Week Eight - Day One: Review

Before we continue to look at God’s sovereignty, let’s review where we’ve come from so far. As we said last week, this topic can be a “tricky part of the trail” so before we engage the tricky part, let’s stop and look out over the land that we’ve covered. We will spend this week surveying. Then we will return to our look at the attributes of God.

Starting out

We began our exercise together eight weeks ago by acknowledging our need to have “daily spiritual nourishment.” Without the habit of daily spiritual meals, we will not grow, we cannot really know God and we have little hope of fully becoming the people that we were designed to be. But we are after more than regular spiritual meals in these exercises. Here’s what we said at the end of Day One: “the real goal is that these moments will create a rhythm to our lives that will begin to make EVERY PART of each day a spiritual activity.”

With that in mind, we looked at Psalm 16:7-8. Take a moment and reflect on that passage now.

Psalm 16:7-8

(7) I will praise the LORD, who counsels me;
      even at night my heart instructs me.

(8) I have set the LORD always before me.
      Because he is at my right hand,
      I will not be shaken.

So, our goal has been to set the Lord always before us. I don’t know about you, but for me this is a very challenging goal, but one worth giving my life to.

Doubt

Perhaps contrary to our expectations, our first topic was doubt. We acknowledged that doubt is almost universal, therefore we should deal with it head on and honestly. Our approach was to (1) face out doubts, then (2) doubt our doubts, and finally to (3) examine our beliefs.

In facing our doubts, we noted that doubt is not the opposite of faith. Doubt means to have two minds: one part disbelief, one part belief. So, in a sense doubt participates in belief. We looked at Psalm 42 as a model for dealing with our doubts. We saw that in Psalm 42, the author recognizes his doubt and despair, but he speaks to his own soul encouraging it to move away from doubt and despair. Sometimes we must do the same, because while doubt is a very typical part of our experience, it is not a healthy part. Look at the first five verses below and notice the Psalmist’s internal work on his own soul.

Psalm 42

(1) As the deer pants for streams of water,
      so my soul pants for you, my God.

(2) My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
      When can I go and meet with God?

(3) My tears have been my food
      day and night,
      while people say to me all day long,
      “Where is your God?”

(4) These things I remember
      as I pour out my soul:
      how I used to go to the house of God
      under the protection of the Mighty One
      with shouts of joy and praise
      among the festive throng.

(5) Why, my soul, are you downcast?
      Why so disturbed within me?
      Put your hope in God,
      for I will yet praise him,
      my Savior and my God.

After facing our doubts, we worked on doubting our doubts. We started by acknowledging that we often wrongly assume that doubt is a problem for faith, but not for knowledge. In other words, we seem to have this category called “knowledge” in our thinking. We assume this category is full of absolute, rock-solid, proven facts. We may associate it with scientific, or observable or assumption-free. But we acknowledged in our office that such a category is fictional. There is no such thing. Doubt, we realized, is a problem for faith certainly, but it’s also a problem for “knowledge.” Tim Keller was helpful in this discussion. Remember what he said?

“You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B. For example, if you doubt Christianity because ‘There can’t be just one true religion,’ you must recognize that this statement is itself an act of faith. No one can prove it empirically, and it is not a universal truth that everyone accepts … The reason you doubt Christianity’s Belief A is because you hold unprovable Belief B. Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith.”¹

We also talked about the surprising way in which some of the authors of Scripture dealt with this same issue. They were not oblivious to the question of doubt. For example, it’s obvious that Luke was addressing the same of these kinds of concerns. In his introduction, he talks about the great pains that he took to insure that what he wrote really did happen. In other words, he was addressing part of the foundation of doubt. Look at Luke 1:1-4.

Luke 1:1-4

(1) Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, (2) just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. (3) With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, (4) so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Before You Start Your Day

1. How effective have you been over the last eight weeks at establishing a spiritual rhythm?
   1. If you have been effective, what have you learned? Where have you sensed God moving in you? Speaking to you?
   2. If you have not been effective (guilt warning) why? What does this say about your priorities?
2. How are you doing in the war with doubt?
   1. How much of what you are thinking and experiencing qualifies as doubt and what of it is unbelief? (Look at the end of the seventh day of our exercises if you need help in this area.)
   2. Are there places where your doubt has been left unchecked? These are almost certainly acting as impediments to your faith.
3. Pray that God would fill you with the desire to know Him more.