my grandparents lived on a farm, and my grandfather had built a bridge over a river that ran through their property. Now, my grandfather was a farmer, not a structural engineer, so I easily could have doubted his bridge building abilities. But because I walked across that bridge every day that I was there, I knew that he was just as good at building a bridge as he was at growing wheat. Because I acted on my beliefs. It`s as I have given some of my money to God`s purposes and watched him provide, it`s as I have served others in his name and watched him work through me, that I`ve become convinced that he`s there. I have a friend who was an agnostic. She went on a short-term mission trip with a church to South Africa and ended up becoming convinced that Jesus was real. Partly because she saw sin and injustice up close for the first time, and she started to feel in her heart that if a price wasn`t paid for all of that sin, then there was no justice in the world. Then she realized that`s part of what Jesus is doing on the cross, he`s paying the price for all of those sins, but in a way that provides mercy for the sinner. But more importantly, on that mission trip she was asked to work with the poor and oppressed and to come up with the right thing to say to them. She didn`t know how she was going to do it, but every time she felt God giving her the right words at the right time. She knew it wasn`t her, she knew it was God. That convinced her that Jesus was real. It was by doing the things that Jesus tells us to do, like serve the poor, that she discovered that he was there.  By: Scott Dudley
Category: Have Faith (Trust) in God - Jesus |
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| Faith and Doubt |
We need to get comfortable with the fact that doubts are part of faith. I think sometimes the problem with we church types is that we`ve somehow communicated that doubts are wrong or sinful, which strikes me as kind of odd, given that the Bible is more a book about people who doubted than it is a book about faith. Abraham doubted, Moses doubted, the disciples doubted, Thomas doubts. One of my favorite scenes in the whole Bible is right after God has divided the Red Sea in two so that the Israelites could escape from slavery. Just one chapter later, just one chapter later, the Israelites don`t have any water so they start whining to Moses. "We`re going to die." "You`re a terrible leader." "Where`s God?" Just one chapter before they had seen an ocean divide in two. I don`t know about you, that would have held me for a while. I bet if I saw that I could have faith for an entire 24 hours! I`m sure of it. The Bible is filled with doubters, and that`s because doubts are a part of faith. Jesus didn`t say to us, "I want you to have sure and certain empirical knowledge." He said, "Have faith." And faith always implies a little bit of doubt.By: Scott Dudley
Category: Have Faith (Trust) in God - Jesus
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| Lessons From Doubting Thomas |
We let our doubts drive us to a stronger faith. Frederick Buechner says that "doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving." Our doubts can spur us on to a stronger faith. That`s what Thomas is doing in this story. Thomas wasn`t with the disciples that first Easter Sunday when they all saw Jesus raised from the dead, so he missed out, and that`s a lesson to us all: don`t skip church, something cool might happen. So Thomas says, "Unless I see it myself, and can put my hands where the nail prints are, I can`t believe it." Thomas` doubts are driving him to investigate the claims of Jesus himself and make up his own mind. When I was in seminary, supposedly learning how to be a pastor, one of my professors would always say, "Maybe there was a Jesus, but I doubt it." I`d think, "Why am I paying you so much money?" But that drove me to investigate Jesus on my own, especially his resurrection from the dead. Through that process of reading books both for and against Christianity, I became convinced it really happened, for a whole host of reasons and I`ve shared them with you in the past. Things like, why would the disciples die claiming they saw Jesus raised from the dead? Folks will die for a lot of things, but not something they know to be a lie. Why were women the first witnesses of the resurrection in a culture where women were considered pathological liars and their testimony wasn`t admissible in court? If you were making it up some guy would have been there. What about all the prophecies that accurately predicted Jesus? For all those reasons and tons and tons more, I became convinced that Jesus is real. My doubts drove me to have a stronger faith.By: Scott Dudley
Category: Have Faith (Trust) in God - Jesus
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 | Definition of Faith |
One foot in front of the other, every day, heading the same direction. That's faith. I totally agree that a liitle bit of doubt should be importnat to strengthen your faith. 
By: sandra magdy
Category: Have Faith (Trust) in God - Jesus |
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