Doubt

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to be here. And we're starting a new sermon series today, as you can see. Jesus, I have my doubts. Often in a Christian church, Sunday morning is kind of an exercise in whipping up believism, as I would say. People believing and believing in faith, in faith itself, and sermons become just a motivational speech to get people to pick themselves up by their own spiritual bootstraps and do it again this week. Give more. Be more. Claim more. Name it. Claim it. No negative thoughts. No confessing anything that's negative. Just positive thinking and confessing that and holding on to those promises. And in large swaths of Christianity, whether you realize it or not, no one can really talk, you know, about their weaknesses or their waverings or any doubts that they have at all about anything. If you admit a negative thought, if you question anything, if you've got a little skepticism, or if you're facing grief or sadness, or you're wondering about stuff, or you're a little depressed, well, all these are a sign of a weak faith, and therefore you are almost shunned. Shunned. Some of you have probably experienced some of this stuff at times in your life when you've gone through difficult times and then all of a sudden nobody knows what to say, nobody's really there to support, and they almost don't want to hear from you. You know, it's just kind of like, you know, they're going to bless you from a distance, maybe. So in the church, I think there has been a don't ask, don't tell policy. Does that make sense? A don't ask, don't tell policy. Don't ask if somebody's really doing okay, how are you doing today, and what's the response I want to hear from you? Fine. Or maybe, let's put it a little more spiritual, I'm blessed. Which doesn't really say anything, does it? I mean, yeah, of course, I'm always blessed, but how are you doing, right? And don't tell anybody any of your struggles. Don't even think about it, don't bring it up. And I think in other words, a lot of churches say, don't be human. Because we all have doubts, we all have, no one has a perfect faith, we all have times of sadness, we are all anxious. I worry, most of the time needlessly, right? We all have felt loneliness. And if you read the Bible honestly, you find it's filled with doubts and temptations and struggles and worry and depression and sadness and grief. I'm going to look at some of those stories in this series. And you'll find people like Moses and Elijah and Hannah and David and Miriam and Zechariah and Thomas and Peter and Paul and Euodia and Syntyche and John Mark. All of them, almost any character in the Bible, you'll find these struggles. So in this series, we're going to go kind of, I think, where our few churches have gone before. And that is, even though you faced it all, we've all faced it, we just don't talk about it. We're going to explore the reality of our lives, but even the deeper reality of God's grace in Christ, where he meets us graciously in the midst of any of our doubts or our despair or our loneliness. He doesn't avoid us. He comes and is with us. For example, you may have never read this letter before, the letter of Jude, it's one chapter, it's a short book. And a short little snippet in the book, I think, says so much. Jude 1.22, Jude says, Be merciful to those who doubt. And you know what? Jude probably did. He is the half-brother of Jesus. And Jude himself probably doubted because, well, you read in the Gospels that all of Jesus' brothers and sisters were wondering about him, wouldn't you? I mean, he's got a Messiah complex. Well, yeah, but they doubted him. And so Jude understands doubt firsthand. I don't know if we Christians have really been merciful to those who doubt. But I think it's time that we do. And I think the more that thrive as a community is merciful to one another, the more attractive we will be to a lot of people in our society. There are countless numbers of people in our community and world that are wanting to believe but struggle, who want to belong but are afraid, who want to be loved and to be listened to, who want to have someone point them to the truth of a gracious God. But they are scared of Christians at times because, well, we're known to be a bit judgmental and a bit harsh and a bit, I don't want to hear it, just tell me you're fine or that you're blessed. Don't tell me anything else. And it's time that we're open to each other. So we all need, by the way, what Peter Berger, he's a philosopher, so he came up with this principle. He called it plausibility structures. It's kind of a weird phrase. But he's basically saying we need to be part of a community. We need to have a place where we can explore the plausibility of faith, the ability to believe that there are other people who are around us whom we can talk with and communi...