Week Two - Day Two: End of Day

Let’s be honest. Most of our doubt does not come from serious, clear-headed intellectual concern. Most of our doubt comes from lack of knowledge about how God works, or from past pain. Some of us have some pretty serious wounds from unanswered prayer or from the hand of some terrifying religious experience.

The way we respond to this is usually laziness on the one hand or by emotionally shutting down on the other. But what if our lives could be a faith-filled daily walk with God and what if that walk could add layers of meaning/purpose and joy to our lives? (I happen to believe this what-if is really the actual truth of the matter!) So, that might justify all of this devotional activity don’t you think? That would provide real motivation for all of our attempts to improve our spiritual diet.

Really, the best way to address all cases – whether our doubt comes from intellectual concerns, or from lack of information or from past hurts – is to get to know God better. Martin Luther once said, “The Holy Spirit is not a skeptic.” Getting to know God better will increase our spiritual confidence and our spiritual connection. This will be the long term goal of our project over the next few months. Let’s get started!

It's Time To Turn Our Attention To The Existence of God

Having doubted our doubts it’s time to turn our full attention to the existence of God. On Day Three of last week, we said our strategy would be to face our doubts, to doubt our doubt and then to examine what we believe. So, as we said last week we’ll try not to assume anything about what we believe and we’ll try to tackle the case of God’s existence “objectively”. Beginning tomorrow we will look at the case for God!

(As an aside, let me point out that I said early in these exercises that we would try to assume very little about where any of us are in our faith journey. That’s why we have begun with our doubts and are now moving to making a case for God’s existence. But in the name of full disclosure, I should acknowledge that I’ve already assumed a little bit by salt and peppering our meals with Biblical references. In a few months, we will take the time to back up from that and look at what the Bible is. We will ask and try to answer whether or not we can trust it and what we even mean by that. But for now, we will continue to flavor our meals with it.)

1. The exercises over the past week, along with what we will discuss over the next few days, have been focused on our heads. Let’s pray that we will not forget our hearts in this process.
2. End your day by praying this: “Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.”
3. Lights out!