Getting Started:
Have you ever switched “allegiance”?
Maybe from one sports teams to another, or from one product (Mac or PC, Pepsi or Coke, Nike or Adidas, etc) to another?
Why did you do it?
READ: Exodus 32:1-2, 4 CEV
“[The people said to Aaron], ‘Make us… a god who lead and protect us. Moses brought us out of Egypt, but nobody knows what has happened to him.; Aaron told them, ‘Bring me the gold… that your wives and sons and daughters are wearing.’ Then he… made an idol… The people said, ‘This is the god who brought us out of Egypt!”
READ
Every Christian will deal with doubt at one time or another. This is not cynicism or pessimism, this is fact. There are times when we feel alone, or abandoned, or unsure; like we’ve put so much effort into this journey only to find out that we started off in the wrong direction.
But doubt is a good thing. Doubt unlocks questions, and questions can lead to change. Timothy Keller said, “People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic.”
Doubt surfaces when our vision of faith or God meets the realities of life. Like the children of Israel who constantly grumbled about God while being delivered from slavery, their reality conflicted with their vision of God. But God was constantly challenging them to change their vision, to begin understanding that God isn’t a genie bent on satisfying our whims—God wanted to show them (and us) true life.
It can be easy to turn to “false gods” in these situations when Jesus won’t jump through the hoops we’ve created for faith - the parameters we’ve defined for how we’re willing to let God work in our lives. When this happens, we see that faith is more about our own ego than about God’s plan and love for this world.
DISCUSS
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the [person] who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
Have you ever called your beliefs about God into question?
What did you discover?
Jude 1:22 says, “Be merciful to those who doubt.”
Where does doubt fit into the “story” of your life?
“Our lives are in perfect sync with what we actually believe”
What does your life reflect about your actual belief in God?
Joseph says that our doubts can be covers for our fear. In Mark 9:24, a man asks Jesus to heal his son and in deep honesty tells Jesus he believes in him, but that he needs help overcoming his disbelief.
What does it mean to believe and yet still disbelieve?