Helpful Questions

            Starting this Sunday our students will hear a new series that encourages them to do something that doesn’t always happen in a church setting.  This new series will encourage students to ask questions about their faith, in a safe manner that will help them shape it as their own.  This series is entitled Doubt and here is a brief series synopsis about series;

“Everyone has moments of doubt. We doubt if we are heading in the right direction when going someplace new. We doubt if that low-fat snack is really as healthy as it claims to be. We doubt if the people in our lives really care about us—even in spite of the evidence that they do. And sometimes our doubts are about God. Can we trust God? Does God really have our best in mind? What does a particular Bible verse actually mean?

When questions arise, they can be a little unsettling, especially questions about faith. But what if God was big enough to handle the questions? He is. What if God was secure enough to handle our uncertainty? He is. And what if doubt actually paved the way to a deeper belief, a stronger relationship with Christ? It can.”

As a teenager I remember feeling uncomfortable asking questions about my faith.  Each week I would go to church, sing the songs, listen to the sermons and go home thinking about how nice that was.  I recall never really wrestling with anything the pastor would preach on or thinking about it a great deal.  I found myself thumbing through my Bible and reading the words without making a real connection to my heart.  I found myself stuck in this rut for the majority of my life, but that wasn’t what God had in store for me.

At the age of sixteen things began to change in how I thought about the sermons I heard, the songs we sang, and the passages I was reading in my Bible.  I began to think through them more intently and realized that there were several things that simply didn’t seem to make sense to me.  I found myself asking my youth pastor and pastor about different things in the Bible almost weekly.  I began to get some sort of answers to my questions however, the questions continued as I learned more about Christianity and particularly what that means to me in college. 

I found myself at a private Christian college where my fellow students and professors were all wrestling with what it means to be a Christian.  What was this relationship that God invited us into really all about?  During these four years I found myself digging deeper into the questions of Christianity and finding some sense of resolution in my heart to these questions.  However, what I realized through this process were two things; first, I began to understand that asking questions is a good thing because it creates tension and not all tension is bad.  In fact the tension that was created from the questions caused us to dig through the Bible and various other books/resources to come to conclusion about our questions.  This leads directly into the second thing that I discovered through asking questions which is the fact that I found myself connecting with God in a more personal way than ever before.  The intent searching for answers allowed us to grow in our faith and really establish a personal relationship with God that was “ours” and not simply something that was passed on from the church or our parents.

Questions are not a negative thing; in fact it is how we learn.  I have discovered this with my two small children who ask the question, “Why?” to almost everything.  My challenge to you is to ask the tough questions about your faith, search for answers, and talk about your findings with your family.  This will not only bring you closer together as a family but it will also help to strengthen your own personal relationship with God.