Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Hey, this is The Pastor Next Door.

It’s a podcast for honest conversations about faith, especially when faith feels complicated, uncertain, or worn down.

I’m not here to give you easy answers or to fix anything.

I am here to sit with you for a bit, ask good questions, and make room for grace and honesty along the way.

Wherever you’re coming from today, I’m really glad you’re here.

Let’s get started.

So we talked last time a little bit about physical strength and developing strength in our faith, a resilient faith, using the means of grace.

So I want you to think a little bit again about physical fitness.

One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about lately in my own physical fitness is the necessity for flexibility.

You see, strength without flexibility leads to injuries.

If our muscles in our body are rigid, they’re going to tear.

We’re going to pull muscles.

We are going to get hurt.

Healthy muscles are ones that can bend, right?

We need to be able to bend and stretch and all of that.

So as we build strength, we also need to grow in our ability to bend.

The same is true spiritually.

Some faith collapses under pressure, not because it’s weak, but because it was rigid.

So let’s talk a little bit about the difference between a rigid faith and a resilient faith.

So a rigid faith is one where there are no room for questions, right?

You cannot ask questions when your faith is rigid.

You can’t wrestle with it.

You can’t struggle with it.

You can’t wonder about it because as you ask questions, the whole thing feels like it’s going to snap and break because there’s no flexibility in it.

There’s no ability to bend.

It’s like a house of cards.

You take one card out and the whole thing comes crashing down.

That is what a rigid faith looks like.

And that’s really not going to help us grow a resilient faith.

In a rigid faith, we believe that certainty equals maturity, right?

So the person who is absolutely certain about all the things, they’re the one that is really and truly mature in their faith.

Now, I don’t want us to equate certainty with confidence.

I think that a resilient faith is one that has a sense of healthy confidence, even though it might not be leaning on certainty.

You see, maturity is not rooted in certainty.

Maturity really is rooted in the ability to ask questions, to go deep, to struggle with things.

That’s what maturity looks like.

Sometimes people with a rigid faith or who teach a rigid faith, they argue that doubt equals rebellion.

So they would say doubt is something bad, something wrong, something sinful, something that you should run away from because if you’re doubting, then you’re rebelling against God in some way.

That could not be further from the truth.

Doubt is the flip side of faith.

The scriptures define faith as certainty and hope for things unseen, right?

And so if they are things that are unseen, this hope that leads to a sense of certainty, I would argue confidence is a better way of translating that word there.

But doubt is going to be a natural thing if we have faith because we can’t see the thing we’re believing.

We can’t touch it.

We can’t feel it.

When you are living by faith, doubt is just right there with you.

It is a healthy part of having a resilient faith is embracing doubt and leaning into it and walking through the struggle.

Another thing that a rigid faith teaches is that change equals compromise.

As though making a change of mind is again somehow wrong or bad.

But what change is, is change is what we would use in our spiritual language.

If you want to use the language of theology and doctrine, the word for change is repentance.

You see, change is not compromise.

Change is the result of wrestling and being transformed by the renewal of our minds through the Spirit.

So we should change.

We should not be the same people we were a year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, thirty years ago.

Change is good.

Change is what a resilient faith brings.

And so if you’re somebody who grew up in a faith or maybe you came to Christ at some point and you were taught that faith looks like this, no room for questions, that certainty equals maturity, that doubt equals rebellion, that change equals compromise.

I want you to know that those things aren’t true.

That as you wrestle, that is a good thing.

Because even though many of us were taught that faith means never wavering, real life does not cooperate with that metal.

It just doesn’t.

That model of faith is maybe great in a vacuum, but as we walk through this life of tribulation and struggle, those things are not reality.

We need a resilient faith.

We need one that can bounce back in the face of tough stuff.

So what does a resilient faith look like?

Well, we’ve talked about this a little bit before, but it trusts without controlling.

You see, you can have a sense of faith that is confident, that is real, that is hopeful, that is rooted in the gospel, that is rooted in the person of Christ, and yet is not controlling.

The Apostle Paul puts it this way.

He says in Galatians that for freedom, Christ has set us free.

This is what the gospel does.

The gospel removes us from a sense of control, being controlled by somebody.

That is not faith.

But a resilient faith is one that trusts, trusts a good and loving God who cares for us, who wants us to grow, who wants us to be the best people that we can possibly be.

A resilient faith is one that asks without abandoning.

It is a faith that leans into the questions.

It says, hey, we can ask all the questions we want to ask, and God is not going to abandon us, and we are not going to abandon God in the midst of asking these questions.

Regardless of how the answers come out, man, we ask these questions, and I think eventually what we’re going to come back to is we’re going to come back to the reality that God loves us.

And he wants us to abide with him.

And if we’re going to abide with God, then, man, we are going to get to ask questions all over the place.

So a resilient faith is one that asks without abandoning, and it adjusts without dissolving.

When we learn new information, we adjust.

We change.

Again, this is what a resilient faith looks like.

It is one that is ever-evolving, or in my faith tradition, we call it ever-reforming.

We are growing and transforming and changing.

The more we learn, the more we learn about who God is, the more the Spirit of God unveils for us who God is through Christ, we are going to change, and our understanding is going to change, and it should, and it absolutely should.

A resilient faith bends, but it doesn’t let go.

So we need to understand, I think, the role of doubt.

I think we need to understand how normal doubt is, and how doubt is just the— it’s like the proper response to having a resilient faith.

It is—I’m going to say this again— doubt is not the opposite of faith.

Certainty is.

And this is one of those funny things, right?

I mean, you think about this idea of going to heaven.

You think about this idea of spending eternity with Christ.

There’s that moment, there’s a line, a phrase that people use in the church, when we long for the day when faith will become sight.

What happens when faith becomes sight?

There’s no more faith.

You see, at that point, it’s simply certainty.

It is, you know, we know exactly what it is that we’re looking at.

There’s no more need for faith.

You see, this is the beautiful thing, I think, when one of the things that we long for in the culmination of all things is that we don’t need faith, we won’t need faith anymore.

Doubt will be gone.

Certainty will be left.

But until then, in this already but not yet that we live in, this existence of tension where faith is all that we have, doubt is going to be everywhere.

And it is the normal response to having a robust faith.

Because here’s what doubt signals.

Doubt signals deep thinking.

Doubt means that we are thinking about our faith.

We are thinking about who God in Christ is.

We are thinking about what does the Bible have to say?

What is it teaching us?

What is God leaning me into?

When we are thinking deeply about those things, we’re going to experience doubt because we’re going to learn new things.

We’re going to learn things that are different from things that we thought we absolutely knew.

And so deep thinking is a signal of doubt.

Doubt is also a signal of us wrestling with morality.

When we read the stories in Joshua, you read the conquest narrative, I hope you wrestle with morality.

It is a disturbing thing to read in the Old Testament, to read the conquest narrative, which is a picture of genocide.

I mean, to kill every man, woman, and beast.

That is genocidal behavior.

That should cause us to wrestle with morality.

Moral wrestling is, we read doubt, but moral wrestling is a part of our maturing.

Moral wrestling is a part of us trying to understand what is going on.

And that is good.

Doubt often also signals emotional honesty.

When we are going through the trials and tribulations of this life, we do not need to fake it with God.

We do not need to pretend like God is not okay with us sharing what is going on in our hearts and in our souls.

When we go through hard stuff, we’re going to be sad.

We’re going to be angry.

We are going to be confused.

We’re going to feel lost.

We may feel isolated.

We might just feel depressed.

We might feel anxious.

Too often, we say, oh, those things are doubt.

Yeah, but doubt is signaling in us Then as we grow to maturity, as we grow older, as we are able to understand things more deeply, that faith has to evolve.

So for instance, the story of Noah is one that as a child is basically a story about animals and a boat and a rainbow.

And then you read, and as you get older, you read through that story, and it is horrific.

It is a horrific story.

So when we scrutinize that story as adults in a maturing faith, that story doesn’t survive the scrutiny.

It doesn’t survive in the same way, right?

It doesn’t survive in the same way as a childhood telling of it initially does.

And that’s okay.

And it’s supposed to be like that.

And so we shed the distortions, and we grow a deeper understanding of things.

Or we might think that God is going to make everything all the time perfect for people who are good enough.

And there’s all kinds of theological statements like that that creep into our minds that we kind of pick up along the way or that we sort of think we hear as we’re growing up in our faith, that when we scrutinize those things by the Scriptures, they just don’t hold up.

And so letting go of unhealthy theology is not abandoning God.

It is quite the opposite.

The reality is that we all have an idol that we chase.

We have an imperfect picture of the divine being, and that is because God is infinite and we are finite.

We are never going to perfectly comprehend the God of the universe.

And so the more we get to know God, the more God reveals God’s self to us, the more we study and grow in the Scriptures and different things, we are going to have new, clearer, better understandings of who God is, and we’re going to let go of the unhealthy stuff.

We’re going to let go of the stuff that’s not right.

We’re going to let go of the stuff that is wrong.

That’s not abandoning of God.

That is a moving closer to the true sense and identity of who God is.

So this flexibility, we need to understand, is not relativism.

It’s not this whole, like, oh, there’s no real truth.

No, no, no, no.

The flexibility that grows from us engaging with doubt, for us going deeper, for us wrestling and unlearning things, that flexibility is resiliency.

It is the very thing that helps us to get deeper into our relationship with God.

As I think about my relationship with my wife, what I know about her and my understanding of her is so much different now than it was in 1995 when I met her, right?

As it should be.

And so why should our understandings of God remain absolutely inflexible?

That’s not relativism.

That is a growth in a relationship.

And here’s how we know this, is because a resilient faith remains centered on Christ.

So we have this kind of centering faith on the person of Christ.

We try to understand and know Christ more deeply.

And as we do, we are going to grow in our clarity and our understanding.

And so the resurrection remains the hope.

We keep looking out towards the resurrection and say, I long for the day of my full sense of understanding of the resurrection.

As Paul would say, I want to do anything to taste the resurrection of Christ.

So that’s the hope.

And love remains the telos.

Love remains the end thing, the end goal.

We grow in love.

If we are growing in love, if we are growing in what Galatians 5 calls the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, then if we’re growing in that, then we are moving to a deeper, clearer, more faithful knowledge and understanding of who God is.

That is what a resilient faith is rooted in.

So how do we develop this flexibility?

How do we develop this flexibility that leads us to resiliency?

Well, deep roots.

We lay down deep roots like we talked about in the previous episode on strength.

We grow.

We seek to develop a clear understanding of who Jesus is.

We seek to grow a deep understanding of our identity in Christ.

Who are we in Christ?

What does it mean for us to be the followers of Jesus, to be the body of Christ out in the world?

So we grow these deep roots.

We also expose ourselves to differences, to people who are different, different faiths, different denominations, different cultures, different backgrounds, because exposure to difference raises in us the questions that need to be asked, that help us to grow in flexibility, which develops resiliency, right?

So differences, exposure to differences is nothing to be afraid of.

It is something to be leaned into.

And then suffering.

I know that sounds terrible, and I know that we don’t like to talk about it, but suffering in our life helps us to grow in our flexibility and resiliency.

It is that pressure.

It’s that strenuous tension that helps our faith muscle grow.

So we need suffering in our life in the same way that if you’re trying to grow strong, you have to lift more weights, right?

You have to put greater tension on your muscles to grow them.

And the way we do that in our faith is through suffering.

And then finally, we need time.

A resilient faith is not built instantaneously.

No, a resilient faith is built up over time.

And so we don’t have to rush it, right?

You’re not going to be as resilient now as you are tomorrow, and you’re not going to be as resilient tomorrow as you are six months from now or five years from now if you lean into these things.

So with that then, during this time, what are some practical habits that we can use to cultivate flexibility?

Well, one is listening before defending.

This is one of the hardest things for me to do.

I have had to learn to listen to other people’s questions about my faith without jumping right into defending my faith.

I need to listen.

I need to hear their question.

Because if I can listen and hear what their question is, I can identify the reality that it’s probably a really good question.

And perhaps it’s something that I need to wrestle with and I need to think through.

And then so as those questions bubble up, not being afraid of those questions, then I need to sit with them and not rush towards answers.

I don’t have to rush out and find some apologetic to try to sway any sense of doubt that I might have.

I can sit with the question.

I can sit with the mystery.

I can wrestle with it.

And then read broadly but anchored.

Read lots of things.

Read Christians.

Read non-Christians.

Read Christians across a variety of spectrums and a variety of faiths, types of faith, of progressive to conservative.

Because the more we read, the more broadly we read, what it’s going to do is it is going to help us to see this prism of faith from a bunch of different angles.

And we are going to be able to identify the things that are good and true and beautiful because we believe that the Spirit of God lives in us.

Right?

Now we want to keep coming back to the anchor and that anchor being Christ.

So we want to keep coming back to, I would argue, the Scriptures.

But as we keep coming back and kind of have our reading anchored in the Scriptures, we read broadly beyond that.

And then the last thing is praying honestly.

We don’t have to pretend with God.

We can pray with absolute honesty.

God meets us in our honest prayers.

You don’t have to resolve every tension to remain faithful.

I want to say that one more time.

You don’t have to resolve every tension to remain faithful.

So if we’re wrestling with all this stuff, if we’re entering into doubt, if we’re walking through these tensions, you might be sitting here saying, Huh, I’m feeling pretty anxious, Dan.

This is creating some fear in me.

And the two big fears that I see from people when I start talking this way, when I talk about another word for building flexibility and wrestling and entering into and normalizing doubt and unlearning things, that unlearning part is something called deconstruction.

We’ll talk much more about that later.

But we’re going to do a whole season on deconstruction in season two.

And so the fears that come out is, if I question, everything will unravel.

No, it won’t.

I understand the fear.

But if we really believe that God is divine and God is infinite and God is eternal, if God is God and we are not, then us asking questions are not going to unravel everything.

What they might do is they might show us some places that are significantly problematic in our beliefs, that are significantly problematic in our traditions.

But not everything is going to unravel.

And if it does, that’s okay.

We’ll unravel it back together in a whole new and more beautiful way through Christ.

The other big fear I hear is, if I admit doubt, then I’ll slide away.

And maybe you will.

But most likely you won’t.

Most people I know that have walked away from the faith are the people who have been told over and over and over again that they cannot doubt.

And so as a result of that, they walk away.

They walk away and say, well, if I can’t doubt, if this faith can’t hold up to questions, if this faith can’t hold up to wrestling, if this faith can’t hold up to doubt, I’m out.

And I think the opposite is true.

If we admit doubt, if we lean into doubt, if we embrace doubt, we are going to draw closer and more deeper with Christ.

Because God is not fragile.

God can handle our questions.

God can handle our doubts.

And truth is not threatened by inquiry.

Right?

If this is true, then the questions are good.

The questions are going to draw us deeper in.

We’re going to have greater understanding.

We’re going to know more.

We’re going to learn more.

Truth is, not only is