Are you allowed to doubt God?  That is an interesting question.  I have an interesting answer.  The answer is, "No".  You can’t doubt God, and "Yes", you can doubt God.

How is that possible?  I'm glad that you asked.

Of course, God prefers that you don’t doubt Him.  He would love for you to just take Him at His word.  However, He knows that you won’t.  God always has your best interests in mind, but you often, and many times openly, wonder if that is true.

The verse starts out with, "And we know".  Do we?  Do you?  This verse takes a lot of faith most of the time.  It can also make you doubt, because it seems as if things don’t always work out for your good.

God wishes that you would not doubt, but He knows you will.  He gives great grace.  He also has a lot of patience with you and everyone.  He allows you to question Him.

Then the devil goes to work and plays with your mind.  You either feel bad for doubting God or you go to the other extreme and get mad at God and assume things that have not happened yet. 

In both instances, you are then eventually ashamed and don’t know what to do, and this is where many give up on Jesus.  Jesus never gives up on you.  You give up on Him.  Jesus does not want you to do that.

Romans 8:1 is a great verse.  "There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit."

Jesus has no intention of condemning you for not trusting in Him.  He wants to take you in His arms and then show you.  He wants to take time with you.

What you have to realize is, you will doubt, and God is not "OK" with it.  However, He understands that you will doubt Him, and He has decided to look past your doubt and help you anyway with His love and mercy.

When you have doubts, what you have to do is go to God with them.  Practice Matthew 18 with God. Don’t go to other people first, go directly to God, and see what happens.  When we don’t practice Matthew 18 with the Lord, what do you think will happen?  God says that no one knows His mind.  So, why are you asking others what the Lord wants for you.  Go to Him and see what happens.

God wants to answer your doubts and your questions.  When you allow others to speak into your life about your doubts, it muddies the waters.  You then go to God with the answer you want, instead of waiting to hear THE answer you need that He has for you.

God has no desire to confuse you or harm you, yet things will arise, and it will look like God is doing just that.  You can wonder where God is in a particular situation of your life.  You can even wonder why it is happening.  Just take the time to go to Him and let Him explain it to you and allow peace to return to your life. 

Will you doubt God at some point in life?  Yes, you will.  You will probably do it more than once.  Does God want you to do that?  No, but does God put up with that?  Yes.  He not only does so, but He is also there to respond personally and specifically to you.

Are you tired of going through the same thing again and again in your life?  Are you tired of not getting the answers you need in your life?  If that is you, you are not alone. This has plagued every single person who has lived throughout all of time.

Have you ever thought that the church is great, but said, "I go, but I don’t get the answers there either.  It seems like God has forgotten me or maybe does not care about me"?  This is why so many people think that the church is irrelevant today, because they think that nothing happens there that impacts their lives.

God gave you the church to be a safe place for you to go to and get the answers that you need so that you can always move forward in life.  However, today it seems as if the church is powerless.

The church is to be a powerful place of love, but in order to experience love, there is a requirement, vulnerability.  To get what you really want, you have to be vulnerable.  You have to be willing to put it all out there, and trust that the person who you are being vulnerable in front of will not hurt you.

You have to be vulnerable to experience love. Jesus gave you the church to be a safe place to be vulnerable.  In the early church, they came, and they bore their souls.  They opened up about life, issues, sin, doubts, and I am sure some were mad at God. 

Then they went back to their weekly lives, but something was different. Yes, the same issues, people, and evil surrounded them, but now they knew none of it mattered, because Jesus was there with them in reality.

That is why the early church grew.  Things happened, miraculous things happened, but only after the people opened up.

This is what you are looking for, and it is what everyone is looking for.  This is what makes the church relevant.  You will get things out of it for the very first time and will look forward to coming back and then sharing your faith.  Actually, you won’t have to share it, it will just come out of you in your life, and people will notice and will ask you where they can get what you have.  Then you will tell them where you got it and tell them that they can get it too.

It is to be a weekly experience, because new things happen, well, things that are new to us. However, nothing is new to God, and because of that, God has THE answer for everything waiting at His church, at the altar, where He is waiting for you.

Jesus is saying, "Come and get it".  Will you?  The devil will say that can’t happen, but Jesus is saying, yes it will!  Trust God!

I will end this week with the popular saying, "Don’t knock it till you try it".

Have you ever heard these sayings? Standing on the promises. Standing in faith. Waiting on the Lord. I have heard these most of my life. Many Christians use these phrases. They especially tend to use them when things don’t seem to be going well. Many then wonder what good is it to be a Christian. It doesn’t seem like our life is better than theirs and it should be?

God has called us to be part of His army, but so often we fight a defensive war. We want to stand our ground.  The problem is, when you stand in one place, and defend one place, eventually the enemy will wear you down and you will surrender.

The devil has some powerful weapons at his disposal, but God says that He will protect you. He gave us a shield, the shield of faith. The thing is, God never said that the shield is for defense only. It is actually given so that we can move forward. So many times, Christians just stand in one place, and it becomes all too easy for the devil to continue to hurt us. Eventually, the devil wears down our faith. The shield of faith always works, but it only works if we hold it up, and sometimes, we get tired of holding it up.

If you want victory in your life, if you want to see the enemy stop attacking you, and see those fiery darts quenched once and for all, as Jesus says in Ephesian 6:16, then we have to move forward behind the shield of faith.

When we move forward towards the enemy, yes, the enemy will still do his thing, eventually, you will get to where the enemy is and crush him. When you do that, you won’t have to worry about his attacks anymore, because you will have stopped the enemy once and for all. You also get to move past your enemy, and out of his range. When that happens, you can relax.

We are in a spiritual war, and like any war, it is tough and tiring.  God gave us this amazing shield of faith so that we can move and get to the place we want to be.

The shield was not given to keep you safe where you are, or where you think it is supposed to be safe, but to allow you to move forward, to crush the enemy, and to get to the place of your destiny, where real safety and peace reside. God has a place for all of us.

However, too many Christians put their shield up and just wait, hoping that the enemy will give up. The enemy will not give up.  What happens is, we give up on our faith and put our shield down. God wants you to have an amazing life, but we need to use our faith as God intended us to, to allow us to move forward and tread down our enemies and arrive at our place of destiny.

When we do that, we will see God move in so many ways that will bolster our faith. We will wonder if it can really work, and God is OK with that.  God just says to trust Him and move forward. As we do, we will see the miracles of God in our lives that we need to see, and we will then advance as God intended, with all the signs following.