The Confusing Experience of Faith

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Some of you got a superficial faith, and if you've never doubted, it's a real good chance that you're not really a thinking person and your faith is not that deep. So what God wants to do is He uses doubt. Doubt's like a divinely sent messenger to drive you deeper into Him. He's trying to break up that shallow, childish, spoon-fed nature of your faith and bring you to a place where you really know Him. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and theologian J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Bidovitch. You're joining us today in the middle of a teaching series called The Whole Story, going from Genesis to Revelation and hitting the main highlights along the way. Today we're pausing in the book of Psalms to look at the question of doubt. Whether we like to admit it or not, we all wrestle with doubts from time to time. Is God really good? Can I trust Him with every detail of my life?

How do I know He's there? When those questions start creeping up in our minds, when we just can't make sense of God's plan, how should we respond? Well, I think it's safe to say that our response can be found in God's word. So grab your Bible and let's jump right in.

Psalm 73, if you have your Bibles, if you have your Bibles, I'd love for you to take them out and open them to the 73rd Psalm. As you're turning there, I will tell you that when I got married, one of the many things that Veronica, my wife, made fun of me about was that I attempted to clean everything in our house with Windex. She has helped me see over the years that most cleaning problems around the house need different, shall we say, more specialized solutions.

So now I feel like we're at the opposite extreme. We've got so many bottles and different kinds of brushes for different kinds of materials. And do not even get me started on the amount of things that we have in our shower to clean our bodies with. Before I got married, I lived with four guys and we had one bar of soap between all of us and we cleaned everything with it. Our hair, our bodies, our teeth, our wounds, our clothes, all of it was fixed with a bar of soap. Now we got bottles and tubes and sponges and volcano rocks and these little Luftwaffe things or whatever you call them.

But evidently that's what you need for a total cleaning experience. A lot of people think that when we were talking about questions of faith, they feel like you got to have a bunch of different solutions, different kinds of answers, depending on whether you're talking to believers or unbelievers, whether you're talking to mature believers or immature believers. But here's what I have found over the years after having many, many conversations with many people at different stages of maturity about these questions.

Here it is. Believers and unbelievers, mature believers and immature believers have essentially the same questions and struggles with how God runs the world. And the answers that we need are basically the same. I share all that because Psalm 73 is a psalm about the universal problem of doubt. Doubt affects us all, whether you're a believer or an unbeliever. People will say to me sometimes, Pastor, do you doubt?

I doubt all the time. Why did God do a certain thing or why did he not do something? You didn't get the job. She said no.

The pregnancy test came back negative or the cancer screen came back positive. Or you've looked around the world and you thought, God, I don't mean to criticize, but I just don't think you're doing that good of a job running the world. I mean, I feel like I do a much better job.

It seems like your reward system is all out of whack because you've got bad people over here who seem to get away with murder, sometimes literally, and then good people over here that seem to get smacked unfairly at every turn. We've all asked those same questions. I've asked them all my life. And for many people, it's made them wonder if God was even there. Even Bible writers. In fact, the majority of them had doubts. In fact, John the Baptist, who was Jesus' cousin, a few years into Jesus' ministry is like, I'm not so sure you're the guy that I thought you were. The apostles doubted. The apostles doubted. One of them even got the name Doubting Thomas at the crucifixion. Even after they'd seen all the miracles, they were like, I don't know. I mean, yeah, he fed the 5,000, but is this, you know, he's just not doing what we thought he'd do. Matthew even says, Matthew 28, that even after Jesus had resurrected and as he was ascending into the air, Matthew 28 says, and some doubted.

He's floating in the air. I mean, you're like, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe this is not, you know.

Why? It's because what he was doing was so strange to them. And there were so many things they thought that a Messiah was supposed to do that God should have done that he hadn't done. And so it made them doubt. Doubt is a part of a thinking life.

In fact, write this down before we even get started. Doubt happens when the superficialities of your faith meet the realities of the world. Let's go ahead and tell you, some of you got a superficial faith and if you've never doubted, it's a real good chance that you're not really a thinking person and your faith is not that deep.

And you've never really asked that many questions and that's not a good thing. And so what God wants to do is he uses doubt. Doubts like a divinely sent messenger to drive you deeper into him.

He's trying to break up that shallow, childish, spoon-fed nature of your faith and bring you to a place where you really know him. Doubt, one of my favorite analogies for this or illustration is doubt is like a foot that is poised to go forwards or backwards. It's true that you can pick up your foot and walk backwards. Doubt can drive you backwards into unbelief.

But it's also true you'll never walk forward until you pick up your foot. And doubt is asking the question, it's saying, God, I don't understand. And that's what God uses to drive you deeper into him. That's what you're going to see in Psalm 73. And this Psalm is in many ways, I think, indicative of the entire book of Psalms, which is why that we chose this particular one. I'm going to be reading today mostly from the NIV translation, which is different for me, with an occasional sampling even from the New Living Translation, which always makes me feel greasy when I do that. But I just felt like some of the language was so clear in the New Living Translation, so I'm asking for forgiveness in advance.

But here we go. A Psalm of Asaph. Asaph was David's worship pastor. Verse 1, Surely God is good to Israel to those who are pure in heart. That's his statement of faith. That's what he believes with his mind. But now he's about to tell you in the next several verses what he feels with his heart.

Because those are not always the same thing. Verse 2, But as for me, I came so close to the edge of the cliff, the cliff of unbelief, my feet were slipping and I was almost gone. For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. The psalmist confesses that his doubt began with envy, which is almost always the case. Envy is, of course, when you want somebody else's life. You want their possessions. You want their opportunities. You want their looks.

You want their talents. And this psalm helps you label envy for exactly what it is, doubt and the goodness of God towards you. You see, before envy is expressed, that's a horizontal feeling, you've got a vertical problem, which is a belief about the goodness of God. Namely, you don't believe that God is good, which leads you to feelings of envy all around you. Y'all, envy is so pervasive in the human heart that it made even the Garden of Eden seem unsatisfactory. It has nothing to do with the conditions you're in.

It has to do with the conditions of your heart. Adam and Eve are literally in a perfect place where they get to run around naked all day. And they are still like, I don't know. I think God's probably holding out on us. They had what we now call with our kids, FOMO.

You know that term, FOMO, fear of missing out? Oh, the really good stuff is in that tree right there that God says we can't have. Not all these trees that he gave us, but that one tree, that's where it's really at. You give my kids each a cookie. I promise you, the moment they get a cookie in their hand, they're checking out the other cookies because I'm just sure that we gave the bigger cookie to somebody else. The better cookie, it's their fear of missing out. That's what they think God's holding out on them.

And so they doubt God's goodness. So let me just ask you, who or what are you envious of today, this weekend? Who or what are you envious of? Somebody's body, somebody's husband, somebody's spouse, somebody's, you know, their car, the way they dress, how they, their house.

Why don't you call that for what it is? A challenge to your belief in God's goodness in your life. What makes it worse for the psalmist is that these people that he's envious of are not good people. He calls them wicked, but still, even though they're wicked, they get to be the social elites of the day.

His description of these social elites is timeless. It sounds like somebody's talking about them today. Verse four, they have no struggles. Their bodies are healthy and strong. They're beautiful. They dress awesome.

They're in shape. They got front row seats to all the games. They fly first class everywhere they go. They're free from common human burdens. Verse five, they've got house cleaners and assistants and they wear designer clothes and their kids go to school on scholarship and then they get awesome jobs because they know people.

Therefore, verse six, pride is their necklace. What's really galling is that they take credit for it all as if the reason they have all this stuff is because they're just more awesome than the rest of us. They don't seem to be aware of the fact that it's just because their parents are rich and it's not because they're smarter than we are.

It's just opportunity. They clothe themselves then with violence. Their pride makes them hateful, disdainful toward others. They really feel like they're better than everybody. Like they deserve all the perks. Like they deserve their status. They feel like they should get to make all the decisions for everybody else. And then they oppress people. They trample people just because they can get away with it.

Nobody stops them. Verse eight, they scoff. They speak with malice, with arrogance.

They threaten oppression. Where their mouths lay claim to heaven and their tongues take possession of the earth. Does God even realize what's going on, they ask. They assume that whatever's out there, even if there is a heaven, it belongs to them. Because they're going to get first dibs on everything. They don't know any other posture, any other posture than at the top looking down. Truth is, they don't really see a need for God at all. I mean, they might tip the hat to God and be like, oh yeah, we're religious and we go to church. But truth is, they're fully sufficient in themselves.

Verse 12, this is what the wicked are like. Always free of care. They just go on amassing wealth.

That's the only thing that they're worried about is how to get more. You ever feel like this? Now before we get too self-righteous and say, yeah, I hate all those arrogant elites. Aren't we just like this too? Ask yourself, when you get blessed with good things, don't you usually assume that it's due primarily to what you have done? How often do you find yourself naturally and instinctively just looking back upward to God and saying, God, this is all a gift from you.

You say, well, no, no, not me. I work for everything that I have. Okay, well, where did you get that talent and that intelligence that you use to accomplish yourself?

Probably the majority of it, if not all of it, is in your genes, which means that if you know anything about science, you had no part in that at all. And do you really feel like if you had been born in a poor village in Liberia, that you have succeeded the way that you have here in the United States? What you have is given and enabled by God, all of it. And you have been surrounded by multiple levels of graces, what is it that you have, Paul said, that you did not receive?

And if you received it, why do you boast as if it didn't come from God anyway? And just like the rich, when we are doing well, don't we, like the wicked, tend to forget our need for God too? Isn't that why we all tend to pray a lot less when things are going well than when things are going bad? So let's not get too high and mighty. Yes, this is what the wicked are like, but it's what our hearts are like too. Tim Keller says that every human society that has ever existed, whether it's a nation, a church, a race of people, a basketball team, a group of eighth grade girls sitting around at the lunch table, all of them have been characterized by pride at the top and envy at the bottom.

So he says, I'm the one that's envious. Verse 13, if I've been wasting my time, why'd you even take the trouble to be pure? All I get out of it is trouble. All the day long, every day, all day, all that stuff I've done for God, I've tried to obey Him. I mean, true love waited, and still I've got a difficult marriage. I went to all the parenting stuff, and my kids are the ones that are causing me problems. We tithed, and we're still not rich like I thought that we were supposed to be.

I did everything according to prescription. Maybe, maybe, maybe all this stuff that I've believed about God is not true after all. You ever felt like that?

I have, verse 15. But if I'd spoken out like that, I would have betrayed your children. There was something, there was something, y'all. There was something about verbalizing that statement that woke him up. That's one of the values I'll add of praying out loud, or writing your prayers out in a journal, because sometimes you don't really realize what you think until you write it out, or you say it when you hear yourself say it. You're like, I didn't realize that's what I actually thought. So he hears himself verbalizing this statement, and realizes he hears himself admit that the reason that he had been serving God was so that God would make his life easy, and the Spirit of God very quietly whispers to him, Why are you serving me? Are you serving me because of what you think you can get from me, or are you serving me because you want more of me?

Because those are two entirely different reasons. It's kind of like when I was in college to graduate. You had to take an elective in the arts. And I had to choose between classical music, drama, theater, or painting. And I thought, well, theater looks like it would be the least damaging. And so it was awful.

I mean, just terrible. Well, I worked hard in that class. I mean, I really did. And I mastered all the avant garde, you know, kind of stuff about theater, because I wanted, I needed a grade. Because I didn't want to blow my GPA on a theater class. And so I worked hard and mastered the theater so that I could get a grade.

And the reason I wanted to get a grade was so that I could have, you know, a good resume that would get me a good job, which would get me a lot of money. Now, fast forward the clock many years later. Here's my wife and I. And we have decided at times, like, hey, we should go see a play at the Durham Performing Arts Center, which is the theater, right? And it's a lot, it costs a lot of money. So you've got to save up your money for it. And then it occurs to me while I'm shelling out the money to go to one of these plays, I'm like, look at the irony of this. In college, I studied drama, theater, so that I could get a job.

So I could have money. And now I use the money to go back to the theater. So the difference, though, is that here, I found theater, or however you pronounce it, I found it useful for something else.

But now, I feel weird even saying this, now I find it beautiful in itself. Here it was a means to an end. Here it is the end itself.

Does that make sense? So here's my question for you. Which one better characterizes your approach to God? See, the question is not, are you working hard for God? The question is, is God a good means to an end for you?

Or is God the end in himself? Because if he's a means to an end, it's going to radically affect how you deal with disappointment in your life. And what this psalmist realizes is, I've been serving God, not because I find him beautiful. I've been serving him because I found him useful. And what was worse, I started to communicate to others just by my attitude that this is why I serve God. I serve him because he makes my life easy, because he is the best way to my best life now and a good marriage and great prosperity. That's why you serve God.

You know, when our attitude toward life is that way, when our joy in God is less, when things are not going well in our lives, what kind of message are we sending about the beauty of God himself? See, I was watching TV, flipping the channels, and I came across a television evangelist. And he was looking around the camera and he said, he said, if you will give a minimum of $1,500 to this ministry, then God has told me he will cut whatever debt you have in half within six months.

That was his promise. He said, some of you out there listening to me right now have some pretty severe credit card debt. If you will use what is remaining in your, if you got $1,500 a room, if you will put it on the credit card, you will be amazed, as in six months, God will have cut that credit card debt in half. Now, I'm sitting here thinking, Lord, would it be a sin for me to fly down to Texas where this guy is and punch him in the throat?

Because that doesn't feel like a sin right now. Then he goes on, he says, and when your credit card bill has been cut in half and you're driving that new Mercedes Benz, your neighbors will be amazed at the smile on your face as they marvel at the goodness of God towards you. And my first thought is, well, you should probably wait until your credit card bill is more than half before you go purchase the Mercedes Benz, just say it. But number two is, no, I don't really feel like your neighbors are going to be amazed at the smile on your face when you're driving a new Mercedes Benz. Anybody smiles when they have a new Mercedes Benz, it's just part of the package. What would really amaze your neighbors is when you got a smile on your face and you're driving the same old ratty car you always drove, right? Because then you're able to tell your neighbors, I got a joy, it doesn't come from the car I drive, it doesn't even come from how good I feel, it doesn't come from my body, it comes from the God whose presence is always with me and a 1993 Honda Civic with no AC but the presence of God is better than 10,000 Mercedes Benz. I've always loved the way John Wesley described this. John Wesley lived like 300 years ago, so let me update his analogy.

He said the Christian life is like hearing that there's an uncle you didn't know that you had who died and left you millions upon millions upon millions of dollars, untold amount of riches. And so the bank summons you to come to the bank to pick up all your money. And so as you're driving to the bank, you get about a half mile from the bank and your car breaks down. What do you do when your car breaks down? Do you jump out of the car and kick the car and curse God? And then look around with envy at everybody else, a nice car where you got this piece of junk?

No, right? You just get out of the car and you leave the car in the dirt and you skip the rest of the way to the bank, right? That's the most joyous half mile journey you've ever been on because of what's waiting for you just down the road. He said, when you go through pain as a Christian, yes, the pain is real. He said, but it's the most joyous walk you've ever taken even when it's fraught with disappointment and pain because of what's waiting for you just on the other side, just on the other side. You see, listen, listen, your walk with God is not supposed to be, it will not be, absent of all dangers.

But you'll just be able to say it through many dangers, toils and snares, I have already gone, it's grace, His presence that brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home. Verse 17, he continues, So one day I went into God's sanctuary to meditate and then I thought about the future of these evil men. In the midst of his doubt, he comes into the presence of God and this is what he sees, he sees two things. First, verse 18, what a slippery path they are on. Suddenly God will send them sliding over the edge of the cliff and down to their destruction, an instant end to all their happiness, an eternity of terror. Their present life is only a dream, they will awaken to the truth as one awakens from a dream of things that never really were.

Here's number one, eternity, he says, is going to restore the balance. And really quickly, Scripture presents this life as so quick, it's like a dream. Now you know when you have a dream, it seems so real. How many of you just out of curiosity, all campuses, you're like vivid dreamers and you have dreams often. That is not true of me.

I have them probably about one every six weeks that I remember. But when I do, it is a doozy, let me tell you. And the other night, my wife and I had a, well actually my wife and I didn't have a dream, I had a dream. This is not the movie Inception. My wife was laying there, but I had a dream and the dream my wife and I were being chased by this wild group of Native Americans back 300 years ago, like cowboys and Indians. And it seems so real, I was genuinely scared. And in my dream, it was like it lasted a month. And it's one of those deals, you have this where you wake up out of the dream and it takes you a good 10, 15 seconds to figure out like, okay, I'm not really being chased by Indians.

I'm actually laying here in my bed and it's all going to be okay. But it seems so real in the moment. The writer here, Asaph, is like, that's what life is like. For those outside of God, death is going to be a sudden awakening from their illusion of success and power. The way one guy says it, the rich without God are on their way to being eternally poor.

Celebrities without God are on their way to being eternally ignored. It's like that awful scene where Steve Harvey crowned the wrongness universe. Do you remember this thing? Now, I read about it in the news, which meant when I watched the YouTube video, I knew what was coming. And you've seen this, right? Most of you have seen this.

I watched it like 15 times because it's like a train wreck. You're like, I cannot look away. And you're watching this poor girl who gets crowned. This is her lifelong dream.

She's always wanted to be Miss Universe. And you're watching just the elation on her face. And you're just kind of shaking your head going, don't be happy.

This is not real. In just a minute, it's going to turn into the worst moment of your life because Steve Harvey's already walking back on stage with that goofy look on his face. And he's going to be like, I crowned the wrong person and it's all my fault. And he's going to take it off your head and put it on this other girl's head. And your joy is going to turn into disaster.

What this writer Asaph is saying is, Steve Harvey's already on the stage. And all this joy you think you got is going to just disappear because if you had to choose, be the second Miss Universe, not the first one. Because the first one, it lasts for just a second and then that crown is gone.

Why don't you labor for the crown that does not fade and is never taken away? You see, on the flip side, for the believer, all the pain they go through is going to seem meaningless compared to the joy that they experience one minute into eternity. Life is so short. And if you're a believer, you may not see it now. But all this pain is just temporary and it will be over soon. I know that feels hard to believe sometimes.

I've been there. But thankfully, God's Word addresses our doubts. The Confusing Experience of Faith. That's the title of our message today on Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. Today's program is part of our teaching series called The Whole Story. Our entire team is excited about this study because we think it'll change the way that you read the Bible forever. You know, J.D., one of my favorite things about this series is how you're challenging us to take a fresh look at these familiar Bible stories. Yeah, you know, I think sometimes, especially for those of us who've been in church for a while, we can get so familiar with these Bible stories that they almost start to sound a little bit cliché.

Like we're no longer looking for God to use them to speak to us. So in this series, I'm hoping you'll be able to set those preconceived notions aside and just see these stories through the new lens in a fresh way and show you, maybe this is the greatest thing, show how they all point to the cross. To go along with the series and to help with that, we've got the perfect resource, simply called The Books of the Bible Cards. It's a set of cards that'll help you as you read books of the Bible to connect that book with the context of the original audience and maybe even more importantly, the overall scope of the one story the Bible is telling. They give you details about who the book was written to and when it was written, three key truths that are gleaned from the book, where the book points to Jesus, some reflection questions based on the main theme of the book. I can promise you, you'll want to keep these handy. And as you're in the books of the Bible and you're like, Who is this for?

What are they saying? You can pull out this card and it'll help you connect what you're reading to the bigger picture of what God is saying. We'd love to get you a set today. So when you give $25 or more, we'll send you a copy of The Books of the Bible Cards as our way of saying thanks for your generous support. If you've been growing through this program and diving deeper into the gospel with us, would you give that gift to someone else by donating today? Give us a call at 866-335-5220.

And please remember to ask for your set of The Books of the Bible Cards, or you can give online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. I am so glad to have you with us today. So be sure to listen again Thursday as we continue looking at the whole story of the Bible on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.