Guidebooks for Life
KEEP THE FAITH SHIFT YOUR THINKING ON DOUBT
Martin Ayers
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Keep the Faith © Matthias Media 2012 Matthias Media (St Matthias Press Ltd ACN 067 558 365) PO Box 225 Kingsford NSW 2032 Australia Telephone: (02) 9233 4627; international: +61 2 9233 4627 Email: info@matthiasmedia.com.au Internet: www.matthiasmedia.com.au Matthias Media (USA) Telephone: 330 953 1702; international: +1 330 953 1702 Email: sales@matthiasmedia.com Internet: www.matthiasmedia.com Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978 1 921896 77 4 All rights reserved. Except as may be permitted by the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior permission from the publisher. Cover design and typesetting by Lankshear Design.
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CONTENTS
Introduction 1. The trouble with doubt 2. Problems in the jury room
9 13 17
Part I: Shift the way you think 3. An inconvenient truth 4. Turning a blind eye 5. Rose-tinted spectacles 6. Finding what you’re looking for 7. Eating soup with a spoon 8. Equally wishful 9. Fallen image bearers
29 31 37 41 49 55 63 71
Part II: Shift the way you act 10. Remember the Fall 11. Remember your redeemer 12. An unexpected response 13. An unnatural end 14. An unstoppable mission 15. Remember the stakes
79 81 97 105 111 119 127
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Rarely indeed shall we find the saint who does not often need that prayer, “Lord, I believe: help Thou mine unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) JC Ryle1
For Hannah and Bethany, precious gifts from the Lord.
1
JC Ryle, Expository Thoughts on John, vol. 2, Banner of Truth, Edinburgh, 1988, p. 289.
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Introduction
In the film Amazing Grace, William Pitt the Younger lies on his deathbed and looks William Wilberforce in the eye. Throughout the years that they worked alongside each other, Wilberforce bore witness to his unbending trust and joy in Jesus Christ. As his life ebbs away, Pitt reaches for his friend’s hand and says to him, “I wish I had your faith.” It’s the cry of a man who, as far as we can tell, wouldn’t have called himself a Christian. Perhaps at that moment it is a cry of longing for the certain hope beyond the grave that God promises to all who trust in Jesus Christ. It’s a cry that reflects Pitt’s desire for the confidence that Wilberforce enjoys in his own salvation—a confidence that led him to live and work and campaign against the slave trade with such purpose for so many years. It’s the cry of a man who does not believe and who at that moment, in some sense, wishes that he did. And yet, it is also a cry that many Christians can relate to today. While clinging to faith in Jesus Christ, INTRODUCTION
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many believers long for greater confidence in what they believe. Those who appear to have such steadfast faith often struggle with doubts. This cry of longing for stronger faith, however, should never be a cry of resignation. As we will see in the pages that follow, the Bible helps us to think through faith and doubt and shows us how to handle our doubts. As we learn to shift our thinking so that it is biblical, and as our actions begin to reflect that shift in thinking, we will find that help is at hand. Our confidence in the truth of what we believe about Jesus Christ can, and should, grow. In an age when messages contrary to core Christian beliefs inundate us on a daily, even hourly, basis, it can be difficult to hold on to gospel truths and live for Christ. Yet the Bible explains what is going on in the world today in a way that is perfectly consistent, remarkably coherent and wonderfully compelling. Living for Jesus Christ and trusting him as your rescuer and king makes the best sense of everything. I hope this book will deepen your conviction and encourage you to persevere—to keep the faith—as you consider God’s word and apply it to the issue of intellectual doubts. As ever, I am acutely aware that I am merely passing on what others have taught me. I would like to acknowledge particularly the teaching of Dan Strange and Mike Ovey at Oak Hill College, the preaching of William Taylor and Tim Keller, and the pastoral wisdom of Andy Mason, James de Costobadie and Matt Fuller. What’s good is from them; the mistakes are my own. PAG E 1 0
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K E E P T H E FA I T H
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My thanks go to Tony Payne and the team at Matthias Media, for their enthusiasm for this project and for the way they have developed it with me. I would also like to thank Tara Smith for her conscientious editorial work. I am very grateful to Hugh, Lil, Mark, Lucy and Alex for reading my draft manuscript and providing such valuable comments, and to Daf for his patience in giving me the time to write. I am always grateful, too, for all of my wife Cathy’s support. Glory to God alone.
INTRODUCTION
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Chapter 1
The trouble with doubt
“What happened to Martin?” That’s what I’m told my mates were asking each other when I started trying to live for Jesus Christ. If you call yourself a Christian, and you have friends and colleagues who don’t, this is the sort of question they should be asking when Jesus Christ takes hold of you. When the evangelist Graham Daniels wrote a little book about the gospel for non-Christians, he insightfully called it My Mate’s Gone Mad! Because that’s what everyone’s thinking when a new Christian makes changes in his life that his friends find mystifying. You’re mad to start going to church. You’re mad to stop living like everyone else. And, above all, you’re mad to believe all that madeup stuff about Jesus. THE TROUBLE WITH DOUBT
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I say ‘above all’ because, for so many friends and relatives and colleagues, it’s what you believe that is the biggest sticking point. Believing that the Bible is God’s living word to us? Believing that Jesus is the Son of God who died for your sins and rose again and is coming back to judge the world? Crazy talk. Many people in the real, high-tech, 21st-century world find all this business about a God who made us to know him and live for him totally implausible. So this is the air we breathe. An atmosphere of unbelief surrounds us, in which declaring that you’re a Christian seems equivalent to admitting you’ve decided that thinking is inconvenient and you’d like to try and get by in life from now on without using your brain. In this environment do you ever ask yourself, “What if I really have gone mad?” Since so many people who seem to have a fairly good sense of judgement think that trusting in Jesus Christ is irrational, do you ever worry that you might have got it wrong? After all, you’re betting your life on this being true. Your Christian faith affects every decision you make. If the gospel is true, then why do so many people seem so convinced that it’s not? Why do atheists keep bombarding Christians with so many varied arguments and such angry rhetoric? All of this can give rise to feelings of doubt, and doubt can have a corrosive effect on your life. It can hinder your ability to serve God wholeheartedly. You shy away from making the big, radical, exciting decisions that would make you most useful in helping to build PAG E 1 4
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K E E P T H E FA I T H
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God’s kingdom, because they would mean stepping out in faith. Doubt can strangle your devotional life, as you read God’s word with the thought gnawing away at the back, or even the front, of your mind that it might not be true after all. And doubt can take away your hope— the inestimable privilege you have of being able to trust in God’s promises that he loves you, that he is working in all things for your good and that he will carry you securely into his glorious new creation. When the weather forecast predicts freezing conditions, my home insurance company sends me a text message, asking me to be careful that my water pipes don’t freeze. If they do freeze, there will be no water. Zapping a quick reminder like that to me about something so important, and so awkward and expensive to repair later, enables me to take the right preventative steps to avoid running into problems. We would be wise to try to deal with our doubts in a similar way. Our faith is the channel through which we receive and enjoy God’s blessings—blessings that are essential to our spiritual wellbeing. And any lingering doubts we have about the truth of the gospel can get in the way and cause untold damage. An unresolved question that at first merely stifles your enjoyment of the Christian life can ultimately cause you to fall away altogether. We need to be careful. We need to take preventative measures. You may be able to point to sound arguments, concrete evidence and personal experiences that you don’t find in the Bible itself, but that reinforce your confidence THE TROUBLE WITH DOUBT
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that the Bible is true, that the God of the Bible who has spoken to us in his Son Jesus Christ is real—really there and really for us. But in the pages that follow we’re going to explore something of what God tells us in the Bible itself about faith and doubt. These truths have helped me so much in dealing with my doubt that I wish somebody had explained them to me years ago. My prayer is that they will sink in for you too. Before we begin to look at what Jesus had to say about doubt, let’s make sure we’re speaking the same language when we think about these big issues of faith and doubt.
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K E E P T H E FA I T H
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