Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Hey, welcome.

This is The Pastor Next Door.

This is 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’m 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 there is a moment that doesn’t get talked about very often.

It can slide in when you’re least expecting it.

It’s not loud.

It’s not dramatic.

It’s quiet.

You know, prayer maybe begins to feel flat.

You show up for worship and it just feels hollow.

Certainties that you have held for your whole life all of a sudden feel thin.

The answers, they don’t satisfy anymore.

You see, sometimes faith doesn’t collapse in a crisis.

It just slowly stops working.

It can feel like disappointment with God.

You know, the world just and life aren’t working out as you thought they would, and so a disappointment with God begins to grow.

Or perhaps you are beginning to feel a sense of emotional numbness.

Or perhaps cynicism is creeping in.

You have a loss of spiritual motivation, the idea of praying or spending some time reading in the Bible or just doing anything related to your faith.

It just feels like more of a drag than it does feeling, you know, life-giving.

Maybe you’re finding yourself questioning everything that you once assumed.

And as you do, perhaps you are starting to feel a sense of shame, right, where you begin to ask, What’s wrong with me?

Why don’t I feel the way I used to feel?

Well, it might be that you’re maturing.

You see, spiritual maturity often begins where emotional certainty ends.

Many of us grow up in our faith traditions and our faith lives with a certain kind of framework, one that is based on certainty.

And we spent a lot of time talking about that in season one of The Pastor Next Door, where we talked about building a resilient faith and how we need to move beyond these certainty-based faith models because eventually they fall short.

They don’t work in the real world.

So if your faith was built on always having the answers, you had an answer for everything, or perhaps your faith was more emotionally centered and you always had this feeling of closeness to God, or perhaps you understood some idea that God would reward you if you were obedient.

If you just did the right things, God would be happy with you and would give you everything that you wanted.

I’ve been there, particularly in the first one, the idea of, you know, a faith based on certainty with all the answers.

The thing is, is that real life exposes the limits of a certainty-based faith.

A faith built on outcomes cannot survive unanswered prayers.

You see, we need to reframe our understanding of faith.

We need to understand that faith is not certainty about outcomes.

Faith is trust in a relationship.

You see, when faith is all about this transactional process, right?

I obey, God gives me what I want, and because God gives me what I want, I will obey, or, you know, I have an answer and nobody can question, and I am absolutely certain, so everything works out well.

That is a faith based in outcomes and in transactions.

But the biblical faith, the faith that is resilient, the faith that is spiritually mature, is one that is ultimately rooted in relationship.

And I think if we look at human relationships, we know that transactions don’t work in relationships.

A transactional relationship is not a healthy relationship.

So too when it comes to God.

You know, there’s this great moment, and I think it’s probably my favorite, one of my favorite moments in the whole Bible.

It happens in John chapter 6.

Jesus has just fed the 5,000, and so then he disappears out into the wilderness.

He goes across the lake and, you know, goes out there, and the disciples jump on a boat, and they go across the Sea of Galilee, and there’s a storm, and Jesus walks on the water, and that’s a cool moment.

But the next morning is where it gets really interesting, because all of a sudden the crowds look around like, Where’s Jesus?

Where’s Jesus?

And they can’t find him.

So they go across the water and they find him.

And they come to him asking him for more signs, and Jesus says, You’re not here because of faith.

You’re here because I gave you bread and filled your stomachs.

In other words, he’s saying, You just want more.

You want more out of this transaction.

And so they come looking for him, not out of an authentic desire to be in relationship with Jesus.

But because they want their bellies filled.

And he calls them out on it.

And he goes one step further and he says, Hey, if you want bread, you want this bread, you know, you need to eat the bread of life, and the bread of life is me.

You got to eat my flesh and drink my blood.

And man, people freak all the way out, to the point that all of a sudden even his disciples begin to leave.

And he looks at his apostles, looks at those twelve that are closest to him, and he asks, Are you going to go too?

Will you leave me too?

And, you know, for Peter, one of the bright moments for Peter in the New Testament, he says, Lord, you have the words of life.

To whom shall we go?

Yeah, there’s this great—it is such a great moment because those twelve, it’s not about the transaction.

It’s not about the full belly.

It’s about the relationship with Jesus, the life-giving nature of Jesus.

Being with him made their lives full and real.

And they had a sense of who they were and identity.

And so it wasn’t transaction.

It was an overwhelming sense of trust.

And so they stayed.

They stayed.

You see, sometimes mature faith sounds less like, I understand, because I got to tell you, you keep reading in John 6 and in the 7, and the fellows didn’t understand.

Mature faith sounds less like, I understand, and more like, I don’t know, but I’m staying.

It’s like Peter, kind of in that moment, saying, Yeah, this is weird, but Lord, to whom will we go?

You have the words of life.

We want to be with you.

We don’t get it.

We’re confused, but being with you, living in this way of love, man, I don’t want to miss out on that.

So we’ll stay.

This is what a mature faith looks like.

And so in light of that, we do need to wrestle with the reality that there are times in our lives when God feels absent, when God feels far away.

There’s going to potentially be a season of spiritual dryness.

We need to understand that this is common, right?

This is, you go back and if you read the stories, the lives of kind of the people of God throughout history, what you find is you find people who experience seasons of dryness.

The prophets, read through the Psalms.

I mean, my goodness, there are so many Psalms that say things like, How long are you going to forsake me?

How long are you going to be quiet?

So a sense of spiritual dryness is common.

It’s normal.

It’s ancient.

Again, this is not something new.

It’s not like all of a sudden in the year of our Lord 2026, there is this like, Oh my gosh, people are spiritually dry.

This has been going on.

It’s part of the human condition.

It’s part of the way we, the ebbs and flows in our relationship with the divine.

It’s—and the other thing we have to understand in this is that this is not evidence of any kind of divine rejection.

This is part of our process of growing in maturity, right?

And so you can even think about this in terms of, you know, helping a kid grow up.

You know, when they’re little, we do everything for them.

And as children age, as they mature, we do less and less.

And there may come a point in time where they sort of feel abandoned by us, where they kind of feel like, Oh, I’m on my own.

What do I do now?

And there are times when they call and you have to say, Hey, I can’t give you the answer to this one.

You got to figure this out.

That happens in our spiritual lives too, as God brings us to maturity.

And so in the face of that, we need to avoid a couple of temptations.

We need to avoid the temptation to force emotion, right?

This kind of ginning up spiritual emotion.

A lot of people will chase that kind of emotional high at conferences and worship experiences.

Man, that’s not going to get it done.

Or a fake certainty, right?

This is where a lot of times people all of a sudden get really into apologetics and that kind of stuff or whatever, and they’re trying to fake some sort of security or certainty.

I’m sorry.

Or maybe we just quietly drift away.

We just quietly fall away from the faith.

Thing that happens a lot, and I think that’s what a lot of people call deconstruction, is just this kind of quiet drift.

And we need to understand, in the midst of this, that silence from God is not the same as absence.

In the same way that sometimes silence from a parent to a child is not the same as absence.

It is letting that child stand on their own two feet.

There are times when God is going to let us stand on our own two feet in a sense of maturity.

God’s silence is not evidence of absence.

Because here is the thing: God’s faithfulness is not dependent on our felt experience.

God is always faithful.

And so when we wrestle, when we question, when we doubt, when we struggle, God is not surprised.

God is not sitting up on His throne going, Oh, shame on them, shame on them.

That is not at all what He’s doing.

God is faithful.

He is there.

He’s listening.

He’s watching.

And I think there are just times where we kind of have to figure it out.

I think that’s part of the pruning and persevering process in our spiritual maturity.

Paul says it this way.

He says, We are to work out our salvation in fear and trembling.

I think that’s oftentimes what’s going on.

The covenant, the covenant of God holds even when our emotions fluctuate.

So when we’re up and down, God is faithful to His promises.

So we can wrestle, we can doubt, we can press and test and question everything.

And that is okay.

So what do you do when faith stops working?

What do we do?

What do we do when all of a sudden life is just so big and so hard and so overwhelming, and our faith doesn’t work anymore?

When the framework of certainty collapses, slow down.

Just slow down.

Start with that.

Keep it simple.

Slow down.

Don’t make permanent decisions in the midst of temporary disillusionment.

When we are going through this, it can be easy to chuck everything and just react.

Slow down.

Don’t make any permanent decisions.

Perhaps instead of trying to continue to do all the things that you’ve always done, just keep one small practice.

Maybe it’s a short time of meditation.

Maybe it’s you open up the Psalms and you read your favorite Psalm or just a verse.

Or maybe you open up the Beatitudes and you just read the Beatitudes in Matthew chapter five or something along those lines.

Just keep one small practice and stay connected to at least one safe person, because this, at the end of the day, is, I think, the most dangerous thing when people enter into a season of deconstruction, is so often they end up isolating.

When we isolate, that is when we are going to fall into seasons of despair and cynicism, and we move beyond deconstruction.

Into something else, into something that is heartbreaking.

The beautiful thing is, you don’t have to rebuild today.

So stay connected to one safe person.

In the midst of your deconstruction, just don’t isolate.

And so this leads us into our next episode, which is, if something is beginning to come apart, the question really becomes, what do we keep?

Is there anything good?

Is there anything good that comes out of Nazareth?

Is there anything good in our faith?

What do we keep?

What are the things that we keep?

What do we release?

What are the stuff?

What’s the stuff that we say, no, that does not work anymore.

In other words, what is essential?

Because here’s the thing.

Sometimes what’s falling apart isn’t faith.

It’s a version of faith that cannot carry us into adulthood.

I want to say that one more time.

Sometimes what’s falling apart isn’t faith.

It’s a version of faith that could not carry us into adulthood.

So if your faith feels thin right now, you are not alone.

If it feels like something inside is unraveling, that may not be destruction.

It may be deconstruction.

It may simply be transition.

So in the next episode, we’ll talk about what to keep, what to let go, how to begin rebuilding without pretending.

For now, stay gentle with yourself, and I will see you next time.