When Christians Doubt Their Faith
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So, when I went off to college, I began to go to church on my own for the first time. Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t tell you, that’s me as a band director with really funky hair and those are some of my kids. That’s my trumpet line in Mustang, Oklahoma. Oh, we got a – yeah, alright, so there they are. I wasn’t the high school director, I was at Mustang North, but I helped with the high school.
When I went off to college, I began to go to church on my own for the first time. And apparently, I didn’t find anything that I was looking for. I don’t know what happened there and I stopped going to church. And in that time that I stopped going to church, I met my husband. He’s from a small town in Oklahoma and he went to First Baptist Church. He’s a Southern Baptist and he was horribly backslidden, is what he would say. He’s dating a non-believer, right? He’s trying to get as far away from small town Oklahoma. He’s dating a non-believer from Portland, Oregon – Yes!
So, anyway, we get married while we’re still in college. It happened all fast because I knew when I met him, I was going to marry him. We get married while we’re still in college and then an ex-girlfriend of his invites us to church, kind of weird. She invites us to church and at that church I heard Jesus preached. I heard my position as a simple human being, and I understood it. And that was – I understood my need for a savior. And it was then, that I was convicted of my sin. And it was then that I was ready to accept and trust Jesus for salvation. So that’s how I came to belief in God. Because I was an atheist before. A lot of atheists will say, “You weren’t atheist!” And when they say that, at a debate last fall they said, “Dude, c’mon, you weren’t really atheist.” I said, “What is really atheist?” And I said, “Okay, I belong to the subclass of atheism called non theist.” Yeah, you’re right, I hadn’t accepted Bertrand Russell. I read Friedrich Nietzsche, I had – said the universe arose out of chaos, it was meaningless, purposeless. Life had no ultimate meaning, I hadn’t accepted all that, right? I was just non-theist, I didn’t believe in God, and I didn’t know why people did.
Okay so, I came to belief in Jesus and then everything was fine, right? Everything was rosy after that, right. Christians, it was beautiful. All the Christians behaved so well, and they showed me the mercy and love of Jesus and I was overwhelmed. That’s not what happened and you’re like, “sarcasm alert”, okay. So, in the next few years we got involved with the youth ministry, because that’s what you do, right? Get saved, go into youth ministry. Bad idea, but anyway so, we get involved with ministry very early and in the next few years I began to see things in The Church that didn’t add up to what I was reading in the bible. And what I mean by that, is I saw such gross, hateful behavior within The Church directed at us and other people as well, that I began to wonder if the people who profess the bible as true actually believed that it was true. And it caused me to start to doubt what I believed. Now I’m not saying they just messed up, right? Because we all mess up. I mean it was gross sinful behavior that had no repentance. No even attempt to say that that was wrong. And I began to compare it to my friends in high school who were atheist or agnostic, maybe even nominal Christians, and they were so much better, they were such nicer people than the people in The Church. And my experiences with ATHEISTS, were a lot better than what I was getting from Christians in The Church.
So, I began to have doubt fueled by these engagements, this emotional doubt fueled by my engagements with other Christians and watching how Christians treated each other. And that led me to go, “Wait a second.” You know, I’m pointing the finger at everybody else, but am I much better? So, I began to look inside myself and went, “Well, I don’t see I’m much better than they are.” So, I began to question why I believe in God. Do I know that God exists? How could I say God exists? What evidence do I have? Do I know that Jesus rose from the dead? How do I know that? And I couldn’t answer any of those questions. I was having all these doubts and I noticed nobody was talking about doubt in The Church. You know church was about studying the bible as if it were true. It was never about answering why we believe it was true. It is true. So, I didn’t know where to go and I had all these doubts. Now, that was coupled with another problem, and this is why I’m so glad you’re here at this conference. It was coupled with shallow Christianity. Now, I grew up an atheist, I didn’t have a background in church history. I didn’t even care about church history. All I knew was crusades and witch hunts and the typical fair. So, I didn’t know about the Christian faith and then, I got into churches where they weren’t deeply teaching us about the knowledge of God. I didn’t know church background. I didn’t know church doctrines. I didn’t have a very deep Christianity even as a Christian. So, I have this emotional doubt and it’s spurring on these intellectual objections coupled with a shallow faith. I call that the perfect storm for doubt and I don’t know why, but for some reason instead of going, I’m going all – I’m going to read Richard Dawkins, and I’m going to read all these new atheist guys, Sam Harris. Instead of going that direction and saying, “Aha, look, I knew it!” I decided that if God were real, that when I went looking for answers, the best answers would lead me back to my belief in God, and that’s exactly what happened.
I went looking to answer my own doubts and I ended up in a field called Apologetics. I didn’t even know that was a thing. And yet here I am, that’s how I got here. I’m supposed to be teaching band somewhere. I taught it for eight years and I never meant to leave it, and here I am from answering my own doubt. So, I began to see that people – If I had these kinds of questions, people in The Church probably did too. And I began to teach Apologetics in The Church. So today, when I give you Why Apologetics, you’re going to see I have a little different approach. Yes, our culture needs to be combative because it seems like they’re going crazy, right. It’s nonsense out there, right? You’ll see some of it in the critical thinking session. But for me, I didn’t set out to combat the rest of humanity. I set out to answer my own doubt and in doing that, what happened was I began to teach others Apologetics. And they began to teach others Apologetics and it began to transform my community.
There’s three reasons I’m going to give to you today for “Why Apologetics?” and they’re all based in my own personal story, my own personal journey, which is Apologetics. We should be doing it to answer doubt, build confidence and change lives. I’ll give you that term because I’m assuming that you all know what Apologetics means, that may or may not be the case, so let me give you a definition. Apologetics is a Greek word that we ripped out of Greek, and we use it in English, called Apologia. That word comes from 1 Peter 3:15. That’s not the only spot, but that’s the spot that you hear over and over, apologists use it. And that’s where Peter’s talking to a group of persecuted Christians. We don’t know how they were persecuted; it looks like it wasn’t physical. Maybe a bit more like what you’re dealing with, that verbal kind of abuse. He was telling them not to fear those people, not to fear their culture but instead set apart Christ as Lord. Part of doing that is always be prepared to give a defense, there’s Apologia, defense of the reason of the hope that is in you. So, a defense, Apologetics is a defense of the Christian faith, or just a defense. Yeah, Muslim Apologists, Mormon Apologists, Atheist Apologists, okay, it’s the word defense. When Jim Wallace gets here, he will be here, I think at the end of this week, he’ll say, “it’s making a case.” Because Apologetics, if you say defense, you might think you’re on the defensive, but actually it’s making a case. And we’ll cover that, it could be offensive or defensive. But generally speaking, an apology which lawyers give in a courtroom is a defense.
So, let’s look at those three reasons, answering doubt, building confidence and changing lives. First of all, we spend a little bit of time on answering doubt. Gary Habermas, who is one of the world’s leading resurrection experts. If you haven’t read anything by him, he’s the one that sort of brought me back around. How do I know Jesus rose from the dead, I read a lot of Gary Habermas and he helped me out with that. And he says, “Doubt, manifested in many forms from the assurance to one’s salvation to factual questioning is certainly one of the most frequent and painful problems which plague Christians.” One of the most frequent – Here’s a guy who’s a resurrection expert, he did his dissertation on this, and he spends a lot of time counseling people in the area of doubt. Why is doubt so prevalent? I think you have these listed on your page. There are many reasons, I’m just going to give you a few.
First of all, doubt is prevalent because of life experiences. By the way, this list is based in me talking to people. What I’ve experienced from people who have talked to me about their doubts. Things in life didn’t go the way they thought they should. Right, they came from a Christian home, but life didn’t turn out rosy. Or, even not just rosy, just totally didn’t turn out how they expected. And that life experience of it not going how they planned, or how they wanted, or what following their dream, or as Disney says, following your heart, it didn’t work out for them. Right, so that life experience can leave them disappointed with what they perceive is a failure by God to live up to their expectation. So, their reaction might be to distrust God, or even to question his very existence. This can’t be the life that is under a perfect God, right? This can’t be it.
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