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    The Shadow of a Doubt: Confronting Challenges to Faith
    The Shadow of a Doubt: Confronting Challenges to Faith
    The Shadow of a Doubt: Confronting Challenges to Faith
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    The Shadow of a Doubt: Confronting Challenges to Faith

    By Talbot Davis

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    About this ebook

    We all have doubts. Throughout this five-week study, Davis invites you to acknowledge and confront your doubts about your Christian faith. Each chapter focuses on a different biblical story that illustrates a key insight into doubt and its effects on our faith. By bringing our doubts out of the shadows and into the light, we have an opportunity to experience an authentic faith seeking understanding.

    Discussion questions at the end of each chapter are designed to help leaders of small groups. Also available when purchasing the book is access to a free video trailer and an audio recording of the author's sermons as another way to experience the weekly message.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAbingdon Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2015
    ISBN9781501804342
    The Shadow of a Doubt: Confronting Challenges to Faith
    Author

    Talbot Davis

    Talbot Davis is the pastor of Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, a congregation known for its ethnic diversity, outreach ministry, and innovative approach to worship. He has been repeatedly recognized for his excellence in congregational development. During his 10-year term as pastor at Mt. Carmel United Methodist Church prior to serving Good Shepherd, that congregation doubled in size and received the conference’s “church of excellence” award six times. Talbot has also received the conference’s Harry Denman Award for Excellence in Evangelism. Since Talbot began serving at Good Shepherd in 1999, average worship attendance has quadrupled, growing from 500 to 2000 each Sunday. Talbot holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Princeton University and a Master of Divinity from Asbury Theological Seminary. He lives in Charlotte with his wife, Julie, and they have two grown children.

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      Book preview

      The Shadow of a Doubt - Talbot Davis

      INTRODUCTION

      Shadows of Doubt

      They wake me up at night.

      Sometimes out of the deepest kinds of sleep.

      And once they wake me up, it’s awfully hard to pick up where I left off.

      What am I talking about? Bumps in the night? Sounds in the house?

      Nope. Doubts in my head.

      I have doubts about this thing that I claim as the center of both my identity and my vocation: the Christian faith.

      And the doubts that wake me up from my slumber while rocking me to the core deal with the most pivotal issues of the faith:

      Is God there?

      Is God real?

      Is God great?

      Is God good?

      What happens to the everlasting souls of people who die without ever hearing of Jesus?

      Is the Bible reliable?

      Why did John just have to tell us that he beat Peter in the footrace to the tomb on the first Easter?

      Why do pomegranates do double duty as aphrodisiacs in the Song of Songs?

      Am I selling people a false remedy to their very real problems?

      I suspect that I’m not the only one to be assaulted with these questions of faith. Most people of faith will admit that they have doubts if they are being honest with themselves. In fact, your own doubts are probably the reason you picked up this book in the first place.

      This wrestling is nothing new. I was not raised in church, as they say, but I nevertheless had a dramatic encounter with Christ when I was seventeen years old. Yet not long after that conversion, questions like the ones I’ve asked above started to seep in.

      A year later, I found myself in college—and in the kind of intellectual environment that celebrated doubt and ridiculed faith. So my doubts intensified. I remember picking up a then-classic book in the evangelical world, In Two Minds: The Dilemma of Doubt and How to Resolve It, by Os Guiness. The book made me feel better simply because I persevered and read it all—even though I was unable to grasp much of what it had to say. I was grateful for a book that expressed my faith mixed with doubt. The title resonated with me because I lived the title.

      Fast-forward a quarter century and half a lifetime. In the course of pastoring at Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, what have I discovered? That people today—even people of great faith—are plagued with the same kinds of doubt that have been with me from the beginning of my belief. The people of this congregation honor me by bringing into my office their honest, raw, conflicted doubts about their Savior. Like the anguished father in Mark 9:24, they often cry out, I have faith; help my lack of faith!

      So what do I do with the doubts of the people, both as their pastor and their fellow pilgrim?

      It seems to me that people have long had these three kinds of responses to doubt:

      1.Ignore them. If you pretend like the doubt doesn’t really exist, pretty soon it won’t. Focus on what you do know of the faith; pay precious little attention to what you don’t know; and in the end, your faith in Christ will be like it was before. Unless it’s not.

      2.Explain them away. This is the approach many of us take when we treat that Bible as if it were a book—which it’s not—and not as a library—which it is. When we misunderstand the nature of the biblical revelation, we are tempted to create all kinds of false harmonies in between its texts. In contrast, I believe that the highest view of the inspiration of Scripture takes into account that the books of the Bible are often in conversation with one another. They even, at times, correct each other. If you doubt me on that, read the Book of Proverbs. Then read Ecclesiastes. There is some serious conversation and disagreement between the two authors who wrote those books.

      3.Cave in to them. All too often, people respond to their very real doubts about faith by taking the easiest route of them all: They abandon faith altogether. The weight of doubt piles up; the lure of life without restraint seeps in; and the next thing you know, a follower of Jesus suddenly is not.

      As you might imagine, I don’t find any of those solutions to doubt’s dilemma very satisfactory. So, along with the people of Good Shepherd, I came up with a very different approach to the doubt of faith:

      What if instead of hiding in the shadow of our doubt, we were to bring our doubts into the light?

      Instead of ignoring them, explaining them away, or caving in to them, I believe that we should take our doubts and expose them to the light, fearlessly acknowledging them and wrestling with them in the open. We should be honest about doubts, unafraid to acknowledge them and shine the light of Christ on them. When we do so, are we not likely to discover that a faith that has gone through its shadows of doubt and then emerged on the other side is, in fact, a faith worth having?

      I believe it is. That conviction stands behind the chapters, activities, and conversation guides in the rest of this book. Because I believe that when we dig deep into our doubts and excavate them with a community of faith, we rob them of their power and we strengthen our faith.

      And who knows? Maybe they’ll stop waking us up in the middle of the night as we rest with assurance that Jesus is Lord and there is no other.

      Talbot Davis

      1

      BELIEVE IT AND NOT

      I have faith; help my lack of faith! (Mark 9:24)

      I conducted a little experiment in getting ready for this series called The Shadow of a Doubt. I anticipated the series so much that as I prepared for it, I did something I’ve never done before: I took an online poll. On the Good Shepherd Church Facebook page, I posted a simple question about faith and doubt and asked people to respond. I asked the online community, which includes both Christians and non-Christians, What is the source of your doubts? When it comes to your faith, what doubts do you bring to the table? This open-ended, two-part question invited people to share any and all doubts they had about God, or Jesus, or the church, or heaven and hell, or themselves, or anything else that might relate to their faith. I knew that I would get a lot of responses, and I did. Here are some of the answers I received:

      Whenever a young life is taken, or stolen, especially in a violent manner, I always ask, Why? If everything on earth belongs to God, including the children, why does he allow those things to happen?

      I get to the point where I feel helpless . . . there are so many poor and suffering people . . . I feel like we aren’t making a dent.

      I doubted my faith and his love when I lost my best friend to cancer.

      Wonder why some babies are born with deficiencies when they haven’t had a chance yet and the mother did all the right things during pregnancy.

      Sometimes when prayer goes unanswered or the outcome is bad I doubt if praying makes a difference.

      I don’t think there’s room on Facebook for all mine. . . .

      Some of those doubts may be your doubts; you might even feel like that last person, the one whose doubts would fill Facebook. And the answers that came in privately, which I can’t share, were even more painful and poignant than the ones printed above.

      IN THE GAP, THE SHADOW OF DOUBT MAKES ITS HOME.

      But the reason I did that survey about doubt—and the reason I’m doing this series—is that I have them too. I have doubts. Doubts about God, and Jesus, and the Bible. I proclaim a gospel of faith, and I too live in doubt’s shadow. Is God real, or am I perpetuating some kind of heavenly pyramid scheme on the poor people of Good Shepherd? And if God does exist,

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