How to Best Grow Faith in the Middle of Doubt

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Sometimes the middle we are stuck in is not a physical place. Sometimes it’s where our mind wanders. Sometimes it’s the questions pressed deeply into the hurting places within. Sometimes even questions leave scars.

Perhaps you’ve been told that faith makes no room for doubt—and if you doubt you are on the outside. And you’re wrestling inside because you believe and you question.

Can you live this missional life if you’re not all in? If you’re full of more questions than answers? Is it possible to share faith—even grow faith—in the very middle of doubt?

I hear you, friend, and today I want you to know that my imperfectly ready may look different than your imperfectly ready, and missional living is not about having a perfect life but one that invites others into the growing pains of learning to look more like Him.

The questions you are asking, perhaps someone else is asking those same questions, and if you open up about how you are holding both faith and doubt, you can plant hope in the heart of someone who is about to give up. Perhaps if you let others in as you’re learning to let God in, you will find that you are not alone—that God gives us Himself and He is all we need, but we learn how to need Him with others.

It’s ok to ask questions

Some of the big names in the Bible, they asked questions too. Take King David, for instance—the one called “a man after God’s own heart” (1 Sam. 13:14). My word-of-the-year, nevertheless, comes from Psalm 89:52, where King David says, “Nevertheless, blessed be our God forever and ever. Amen! Faithful is our King!” What’s intrigues me about this expression is that it follows a long string of questions, despair, and lament. In verses 46-47, David’s questions take the tune of

How long will you hide your love from me?
Have you left me for good?
How long will your anger continue to burn against me?
Remember, Lord, I am nothing but dust,
here today and so soon blown away.
Is this all you’ve created us for? For nothing but this?

From David, I learn how God welcomes my honesty and that my questions can bring me closer to, rather than farther from, Him. The pivot happens when David chooses to praise the character of the God he knows never changes even when his short-sighted vision couldn’t connect all the dots.

David wrestled with doubt and still chose to praise. And he paved the way for you and I to do the same.

When doubt fills our thoughts

As McKenna Park aptly states in “4 Reasons You Shouldn’t Feel Guilty For Doubting Your Faith,” “Faith may be a matter of the heart, but doubt is a matter of the mind, and many times the two don’t see eye-to-eye.” So we test and we weigh and we pray over the things that do not sit the same way in our mind as in our heart.

Focus on the Family explains it this way in an article entitled “Wrestling with Doubt and Disbelief”:

There’s nothing “bad” or unusual about the struggles you’re experiencing. Every Christian needs to wrestle with doubt and disbelief. A faith unquestioned and untested is no faith at all. That’s why the great poet Lord Tennyson was able to write, “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.” 

A faith that accepts all without question might be a blind and shallow faith. The things we put to the test and find them to be true, they root deeper and flourish within us.

So how do we grow faith in the middle of doubt? And how do we lean into mission when we are unsure exactly what we believe?

1—We ask questions and search out truth.

We become truth-seekers. We hold our questions and beliefs in open hands and invite conversation with God about both. We ask to experience God for ourselves—and look for the evidences of His presence and goodness throughout history through to the present.  

The Focus on the Family article goes on to say

 . . . that the process of making your faith your own is probably going to entail some hard work. It’s going to mean putting on the hat of the investigator, the detective, the historian, the scholar, and the dedicated disciple. It’s going to require that you study the Bible intently, weighing the validity of its historical claims. It’s going to involve comparing its assertions with those of other religions and philosophies.

If we want to grow our faith, we don’t turn down the volume of our questions. We let our questions lead us to Him.

2— We are honest—with ourselves, with God, and those around us.

Your questions don’t have to look pretty. If fact, they probably won’t if you’re committed to being truly honest. But our honesty gives God open access to our hearts. It invites Him to meet us in the middle of our questions.

This intentional choice to be real, it tears down barriers between God and us, us and others. One of my favorite lines from Ann Voskamp is this: “You are as healable as you are vulnerable.”

I remain stuck until I can embrace humility and vulnerability and accept that at times it may feel awkward and I may be a bit uncomfortable, but being real and true lets down my guard, lets God reach into hidden places I was keeping off limits.

And honesty—it ripples. As we are honest with others about how we are learning to be honest with God, it invites them to do the same.

3— We choose humility, accepting that we have more to learn no matter who and where we are.

Our honesty we couple with humility. We choose a soft heart even as we hold our questions. We don’t assume we are always right. If we assume at all, we assume there is more that we aren’t fully seeing, more that we don’t have quite right, more that we still have to learn.

Choose the road of the life-long learner, and it will always lead you to truth, to Him.

Lean into the learning, and you will find healing.

4—We praise anyways.

Just as David chose to direct his praise towards the always-worthy God even as he wrestled through questions, doubt, and despair, so too can we. And as David discovered that gratitude makes a heart soft and open to God, so too can we.

The praise, it goes first. Before all our questions are answered. Before we see the good in everything about the present. Before we feel like being thankful.

Say thank you to God—no matter the nevertheless—and it grows our ability to trust Him. Praise Him in the storm. Praise Him through the questions and the searching and the not-knowing. Because gratitude guides where we gaze and praising God helps us see how praise-worthy He is.

Today, if you’re holding both faith and doubt, you are among friends. You are not alone. Your questions and my questions might not be the same—but we each have them. And these questions, if we let them, can grow the roots of our faith ever deeper.

Shall we pray?

God, You never leave us alone and You are not intimidated by our questions. Today we make a choice to be honest about our questions and accept that for all we think we know, there is more that we don’t know yet. We commit to praising You anyways—praising You in the quiet, praising You in the presence of others, praising You in the middle of our questions and doubts and not-sure-yet’s. May our lives point an arrow to You as we let our questions grow a faith with roots wide and deep. In the precious and holy name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.

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