Stand Strong in Your Faith E-Book

Alex McFarland

• Herausgeber: BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 175

Beschreibung

With all the fear in the world and the constant doubts and worry that consume most Christians, this book will build your confidence and help you possess an explosive faith! Jason Jimenez and Alex McFarland deliver a powerful message that champions Christians to live their faith with boldness and strength. In Stand Strong in Your Faith you will learn how to: - Overcome fear and doubt. - Live beyond yourself in the power of the Holy Spirit. - Trust the reliability of the Bible and study it effectively. - Defend the resurrection of Christ. - Persevere during tough times. Join Jason and Alex as they share truth that will take you from saying what you believe to living what you believe with conviction and passion.  

Leseprobe

BroadStreet Publishing Group, LLC

Racine, Wisconsin, USA

BroadStreetPublishing.com

STAND STRONG IN YOUR FAITH: Live What You Believe with Confidence and Passion

Copyright © 2017 Jason Jimenez & Alex McFarland

ISBN-13: 978-1-4245-5306-8 (softcover)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4245-5307-5 (e-book)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright © 2000; 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2007 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188, USA. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. All emphasis in Scripture quotations are those of the author.

Stock or custom editions of BroadStreet Publishing titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, ministry, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

Cover design: Chris Garborg /garborgdesign.com

Interior design and typeset: Katherine Lloyd/theDESKonline.com

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

A Faith Workout

Chapter 1

When in Doubt

Chapter 2

How to Be Fearless in the Midst of Fear

Chapter 3

Living Beyond Yourself:The Role of the Holy Spirit in a Believer’s Life

Chapter 4

The Most Neglected Thing in America: The Bible

Chapter 5

How Can I Know the Bible Is True?

Chapter 6

The Crux of History:Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

Chapter 7

What’s the Best Way to Study the Bible?

Chapter 8

Six Christian Duties to Keep You Strong

Notes

About the Authors

A FAITH WORKOUT

The common response when someone asks you how you’re doing is to say, “I’m good.” But what would you say if someone asked you about how your faith was doing? Would you say it’s good? Would you say it is strong? Or weak? Or maybe even nonexistent?

What we have found in our combined forty years of ministry is that most Christians have a defeated faith. Throughout the Bible we are told to “be courageous” and to “stand strong in your faith.” And yet there are many Christians today who are throwing in the towel and giving up altogether. We think this is a shame and unnecessary.

That’s why we felt compelled to write this book. We want to help you not only stand strong in your faith but also do so with great passion and conviction as you impact the lives of those around you. If you feel your faith is not as strong as you would like it to be, know that we are glad you have picked up this book. We are thrilled at the opportunity to take you on this faith workout. Think of this time together like hitting the gym. Before you freak out and toss the book aside—please, hear us out.

As Christians, our entire lives are built on the foundation of faith. Every human being expresses and exercises some form of faith. Yet, for the most part, Christians duck and cover rather than exercise their faith. They’d much rather sit in the pews, watching and hearing from their fellow believers who are working out their faith, rather than work out their own faith. That’s the easy thing to do. But do you really want that for yourself? Don’t you want to have a strong faith that can make a supernatural difference in your life and in the lives of those around you?

We want to help motivate Christians to hit the “faith gym” and start building up their spiritual muscles. The world desperately needs stronger Christians who can step up, motivate, and inspire a whole new generation to stand strong in their faith. But this won’t happen if Christians have a weak and untrained faith.

It takes a commitment to build up your faith. It will take discipline and hard work. But we believe you can do it with the help of the Holy Spirit and by spending time in God’s Word. Much like physical training, you will have good spiritual workouts and not-so-good ones. There will be times when you will have to dig deep to maximize the most of your faith and pull through. But don’t worry; we are here to train alongside of you. Look to us as your spiritual coaches.

In Stand Strong in Your Faith, we walk through some of the most common areas that prevent Christians from having a strong and robust faith. It is our goal to change that. In this book, you will come face-to-face with your fears and doubts, and learn to deal with them according to the Word of God. We will also train you on how to walk in the Holy Spirit, and thus you will gain invaluable insights into how to pray with power, share your faith, and persevere in the midst of hard times.

Are you ready to start strengthening your faith? Then let’s hit the faith gym.

Jason Jimenez & Alex McFarland

Spring of 2017

Be on your guard; stand strong in the faith.

—1 CORINTHIANS 16:13

CHAPTER 1

WHEN IN DOUBT

Feed your faith and your doubts will starve to death.

—UNKNOWN

Have you ever doubted what you believe as a Christian? If so, know that you’re not alone. Doubt is a normal struggle in the faith. Every Christian (including your pastor) has had doubts. Would it surprise you to know that legends like John the Baptist, John Calvin, C. S. Lewis, Charles Spurgeon, and Martin Luther all struggled with deep doubts?

We have had our fair share of doubts in our walk with Christ too. We’ve questioned the reliability of the Bible, doubted our salvation, and have even felt that prayer was a waste of time. But whenever we were at that halfway point—between belief and disbelief—we had to ask some questions: What’s causing my doubt? What does God’s Word say about doubt? How can I prevent doubt from consuming my life? Asking these questions is a deliberate process. It forces one to address the doubt, figure out how it happened, and decide on the appropriate steps necessary to rectify those doubts.

Unfortunately, this is not something Christians know how to do well. Talking about doubt makes us uneasy. We feel judged. Or we feel a sense of shame for calling into question God’s love for us. Some can get so overwhelmed by doubt that it stirs up more worry and doubt. This is the crazy cycle of doubt. And the longer a Christian rides this crazy cycle, the more ineffective he or she will be for God.

But would it surprise you to know that the Bible includes many examples of doubt? For example, did you know that Abraham doubted God? He even laughed (or mocked) God’s promise that he would have a son in his old age. What about Moses? Or doubting Thomas (as we like to call him)? Did not these men doubt at one time or another in their lives? They did. But the thing is that their doubts didn’t lead them to unbelief. Rather, their doubts led them to a greater journey of faith.

These stories are recorded in the Bible to help us overcome doubt in each of our lives. No matter if the doubt is big or small, the Word of God is the answer to defeating any kind of doubt we may have. Despite the trouble you might be facing with doubt, understand that God is faithful and He has given you the Spirit of truth to help you walk and grow in a true and lasting relationship with Him.

However, every Christian must be aware that satan uses doubt as a mechanism to destroy his or her communion with God and flood that individual with concerns. He will target your boldness and keep the attacks coming until you break. Satan wants to strip away any certainty you have in God and replace it with uncertainty. That’s his goal.

But we (Jason and Alex) want you to know that our prayer is that you won’t allow satan to use doubt as a ploy to break your intimacy with God. Our goal, especially in this chapter, is to embolden you to not let doubt go unchecked in your life. We want to help you properly address your concerns, questions, and doubts—and, Lord willing, bring you the necessary remedy to soothe your wandering soul.

DOUBTS ABOUT MY FAITH

Does God really love me?

Can I trust the Bible?

Can I lose my salvation?

Does my church even care?

How can I be sure what I believe is true?

Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

What if all this isn’t real?

Entertaining Doubts

In the church, and even beyond the doors of the church, are millions of Christians who are consumed with doubts. I (Jason) was speaking at Summit Ministries1 one summer and remember having a lot of conversations with millennials about their doubts. One student told me that he tried discussing his doubts about his faith with his pastor but felt judged. Another student told me she doubted that God had truly forgiven her of her sexual past.

After speaking at a church in Texas, we (Jason and Alex) had a couple who approached us after the event. They were visibly distraught. After some small talk, we asked them how we could help. They shared about their marriage troubles and how they were seeking counsel on a few issues. This couple was consumed with doubt. In fact, there wasn’t anything they didn’t doubt. They doubted their marriage, they doubted their faith, they doubted their parenting, and they doubted the leadership at their church. After listening to them for a bit, we asked them one simple question: “Do you pray?” The husband looked at his wife, and then looked over at us again and said, “I don’t have the faith to pray anymore.”

These people represent just a fraction of the doubt that is plaguing Christians today. We are living in a day when there are a lot of doubters. And the last place one would think to find them would be at church. But the church is filled with doubters—doubters who have neglected to confront their doubts, and, as a result, are becoming more skeptical in their faith. They may not reject Jesus as Savior, but they are living a dejected faith that is leading them farther down a path of doubt, worry, anxiety, and frustration.

But as we mentioned before, doubting is a normal process. The truth is that we are going to doubt. We are not perfect. We will have our issues with God and raise questions about life that will (from time to time) go unanswered. That’s life. Doubts will cause us to hit rock bottom, but as long as our faith is built on the Rock, then we will be just fine.

Doubts will cause us to hit rock bottom, but as long as our faith is built on the Rock, then we will be just fine.

Author and pastor Timothy Keller sheds some light on the tension between faith and doubt in every Christian’s life:

A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. 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. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.2

Thus it’s important that we understand the role of doubt in each of our lives—not only from our human perspective but for God’s sake as well. Let’s now look at the different kinds of doubt and see what we can learn about each type.

The Three Kinds of Doubt

Doubt comes in all shapes and sizes. But before we delineate the different forms of doubt, we want to share with you some insight from an expert who also happens to be a friend of ours. His name is Dr. Gary Habermas, and he wrote a fantastic book called Dealing with Doubt. In this book, Habermas writes:

The fact that human beings are whole, rather than being fragmented into their component “parts” is a reminder that uncertainty generally affects the entire person. As a result, causes of doubt are seldom individual but are interrelated with each other. Attempting to unravel the moral, social, medical and psychological factors for purposes of identification can indeed be troublesome.3

Habermas makes an important point: Getting to the core of doubt takes considerable effort. There are so many variables and interrelated pieces. It’s one thing to recognize doubt in your life but quite another to identify its root cause. I (Jason) remember talking with a young woman about her doubts. She knew exactly what her doubts were but couldn’t figure out why they were there. The more she tried to solve the cause of her doubts, the more stressed she felt.

To help further understand doubt and provide a clearer way to distinguish the different kinds of doubt, we are going to use Habermas’ three groupings of doubt as a preliminary step to find healing. The three most common aspects of doubt are emotional doubt, reasonable doubt, and volitional doubt.

Emotional Doubt

Emotional doubt is the worst kind of doubt. It is also the most painful. Emotional doubt has more to do with feelings than facts and frequently involves a person’s subjective responses, not objective reality. People with emotional doubt are typically those who have experienced a tragedy in their life. The death of a loved one, a bad breakup, a loss of a job, or anything that brings with it emotional and physical pain can cause emotional doubt. Anxiety and depression are also common causes of emotional doubt and can lead down a path of unspeakable damage. Habermas said this about emotional doubt:

Emotional doubt frequently poses as its factual sister. It has some of the same concerns and raises some of the same questions. Yet, the issues are determined and the evidence is judged by how one feels about them. Conclusions come from one’s moods or feelings. The emotional doubter is often very intelligent and appears to be raising serious objections to the truthfulness of Christianity. But, in reality, the uncertainty is not primarily factual and the questions are far more subjective.4

Another thing to realize about emotional doubt is that it is often stirred up by demonic activity. In his classic book The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis fancifully articulates the pressure of doubt brought on by demons:

But you can worry him with the haunting suspicion that the practice is absurd and can have no objective result. Don’t forget to use the “Heads I win, tails you lose” argument. If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and “therefore it would have happened anyway,” and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.5

Reasonable (Factual) Doubt

Reasonable doubt is mainly concerned with the evidential foundation of belief. It’s brought on when a certain belief is challenged with a new set of information. This form of doubt is not to be confused with skepticism. It’s one thing to be skeptical about a new challenge or new piece of information, but it’s quite another to question everything and never come to grips with the facts (no matter what they are). This is not the case with reasonable doubt (hence the term).

Someone with reasonable doubts doesn’t believe just because someone says she is supposed to believe. If something doesn’t make sense (if there is an apparent contradiction) to her, she will investigate until she gets the answers for which she is looking. And she won’t let it go until she gets answers. For the most part, reasonable doubt is motivated by a lack of credible answers. Just like in the court of law, if the jurors cannot conclude “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the defendant is guilty, then they must acquit. Likewise, to have reasonable doubt is to admit a level of uncertainty.

Volitional Doubt

Volitional doubt exists solely because the person is unwilling to believe. No matter how overwhelming the facts or evidence is, it doesn’t matter to him. In the case of an unbeliever, he deliberately rejects the truth of God. He doesn’t want to admit his need for God. He wants to live for himself. This is kind of like the Huxley brothers, Thomas and Aldous. They didn’t want to be under moral restraints; they wanted sexual freedom. Therefore, no matter how convincing Christianity was to them, they willfully chose to reject it.

Remember Bertrand Russell? He was one of the greatest philosophers, skeptics, and atheists of his time. This question was posed to him: “If you were to stand before the Lord, what would you say?” Russell arrogantly replied, “You did not provide me enough evidence.” Talk about a rebellious heart. But this is exactly what happens when a person chooses to harden his or her heart to the truth.

On the other hand, in the case of a believer, she can also harden her heart toward God. But does this mean she is rejecting Christ as her Lord and Savior? No. What we mean is that a Christian (who volitionally doubts) is freely choosing not to trust in God. This ranges from an undeveloped (weak) form of faith to a lack of motivation to follow the Word of God and thus choosing to sin despite the consequences. This is the most dangerous of doubts because the Christian is volitionally choosing to turn from God.

The more a Christian gives in to his or her own sinful desires, the less care and devotion he or she will have toward the things of God. Paul warns in 1 Thessalonians 5:19 that we are not to “quench the Spirit.” For Paul to give this warning, it is implied that we can disregard (or willfully refuse) the conviction of the Holy Spirit. The only remedy for volitional doubt is repentance (to change our attitude toward God).

Overcoming Doubt

We are now going to offer biblical and practical ways to address and deal with each form of doubt. It’s important to mention that we all struggle with each form of doubt (emotional, reasonable, and volitional) in our lives. However, there is always that one form of doubt that we will be more sensitive to than others. We need to be aware of this, because it will help us isolate and explain (to some degree) why we’re struggling with doubt in the first place.

Dealing with Emotional Doubt

C. S. Lewis so fittingly reminds us that our faith will go through seasons of drought and doubt. He writes, “Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. … That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist.”6

The challenge here is whether you let the truth of God rule your life or whether you give in to the fears of the flesh. Emotional doubters fixate on what-ifs all the time. However, faith doesn’t thrive on moods. Faith thrives when it holds fast to the Word of God. In 2 Peter 1:5–9, we are told how to grow in our faith:

Make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins. (NIV)

Os Guinness states it this way: “What is more, faith, like health, is best maintained by growth, nourishment and exercise and not by fighting sickness. … Equally, faith grows and flourishes when it is well nourished and exercised, so the best way to resist doubt is to build up faith rather than simply to fight against doubt.”7