Strategies for Dealing with Doubt

A general tasked with defeating a powerful enemy army. An overweight person making a New Year’s resolution to drop 30 pounds. A student during finals week. What do these people have in common? Among other things, all three could benefit from coming up with plan, a strategy. Each of them faces some obstacle, and there are things each can do to give themselves the best chance of overcoming those obstacles. 

Doubt is an obstacle to Christian faith. Like an enemy army, weight loss, or finals, there are things we can do to help create a context for overcoming the obstacle of doubt. To that end, I wish to offer a few strategies here. Elsewhere, I addressed some ways we might be sabotaging ourselves in relation to doubt. That reflection was more of a diagnostic tool, a self-checkup if you will. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so before continuing. Here, I want to take the offensive. Let’s get started. 

To one who struggles with doubt, I suggest that as a first step, you find one or two Christian friends you feel comfortable talking about it with. You never know, maybe one or both of them have also walked through that valley. I had a few people I confided in when I struggled badly with doubt, and the conversations I had with them helped me. One of those friends had also struggled. Sometimes it’s nice to know you’re not the only one, you know? For the most part, it wasn’t really answers to intellectual challenges that I found most helpful about these conversations. It was this—talking with them helped to diffuse some of my distress. Burdens are easier to bear when you’ve got a buddy or two helping you.

The second thing I’d advise is to keep doing the things a Christian normally does, even if it doesn’t feel right. Go to church. Pray. Worship. Read the Bible. God uses these things to grow and transform us. Part of that growth and transformation might include your journey out of doubt. 

I’ve talked before about the importance of imbibing Christian truth. God’s truth helps us properly make sense of everything else we imbibe. This is one reason why it’s important to read the Bible. I know that when you’re struggling with doubt, reading the Bible can be stressful because it reminds you of your predicament, but don’t stop. Especially if you haven’t stopped reading other books, watching movies or TV, playing video games, or whatever. Toward this end, you can also read Christian books (other than the Bible)—both apologetics books and books about other topics—and listen to good Christian podcasts, watching videos, etc. The bottom line is this: Make sure to keep the truths of Scripture constantly before your mind’s eye so that you can properly interpret everything else you see. Otherwise, you will drift, and probably not in the direction of belief. 

A third step might be dealing with persistent sin issues. Sin and doubt have a strong relationship, as I’ve talked about before. Sin has a subtle way of making unbelief convenient, and this can happen without your consciously knowing it. If you’re struggling with doubt, you might be less motivated than ever to put a stop to sinful practices, but take it on faith (no pun intended)—it might just be that by letting go of that grudge, by running away from pornography, by saying “No” to the bottle, or whatever it might be, you are helping to put an end to your doubt, too. 

The last thing I’ll say is this: Don’t give up. Keep seeking answers. They are there. I’ve found many of them myself. But more important than continuing to seek answers, keep chasing after God. Most of the strategies above help toward that end. Scripture promises that if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us (James 4:8). So keep following the sound of His voice, even though you may not see Him through the fog. I think that after some number of weeks or months have passed, the mists will start clearing, and before long, you’ll find that He’s led you into much more pleasant country.

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.