Alignment Issues: Non-Intellectual Reasons For Doubt

Cars have a very specific purpose—to get us from point A to point B. All the nuts, bolts, gears, and switches are there to make sure that we get to our destinations both safely and comfortably. If you’ve taken your car to the dealership or any other shop, then you know that any number of issues can plague our vehicles at any moment and keep them from operating at full capacity, often without our even knowing about it. Maybe the tires are out of alignment. Maybe the car won’t start because the battery is hosed. Maybe you need an oil change (although let’s be honest—has anyone really ever walked away from the auto shop having paid for just an oil change?). 

People bear a certain similarity to cars. Our Maker has imbued us with purpose. He created our various faculties to have particular functions. Like cars that run on gasoline as opposed to diesel, He fashioned us such that we operate maximally with certain inputs rather than others. When we use our faculties in ways God didn’t create them for, we experience dysfunction. When we listen to and absorb messages deep into our hearts that stand in opposition to God’s truth, we experience dysfunction.

One of the effects of such dysfunction is doubt. Like a car plagued with various issues, we sputter and scrape along, and wonder whether or not our Christianity is all it’s cracked up to be. I’m not talking about intellectual questions (like, “Why do bad things happen to good people,” or “Doesn’t science do away with the need for God?”), although such intellectual questions often work alongside dysfunction to create doubt in the Christian. I’m talking about living out of alignment with how God designed the human to function. Elsewhere, I talk about some strategies for dealing with doubt, many of which speak directly to issues of dysfunction. My purpose here, however, is mostly diagnostic. Let’s dive in.

One particularly nasty cause of doubt is unmet expectations. Unmet expectations can lead to cynicism. There’s nothing like cynicism when it comes to sowing seeds of doubt. Maybe we’ve been expecting things of the Christian life that don’t align with what the Bible actually promises, things like health, wealth, or unmitigated happiness. God doesn’t promise these things to His children, not in this life. It’s true that righteous living in general results in blessing, but we cannot forget that we live in a spiritual war. And the battleground for this war is a world marred by sin. God’s children suffer throughout the pages of Scripture—David (just read the Psalms), Jeremiah, Elijah, Paul and most of the other apostles, even Jesus Himself, just to name a few. As Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). So we should actually expect trouble in this world. But we should not lose heart, because our Lord has overcome the world.

It’s also possible that we’re getting the wrong inputs. In other words, we’re listening too much to the wrong people. How much time do we spend reading from Scripture every week? Do we go to church regularly? Do we have friends who regularly speak the truth into our lives, or do most of our friends not care? What messages do we absorb from the novels we read, or the movies, shows, or anime we watch, or the games we play? I’m not saying it’s wrong to like those things; I do. But do we imbibe enough truth such that we can properly make sense of the other things we read, watch, or play? The world constantly presents to us lifestyles contrary to God’s design as if they are normal, and if we forget God’s design, we’ll start to think they are normal too.

Finally, and I’ll spend a bit more time on this one, maybe our lifestyles—our thoughts, habits, attitudes, etc.—do not line up with how God designed the human machine to run. He has given us things to avoid in Scripture: greed, sexual immorality, adultery, drunkenness, to name a few. Some of these alignment issues are simply mis-uses of good gifts that God has given us to enjoy. Take sex, for example. God made sex what it is, but we know from Scripture that He designed it to be enjoyed between a man and a woman who are married to each other. Outside this context, sex is like fire outside the fireplace. Likewise, intemperate enjoyment of alcohol can turn into alcoholism and just destroy, destroy, destroy. It’s happened over and over again.

Living out of alignment with God’s ethical design for the human does two things to us. First, it makes life suck. Pardon the crass language, but I speak the truth. What I say bears especially upon Spirit-indwelt Christians. As Christians, we cannot embrace compromise and it not rip us to shreds on the inside. We just can’t. And when life sucks, it’s easy to become jaded and cynical.

Second, living in moral mis-alignment warps our desires, and makes us want things we shouldn’t. After a while, we may even come to consider those warped desires as natural. When we desire things contrary to the life of belief, unbelief becomes convenient. This can operate at a subconscious level. We may sincerely deny a connection between our doubts and moral misalignment we allow, but that misalignment may be pushing us in the direction of unbelief without us even knowing it.

This combination of “life sucks” cynicism and warped desires can lead us to conclude that our Christianity “just ain’t doing it for us.” But a Christian life riddled with compromise isn’t really the Christian life as it is supposed to be, so is it any wonder that we can end up in such places?

What can we do in the face of such things? First and foremost, we must remember that our God is the master mechanic who “creates new hearts within us” and “sustains us with willing spirits” (Psalm 51). No brokenness lies beyond His healing powers. I’ll talk about some concrete strategies for dealing with doubt elsewhere, much of which pertains to what I’ve explored here, but always remember this: There is no manner or amount of misalignment that our God cannot fix.