Sessions Include:

Defending the Faith
Jude 1 – 4; 20 - 25

Is There a God?
Psalm 119; 111

Does Truth Exist?
John 1.14 – 18; 8.30 – 32; 18.36 - 38

Is Jesus God?
Luke 1.26 - 35

Aren’t All Religions the Same?
Isaiah 44.6 – 17; John 14.5 - 7

The Power of Your Story
Acts 26

But there is an even more destructive way that doubt can hurt us. The third category of mismanaged doubt doesn’t go simply by one name. It is sometimes called “unbelief” in the Bible, but it is very different than uncertainty. This is the severest form of doubt gone wrong. Unbelief is refusal to trust. It is not uncertainty in the intellect; it is a settled decision of the will.

The rebel is not simply someone who doesn’t believe. He or she is someone who doesn’t want to believe. Rebels do not want the story of Jesus to be true. They do not want to live in the universe governed by the kind of Father whom Jesus himself trusted and described. And this desire goes so deep that it colors the way they look at every argument and every bit of evidence and makes sure they find a way not to believe.

Rebels are afraid of what would happen if they were to surrender themselves to God. So they just defy. Skeptics abstain because they don’t know who to vote for. Cynics abstain because they are suspicious of everybody. Rebels don’t just abstain; they secede to set up their own little dictatorship. Skeptics question, cynics suspect, rebels defy.

Edward Ruffin was a rebel of the Confederacy. He fired the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter then fought the Yankees for four years. He lost his plantation and fortune along the way. When the war was over, the South had lost, and the slaves were free, he wrote a note on June 17, 1865, declaring his “unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule . . . and for the perfidious, malignant, and vile Yankee race.” Then he blew out his brains.

C. S. Lewis said that when he was an unbeliever, atheism was not only his belief, it was his strongest desire. “No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word interference.” And he was uncomfortably aware that the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures “placed at the center what seemed to be a transcendental Interferer.” Atheism appealed to his deep desire to be left alone. Rebels fear being interfered with.

Sometimes the existence of God would turn out to be — borrowing a phrase from former U.S. Vice President Al Gore — “an inconvenient truth.” I liked Denny, but I couldn’t figure out why he kept wanting to meet. He was a large man, a construction guy, and I was a little intimidated. He wanted to talk about God, so we did, and he asked one difficult question after another about faith — one tough intellectual issue after another. We would talk each one through to as much resolution as we could get, and he would always bring up another one. Finally, I asked him, “If all of these issues were settled, if every intellectual barrier you raised were dismantled, is there anything else besides all this intellectual stuff that would hold you back from following Jesus?”

There was a long silence. Denny did not like the question. It turned out that he was involved in sexual behavior that he knew was not honoring to God and that, if he were to become a follower of Jesus, would have to change. He didn’t want to change. His mind caused him to find all kinds of objections, but the reality was that he did not want it to be true. He was afraid of what he would have to do if it were.

If Denny had been smaller, I probably would have pointed this out earlier.

John Ortberg, Know Doubt: Embracing Uncertainty in Your Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014).

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