Faith in the Doubt

So Gideon took ten men of his servants and did as the LORD had told him. But because he was too afraid of his family and the men of the town to do it by day, he did it by night. Judges 6:27

In my addiction, I wanted the easy way out. I didn’t want to have to go to treatment, change my life, or go to meetings. I just wanted God to magically make me hate drugs, then I’d stop using them. As you know, that was not my experience. Instead, God insisted that I do the hard work of following his will, cutting drugs out of my life. Why? If God could have miraculously removed my addiction, why didn’t he? I think it was because he was teaching me faith and obedience, which is what he desires from me. If, once I realized I was addicted, I prayed for it to be gone and God immediately removed it, what would I have learned? I’d have learned that I can do what I want without consequence and that change requires no action or sacrifice. Change did require sacrifice though. It was hard work. I didn’t want to do it. But faith meant obeying God, even when it was terrifying to do so.

That’s where Gideon found himself in today’s passage. In the story, God called Gideon to deliver Israel from idol worship. His first task was to tear down his own family’s altar of Baal, but Gideon feared the reaction of both his family and community, so he did it at night. God gave Gideon a task which Gideon feared. Still, Gideon was obedient despite that fear.

That is faith. I used to think that faith was the absence of doubt. I thought that if I concentrated hard enough, I could banish all doubt from my mind, embracing complete faith, in which case God had to do whatever I wanted. Faith though, isn’t about positive thinking or making God do what I want. Faith is me following God’s will despite my fears and doubts. It takes no faith to for me to live as though the sun is going to rise this morning because it’s risen every day of my life and I have no doubt that it’s going to rise again today. Faith rather, is following God, even when I don’t know the outcome and I fear the possibilities.

Authentic bravery can only exist in the face of fear and true faith can only exist in the face of doubt. If we knew the outcome, it wouldn’t be faith. Faith means looking to God, following his will instead of our own, even when we don’t know what will happen next.