GIANTS
Series Outline
• What is it?
• What does it do to me?
• How do I kill it?
Secret Weapon Recap
• Fear
– Love
• Discouragement
– Humility
• Loneliness
– Introspection
• Guilt
– Acceptance
• Worry
– Shame
• Temptation
– Cowardice
• Anger
– Burning
• Resentment
– Mortality
• Doubt
– Testing
Testing the Null
• H0: The Ford Mustang has replaced the
Volkswagen Rabbit as the pinnacle chick
car.
• Sampling 1,000 via phone:
– Do you own a Ford Mustang?
– Are you a chick?
• The 95% certainty threshold.
– Type I Error
– Type II Error
Warm Up
• What is doubt?
• What do we doubt?
• Is doubt ever healthy or productive?
What is it?
• Doubt is seen in our modern world as a
trait of weakness.
• “He who hesitates is lost.”
• We build game shows and entertainment
around inflicting it.
• Two flavors of doubt:
– “I choose not to believe.” (unbelief)
– “I don’t understand.” (uncertainty)
What does it do to me?
• Christian translation of two flavors:
– “I question the existence, qualities, and/or
consistency of God.”
– “I don’t question God’s attributes, but I don’t
understand what He’s doing.”
• The first seeks to derail your experience,
trust, and maturity in Christ.
• The second seeks to verify what you know
about God through better understanding.
How do I kill it?
• Understand that doubt develops in
isolation.
– Thomas was the only one not present when
Jesus first appeared to the disciples.
– His isolation led to a lack of experience which
led to doubt.
– His isolation denied him an affirming
experience that the others had enjoyed.
How do I kill it?
• Understand doubt’s source.
– Articulate your doubt clearly. What exactly are
you struggling with?
– Evaluate yourself on the origin of your doubt.
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Conversation?
Book?
Movie?
Personal setback?
– Instead of declaring yourself a failure, take
your doubt to God in deliberate prayer.
How do I kill it?
• Earnest doubt demands a span of time.
– Drawing conclusions on the conditions of the
day, or on fragments of evidence before it all
comes in can lead to the wrong mindset.
– Jesus made Thomas wait a week before
getting the evidence he desired.
– Looking back over long spans in your own life,
do you see the immutable qualities of God at
work?
How do I kill it?
• Force doubt into its proper perspective.
– “Believe your beliefs and doubt your doubts.”
– Doubt should be a searching minority of your
mindset, not the tumultuous majority.
– Don’t let minor questions confuse your
foundational doctrine:
• “Do dogs go to heaven?”
• “At what age would God let a child get into heaven
without them praying the sinner’s prayer?”
How do I kill it?
• Pursue doubt through to its conclusion.
– Thomas stuck around until the evidence to his
question was presented.
– Failing to do so leaves pocks of unanswered
questions that could ravage your spiritual
strength as Alzheimer's attacks the mind.
– Don’t ask a question you don’t want the
answer to.
– Pursue it until you find yourself facing the
conclusion of “My Lord and my God!”
How do I kill it?
• Accept your limitations.
– The more you study, the more will come to
your attention in the way of doubt.
– The more you study, the more you’ll learn that
you just can’t understand everything.
– The Bible has all truth, but not all the answers.
• The Bible does not attack all of our modern
quandaries with specificity.
• These require the APPLICATION of the TRUTH we
find in the Bible about God’s will and character.
Kill Shot
• “You must not put The Lord your God to
the test.”
• Yet…
– Abraham and the fate of Sodom & Gomorrah.
– Gideon and the dew point fleeces.
– John the Baptist
– Doubting Thomas
Kill Shot
• DO NOT test God by imposing your will
ahead of His.
• DO NOT test God by the assumption that
His power is somehow at your whim.
• DO test His promises to discover their
unwavering validity.
• DO test, probe, and prove the perfection of
God’s plan and will for your life.
Testing the Infinite
• We take 95% confidence samples because
it’s too expensive to learn the “true” truth
of our greatest questions.
• With God, truth is always 100.00%. There
is no possibility of a Type II error.
• With God, the greatest tragedy is a Type 1
error…having the evidence to proceed but
holding back because we do not believe it.