The Rule I Made About Doubt

Nobody handed her this one. She wrote it herself, which is why it has been so hard to get at.

The rule is simple. God answers people who do not doubt. She has never said it out loud in those words, but it runs underneath everything, and she can trace it back to a sermon she heard at twenty two about the man who asks and wavers not.

So for nine years she has been trying to be a person who does not waver. And she cannot do it. She asks, and half a breath later there is a small cold voice saying probably not, and she cannot get rid of that voice, and she has tried.

Which means, under her own rule, she has disqualified herself before the prayer is out of her mouth. Every single time.

You can see what that does. She has begun to pray less, not from unbelief exactly, but because there is no point starting a thing you have already failed.

If you built a rule like that out of a good sermon, sit down at this table with me. Nothing about the sermon is going to be sneered at here, and neither is your doubt.

What that sermon was actually about

Let us take the verse down off the wall and look at it properly, because it has been doing a job it was never given.

James does speak about asking without wavering, and he is writing about a double minded person, someone genuinely trying to hold two masters at once and hoping God will settle a matter they have already decided to run their own way. That is a different animal entirely from a woman who asks God for something and feels a cold voice behind it.

The cold voice is not double mindedness. It is a person who has been disappointed and whose nervous system remembers.

You are not disqualified by the voice that follows your asking. Nothing in that reflex has ever changed how God receives what you bring. I am not saying that to make you comfortable. The written word says the LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy (Psalm 103:8), which describes His temperament rather than the quality of ours, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the sentence, who makes it live in a woman at a kitchen table who fails her own rule twice a day.

The man who said both things at once

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a strategy for silencing the cold voice.

There is a father in the Gospel who brings his son to Jesus. He says, if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us. Which is doubt, right there, in the request, said out loud in front of everybody.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.Mark 9:24

Read the sentence again. He says he believes and he asks for help with his unbelief in the same breath. Both are true about him at once, and he says so, and he is not corrected for it, and his son is not sent home.

Scripture put that sentence in the book on purpose. It is one of the most quoted things any ordinary person says in the Gospels, and it is a doubting sentence, and it went into the record uncorrected.

You have room in Scripture to bring both at once. The Word keeps a man's doubt inside his own request and answers him anyway, and it never once made the absence of doubt the ticket. That is written down and left there deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is what drives it home in a woman who has been failing a rule she invented at twenty two.

Do not replace it with a smaller rule

Something has to go where the rule was, or a lighter version arrives by Thursday. Try to have more faith than doubt. Try to say it with conviction even if you do not feel it. Try to catch the cold voice before it speaks.

That is the same rule wearing a cardigan.

You are received whole, doubt and all, and the receiving does not run on a ratio. Scripture says if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13), which is His faithfulness stated as an independent fact rather than a response to ours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has carried nine years of asking with a cold voice behind it and never once returned one to sender.

And if these nine years have cost more than anybody around this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the mornings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.