Questions, Doubts, Faith, and Worship

All too often, we have packaged faith as being opposed to questions. It's as though God cannot handle being questioned or challenged. Then we look at the Psalms and see a host of questions and direct challenges to God.

"Why do the wicked prosper?"
"Arise, O Yahweh, and judge!"
"How long, O Yahweh?"
"How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked?"
"Will you be angry with us forever?"

We turn to Job and find chapters of questions directed at God, pleading and begging for vindication, as well as arguing against God's seeming injustice.

A faith that cannot abide questions is not a very Biblical faith. God can handle our questions. The Psalms are a liturgical collection of hymns for use in worship that include the lament, anguish, fears, and doubts of Yahweh's people. This is a faith that struggles to understand. It is a faith that questions. It is a faith that seeks to know more. It is a faith that publicly cries out for direction, for guidance, for answers, for intervention, for justice, for mercy, for relief.

When Jesus comes along, he reminds the people that God loves them, but he does not try to answer all our doubts. He calls us to trust God's love and live God's love despite our failures to understand. He confirms God's loving character and calls us to adopt the same as our own.

So what, if we need to rant, or vent, or struggle to understand? God can handle that. God is not threatened by it. God just wants us to grasp the basics, like love, grace, and mercy being the way forward.

"He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does Yahweh require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?" - Micah 6:8

Even if I have doubts about God, or should I doubt God's very existence, the truth of Micah's words resonate as to how we should live. How I worship, or even if I consider anything I do as worship, does not hold a candle to living a life of justice, love, kindness, humility, and mercy. At the end of the day, "To obey is better than sacrifice" (1st Samuel 15:22), even if I do not consider it worship or an exercise of faith. God is just big enough to accept and honor that.



— ©Copyright 2022, Christopher B. Harbin 



http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/

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