It’s not sin that throws a man. It’s doubt; doubt about God. It’s not that he doubts that God exists. He doubts that He is truly, consistently and personally good towards him. This state of mind, brought about at the Fall of humanity, when evil became attractive to man and good became something he ran from, is the Great Barrier to his salvation and well-being. The passionate Love of God moves Him at all costs to break it down.
It’s as if God is running through the world pulling people into rounds of spiritual conflict that will stir up in them the faith in Him that He has placed there. And all the while He’s calling out, “O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord” (Jer. 22:29) and contending, “Oh you of little faith, why do you doubt” Me? (cf. Matt. 14:31). Like a devoted yet neglected Father, He complains, “So far you have asked nothing in My name” (John 16:24) and seems almost to beg us to call on Him: “Ask and you will receive” (John 16:24, Matt. 7:7). “Would any of you offer his son a stone when he asks for bread?” (Matt. 7:9). “Whatever you pray for in faith you will receive” (Matt. 21:22). At first, in our doubt, we avert our eyes and turn away, twisting a shirt button between our fingers. But God, Who is more passionate about our lives than we are, will not be denied and “with unhurrying chase, and unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy” (Francis Thompson, The Hound Of Heaven) draws us, through the trials of our life, into the faith-conflict.
Believe what I am doing for you. Don’t doubt me. Wrest the blessing from me. I’m more willing than you could ever imagine to give it to you (it’s your doubts that fear I’m not). I am in this trouble that you are going through. I am here. Thank me that I’m here. Thank me for Who I am. “Is anything too difficult for Me?” (Jer. 32:27 NASB).
Slowly our minds awaken to the seriousness of God’s Love. The new awareness excites hope. Words long perceived as applying only to others now bring home their specific meaning to us: “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you” (Heb. 13:5 NASB)—in whatever happens, no matter how many your defeats, however deep your disappointments, I AM. Believe in Me. The Lord is actually calling forth the faith He planted there in the first place, a faith designed to crawl over our cold, harsh wall of Doubt.
We begin to allow the possibility of that faith. The idea seems tentative and experimental at first. It wrestles in fear to pass beyond the intimidating scowls of our doubt. We speak out the words. We hear them traverse our mind, floating out on our breath, crossing the boundary of our lips, entering our ears, back into our brains, and reaching down again full circle—faith giving birth to faith—into the heart:
I believe in You. You are not trying to hurt me. I have cried so long over this thing and asked You to take it away. But now I see You. You are here in it, opening to me Your Love in my pain, disarming the power of evil by Your presence. You have forgiven me of all that I have done or ever will do. I am your child. And everything now works for my good, to reveal who I am in You, not who I am in myself.
Words of Scripture, previously obscure, now sharpen in focus. “But the righteousness that comes by faith says, ‘Do not say to yourself, “Who can go up to heaven?” ’ (that is, to bring Christ down) [in other words, “Where in the world are we going to go to get help?”] ‘or, “Who can go down to the abyss?” ’ (to bring Christ up from the dead). And what does it say next? ‘The word is near you: it is on your lips and in your heart’; and that means the word of faith which we proclaim. If the confession ‘Jesus is Lord’ is on your lips, and the faith that God raised Him from the dead is in your heart, you will find salvation. For faith in the heart leads to righteousness, and confession on the lips leads to salvation” (Rom. 10:6–10 REB).
So that’s what that Scripture means?! The word is near us! It is in our heart and on our lips! It is not in some far off place that we have to hunt for, and once we find it, cast about everywhere for the code to open it. It does not yield itself only to worthy achievers, like those in search of some holy grail. It is a mere breath away and we simply must speak it out!
Which is exactly what we did! And as we did so we noticed how calming the word of faith is, how relaxing, telling God that we trust Him in all we’re going through. It renews, it refreshes, it brings hope. It brings victory. There is always the fear, at first, that creates a faith-tension as it crosses over the barrier of doubt, but once on the other side it calms us down and changes our whole world-view.
And the reason for that calming effect is that we didn’t plead and beg as we did when we acted towards God as if He were reluctant and had to be persuaded. For, remember, He’s the One coming to us through all our troubles, wrestling with us in them to encourage us to believe that His grace is operating through them so that we, in turn, will wrestle with Him, against all our doubts that tell us to let go, until we insist on holding on to Him for the blessing and thank Him for it through everything that’s going on.
Ah yes! And that, of course, is the significance of those “thanks” verses: “always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father” (Eph. 5:20). “In everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:18). To thank and praise God when trouble is all around, when our hearts feel dark and empty of His love, when our doubts tell us, “What hypocrisy! What right do you have to expect any good from God?! This trouble speaks for itself. God has forsaken you” is an act of faith so utterly contrary to the evidences of our senses that it can only be described in terms of conflict—a fight, a battle, a wrestle, a warfare.
And this is the surprise: that something so simple—almost trivial—and something so light and bright as a thankful, grateful praising heart of faith should be so powerful an instrument of victory. But the surprise is soon understood when we remind ourselves that this battle, this wrestle is not a warfare with the devil. It is a wrestle with God. And God is not wrestling against us, but for us against our doubt. And we are not wrestling against God but with Him against our doubt, to grasp the blessing He’s more than willing to give. Nothing but a conviction of the generosity of God can be the foundation of a grateful, thankful heart of praise. He is the source of its lightness because He is a Lifter of burdens, not a Creator of them:
“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart; and you shall find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My load is light” (Matt. 11:28–30).
But it is not only that God is for us that leads us to the faith-art of praise in all things, it is also that since God is for us, nothing can be against us. Jesus said, “In the world you will have trouble. But courage! The victory is mine; I have conquered the world” (John 16:33 NEB). And for this reason Paul seems almost beside himself when he says:
“With all this in mind, what are we to say? If God is on our side, who is against us?…For I am convinced that…nothing in all creation…can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:31–39 NEB).
No half-measures here. We give thanks “for everything” and “in all things” (Eph. 5:20; 1 Thess. 5:18) not only because God is present in His love and grace but also because that Love, through Christ, has won—won for us, won our battle!
Now this gets a little strange. Faith can’t always be expected to make sense in a world in which doubt is the order of the day. How can someone thank God that the victory is already won when he can’t keep his fingers off his computer keypad to reach for his favorite porn site four nights a week?
But that is precisely what he is called to do! And the very contradiction is what makes simple faith a wrestle to those who exercise it in such circumstances, and the idea of a faith-wrestle with God such silliness to those who don’t. “We exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance…character…and…hope” (Rom. 5:3, 4).
In our past we pleaded with God to set us free from this and that. We almost agonized in prayer and fasting, and determined our level of freedom by how well we were doing during a day, over a week or a month. It never dawned on us in all this praying that there was almost no faith in Christ’s work on the Cross for us, but mounds of anxiety “faith” in ourselves, and that this kind of praying only led us back into our sins. In fact, we were religious neurotics engaged in anxiety prayer!
But now things are different. A temptation comes to us: a pretty woman, a desire to drink away our sorrows, the urge to get high to cope with the day, the craving for food to palliate the loneliness, and a desirable homosexual opportunity…
And we praise and thank.
Father, thank you for allowing this temptation [Lord, I fear to say this], because it’s an opportunity to build my faith that the Victory is already won in Christ. So I am praising you, Father, that the Victory is already won in Christ for me. In faith, Father, I thank you that Jesus took away all the powers behind this temptation. I praise you that I am not abandoned by You because I feel these things [the power of Wrath which “hands over” to sin and which Jesus took for us (Rom. 1:24; Rom. 3:25)]. I thank you, Father that I am not under the power of these feelings, even though I feel them [the power of Sin comes from the Law (1 Cor. 15:56) by its power to condemn, and this condemnation Jesus took for us, so that now “there is no condemnation” (Rom. 8:1)]. So these feelings cannot cut me off from you. They cannot frighten me into feeling abandoned, Lord. And so, Father, I will not despair, I will not accept hopelessness [the power of Death brings despair and hopelessness, and this Jesus took away by His resurrection for us] because I’m alive in You, no matter what I feel.
At first reading, this gratitude in the midst of temptation appears to give us the freedom to sin without having to feel bothered by it. But that impression comes to us only when we are seeing the issue from outside of faith’s embracing circle. Once inside, when we are actually thanking God in the midst of the desire to fulfill our lusts we become aware of not being alone in the conflict. We are talking with God in conversation. Fear and animosity have gone. God is our Friend. And this knowing of Him within our souls also becomes a knowing of ourselves. It is not simply that we are enjoying God more, it is that we are also enjoying who we are in His presence.
Then in this faith-that-thanks state of mind—a state of mind not produced by circumstances or moods, but words of truth released from our hearts and floating on our breath—we discover that the urgent or demanding powers of desire lose their punch. The fingers on the keypad, in search of the power of porn, release their touch. The images of the mind focusing in on the contours of that desirable woman fade to gray. And the surprise is that sin’s powers did not lose their punch because we knocked them out, as we tried—and failed—to do so many times in the past. Rather, we turned our souls in an entirely other direction. We turned our attention to our Loving God who calls forth our gratitude and in that response we discovered our selves in Christ.
Then the meaning of that verse tucked away in the Old Testament came to us afresh:
“Joy in the Lord is your STRENGTH” (Neh. 8:10 REB).
We are embarrassed. We are humbled. We have heard this message time and again and ignored it. It seemed too simple in the midst of the glaring and stunning complexity of our sins. It seemed too naive in a culture that has taught us to believe that anything worthwhile knowing must surely be very complicated learning.
But faith is of the heart, not the mind. And we begin to see that we ignored the praising heart in the past not because it was too simple but because it was too revealing. Revealing, in that its absence speaks of a closed and resentful heart, a heart where Doubt maintains the delusion of the neglectfulness and dangerousness of God Who, as Doubt sees it, takes things away from us that are precious to us, and leaves us with things that we dutifully receive but that give no satisfaction to the soul.
For now we are in a different place in our lives, where what we thought was precious to us has splintered to pieces in the hurricanes of our addiction, and what we are left with are the precious things previously hidden from our eyes but now revealed through a heart of praise.
And in a new humility we repent of our doubt of the Only One Who can be believed and we “enthrone Him upon our praises” (cf. Ps. 22:3).