The following quotes are the ones I see as most indicative of the message and tone of my book, Help My Unbelief: Why Doubt is not The Enemy of Faith (releasing January 1 from The Good Book Company). I hope some of them pique your interest, strike a nerve, or rattle your brain and heart a bit.
“I believe; help my unbelief. That simple sentence is the key to the struggles, the ups and downs, the winding road of belief. In a breath he expressed the highest of heights, the strength of virtue, the emptiness of doubt, and the yearning for something on to which he could hold.”
“Christians who don’t know the tension of “I believe; help my unbelief” might not be Christians at all, or at the least they might be very infantile ones. Our faith is one of brutal tensions. Not everyone can express this, but every Christian knows it. We feel it in our guts.”
“God does not fit the world as Western thinkers have shaped it. He does not fit the processes and grids of theory, evidence, and proof. So, under the influence of Enlightenment to those second-tier statuses of religious tradition, personal values, and vague spirituality. The God of the Bible, though, will not be relegated to anything. He is the omnipotent creator of all, including all those who are doing the relegating.”
“What the Bible reveals of God is precisely what God wanted revealed of Himself, no more and no less. But it isn’t everything about Him. Scripture raises as many questions as it answers.”
“God is infinite, beyond our understanding, and He chose to reveal Himself to us in a way that sparks questions rather than settles all of them. God did not want us to have easy instructions and simple answers. He didn’t want us to be able to understand Him so well that we could package Him, wrap Him up, and put a bow on Him.”
“Much of belief is asking.”
“Questions indicate belief only if you actually want an answer.”
“Asking well also means knowing when to lay our questions down.”
“Jesus, more than anyone in history, knew God’s character and power and goodness. Yet still He asked. And Jesus, more than you, more than me, more than everyone, felt the weight of suffering and pain and doubt because He actually felt the weight of everyone’s suffering and pain and doubt. Yet still He believed. He is the perfect example of questioning in faith.”
“When our questions begin to undermine commitment to God, that is unbelief.”
“Often the intellectual obstacle to belief is a convenient excuse for rebellion.”
“If a demon can ‘believe’ in God, what does that mean for my belief?”
“I wasn’t trying to be hypocritical; I was blinded by the truth I knew. I had fooled myself into thinking I was living by faith in God, when instead I was living a life shaped by knowledge of Him. And those are very different things.”
“By all means, study God’s Word. But don’t do so to collect knowledge. Do so to know Him.”
“When we are in relationship with God, His Word becomes more than a book; it becomes alive. It becomes personal.”
“Like a bucket being filled by a dripping faucet, I found myself getting filled up with a real Jesus, one I hadn’t known before. I read the Word and met the Word. When something like this happens, no longer is the Bible just a lengthy book of many words; it is alive. It speaks. And it reads us as we read it.”
“The finite lives within the infinite and cannot grasp the extent of it because the infinite has no extent at all. We can grasp only those things that have limits. Trying to understand the infinite is like trying to reach the end of a road that has no end; it isn’t even logically feasible.”
“We forget God until we are at wit’s end, then we cry out for help. We don’t need Him at work. We don’t need Him at school. We don’t need Him anywhere. Until we do. Then we seek to summon Him from on high or wherever it is that He waits until we beckon.”
“Simply put, the church is not comfortable presenting an answer of ‘We don’t know.'”
“We cannot drive God’s love away with our badness. In fact, the greatest sign of His steadfast love is the very means of paying for our badness and doing away with it—Jesus Christ.”
