When I was a teenager, I went through a doubting phase. I started to question if God was real and tried to find ways to “prove” His existence. I started obsessing over being a lukewarm Christian and pored over Revelation so I’d be “prepared” for the end times.
I spiraled from doubting to feeling guilty about doubting, and then wondering if my faith was real in the first place because I was doubting.
I carried that tension for years until my sister, Rachel, said something at her baptism that put words to the feeling I had then. She shared her full testimony later, saying, “Faith can’t exist without doubt. Otherwise it’s just an accepted fact.”
What if doubt isn’t faith’s enemy? What if it’s the very thing that makes faith faith?
Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. It’s the prerequisite. Faith without the possibility of doubt is just certainty. And certainty requires no trust at all.
What We Weren’t Taught About Doubt
In church growing up, NO ONE wanted to be like Doubting Thomas. Doubting or questioning anything about God was framed as spiritual failure, weakness, or even sin. We’d study James 1:6-8 (“the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind”), and I’d be terrified of “not believing enough”. But James 1:6-8 isn’t about doubt. It’s about asking God for wisdom and then ignoring Him after he gives you the answers. The passage isn’t about having honest questions.
I remember being so embarrassed for doubting my faith. It was my closest held secret; I thought I’d be shamed if people knew. When those of us who are doubting get condemned, we might start to perform the certainty we don’t have. We go through the motions and do what looks right to avoid embarrassment. We maintain the image of the “perfect Christian”. In doing so, we won’t ask questions to help our doubt and might, in turn, start to wilt.
Sometimes, we might even leave the faith altogether because we think our doubt automatically disqualifies us. We may think that faith means believing everything without question. We might think, “Well, I still have questions about x, y, and z, so I must not actually believe in this.”
Faith isn’t blind belief. And this is where culture collides with faith. We’re raised in an evidence-based society trained to think critically. We need the receipts, we need the peer reviewed studies. We go to school and learn the scientific method, turn around on Sunday, go to church, and hear “just believe”. But some analytical minds can’t “just believe”, and this “simple” command creates unbearable cognitive dissonance—that uncomfortable tension when two things you believe contradict each other.
But the problem isn’t doubt itself. The problem is that no one ever told us that doubt is allowed.
What Faith Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)
Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
Faith by definition operates where we DON’T have all the answers.
If we could prove God’s existence, we wouldn’t need faith. We would just have knowledge. And faith without the possibility of doubt isn’t faith; it’s just information.
Faith, then, is a daily CHOICE we make. Just like choosing to forgive when resentment would be easier. Like choosing to show up when you can’t see the outcome. These choices all have meaning BECAUSE the alternative exists.
2 Corinthians 5:7 says, “We walk by faith, not by sight,” not because seeing is bad, but because some realities are bigger than what our finite minds can fully understand.
But this isn’t to say we’re not allowed to be intellectual. Romans 12:2 tells us to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. God doesn’t just tolerate our intellect—He actively calls us to use it. In fact, a lot of researchers and those who doubted often end up with the deepest faith because they fought for it, rather than inheriting it passively.
The Bible’s Doubters
The Bible is actually filled with doubters whom God loved anyway.
In Mark 9, a father whose son is “possessed by a spirit” comes to Jesus and asks for His help. “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us,” he says (Mark 9:22). Jesus tells him that “everything is possible for one who believes”. Mark 9:24 tells us, “Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, ‘I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief!’” This father brought both doubt and faith to Jesus in the same breath, and Jesus doesn’t tell him to come back when he’s figured it all out. He heals the son immediately.
Think about Peter walking on the water during the storm (Matthew 14:28-31). He had enough faith to get out of the boat, AND he sank when doubt crept in. Both were true. He was the only one who stepped out at all, and Jesus didn’t condemn him for sinking—He caught him.
And then there’s Doubting Thomas, one of Jesus’s disciples. If we push past the “Doubting Thomas” label, we’ll see he wasn’t weak. Thomas processed things differently. He’s the same man who said, “Let us go and die with Him” (John 11:16). Jesus never shamed him. In fact, Jesus showed up for Thomas specifically and met him exactly where he was.
Thomas was a disciple for a reason; he was in Jesus’s inner circle to show us that all of us can be saved, no matter our process, as long as we choose to believe and have faith.
God has never once condemned honest doubt. He condemns hypocrisy, pretense, and hardened hearts, but never someone who came to Him saying, “I’m struggling to believe, and I need help.”
The Heart vs. Mind War
The war starts when our hearts want to believe but the mind demands proof first. We get stuck in an endless loop: Am I really saved? Do I really believe this? Is this real or am I performing? As my sister, Rachel, wrote in her testimony, “I wished I could just wake up and be convinced, like Paul says in his writings […] Even though my heart yearned for faith, it felt like I couldn’t be accepted by Jesus until my brain was logically satisfied.”
How many of us feel or have felt like this? We try to use logic to verify something that, by its very nature, transcends all logic. Isaiah 55:9 says, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”
We don’t have to turn off our brains to have faith. God wants us to engage our minds while acknowledging its limits. And this might be where we get lost. Our pride prevents us from acknowledging our cognitive capacity is finite. God created logic itself, so expecting to fully comprehend the infinite with a finite mind isn’t actually intellectualism. It’s a form of pride. As Rachel wrote in her testimony, “How prideful of me to think my brain was more important to salvation than the blood of Jesus Christ.”
When we finally come to this realization, we come out of this war with even deeper faith. Because our faith cost us something.
So, if faith isn’t certainty and it isn’t information, what is it?
Faith is a Verb, Not a Feeling
I used to think faith was something you felt. But faith is a daily choice.
Faith isn’t the absence of doubt, but what you do WITH the doubt.
What actions do you choose to do despite the doubt? The pursuit IS the faith. Continuing to pray even though you’re not sure what will happen, reading the Bible even when it’s hard to understand, showing up even when your mind rages against it—you might be waiting for the faith to “arrive” without realizing you’ve already been living it.
My sister showed this beautifully in her testimony: “I think salvation has happened for me like a thermostat warms up the house—incrementally, a tenth of a degree at a time, until suddenly, *boom*, you feel the warmth.” Faith sometimes builds up slowly over time.
This can be hard for those who grew up in the church. When I was young, I always heard crazy testimonies of how “I almost died and God saved me and now I believe”. I thought I had to have an equally crazy “conversion” story to have “true faith”. I remember wishing that I hadn’t grown up in church, so I could find God in a dramatic moment like these testimonies did. But Rachel’s testimony helped me see that my quiet, gradual journey was just as valid. It makes sense now that it wasn’t until I made a conscious choice to pursue Jesus that my faith was strengthened.
Not everyone gets a lightning bolt moment, and that’s perfectly okay.
No Shame in Doubt
We can’t shame those who doubt either. Jude 1:22 says to “be merciful to those who doubt”. If God’s instruction is mercy toward doubters, that tells us everything about how He views doubt.
Think of the woman who touched Jesus’s hem (Mark 5:25-34). She didn’t need to understand all the theology around Jesus to reach out and be healed. Just reaching out to touch Him was enough.
If you’re still searching, still Googling “how do I know I’m saved” at 2 am, still reading posts like this one — that’s not a lack of faith. That might BE the faith.
Choosing Faith
Doubt and belief are allowed to coexist. We can question and trust God anyway. We can struggle and still be saved. We can wrestle with God AND still be held by Him.
Everyone has a moment where you suddenly feel the warmth. If you feel you haven’t had this moment yet, think about what you’ve been researching, poring over. What rabbit holes have you dived down investigating to “qualify” your faith? What more do you think you “need to know” before you can be accepted by Jesus?
The answer is His Grace. There’s no such thing as being “good enough” for Jesus, because we’re sinners AND He loves us anyway. Jesus isn’t waiting for us to pass the Christian Test or to know everything before coming to Him. He just wants us to reach out for His hem despite not knowing everything we think we need to know.
If you’ve been waiting for all doubt to disappear before coming to God, think about this: What if you came to God now anyway, doubt and all? What if He’s been waiting for you to bring Him your questions instead of trying to solve them alone?
Sometimes the most faithful prayer we can pray is that of the father with the spirit-possessed son: “I believe, help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). I have doubt but am choosing faith anyway.
So, bring Him your doubt.
He’s not afraid of it.
He’s been waiting for it.
