Doubting Toward Faith

I have been following a daily devotional program put on YouTube by Pastor Bobby Conway, the "One Minute Apologist", who is the lead pastor of Life Fellowship church in Charlotte, North Carolina. In the video below, Conway, who has written a book titled Doubting Toward Faith, talks about doubt. I think that we would all agree that doubt is part of the human condition. If that is the case, how do we reconcile this with living a life of faith? For Conway, the answer is found in the idea of "doubting toward faith."

In James 1:2-8, Christ's apostles, James, writes:

"Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. And let perseverance be perfect, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. But if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and he will be given it. But he should ask in faith, not doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed about by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord, since he is a man of two minds, unstable in all his ways."

In other words, the only way we can overcome our doubts is to ask God for guidance in faith. But how does one ask God for anything in faith if doubt is part of the human condition? Well, if faith consists of a personal relationship with the Lord, doesn't it also stand to reason that the strength of your faith -- your personal relationship with the Lord -- will be forged the same way any personal relationship is? If you had a friend who promised to pick you up at a specific place at a specific time, but your experience with this friend had been such that he or she never showed up on time when you needed him or her the most, how strong would your faith in that person be? Faith is a knowing that Christ is always with us which is based on the personal relationship we forge with Him. This may sound circular, but it really isn't.

Think about it this way. Would you expect a stranger to love you so much that he would be willing to lay his life down for you? Probably not. It is not any different with Christ. If you don't have a strong personal relationship with Him, how are you ever going to believe that He died for your sins and that He is walking by your side every minute of every day? By suggesting that we doubt toward faith, Conway is asking us to use every doubt as a test of our faith that ultimately strengthens our faith.

In his classic book about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp , Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes, "[E]verything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances -- to choose one's own way." That is really what faith comes down to. It is a choice we make with respect to whether we want to be ruled by doubt such that we are people of two minds unstable in every way or we want to doubt toward faith.