How the Church Can Support Someone Wrestling with Doubt

We Need Fellowship

One of the things that we need for every element of the Christian life is the fellowship of our brothers and sisters in Christ. In any given church, we are going to have a range of people with a range of experiences, backgrounds, and expertise. Often, we will find our own questions and doubts most helpfully answered by people in our local community who might have a particular way that they can relate to that question.

I think of examples in my own church community up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where folks who maybe are wrestling with the goodness of Christian sexual ethics can meet people in our church community who either were previously in same-sex sexual relationships before they became Christians and can speak to the goodness of the gospel and Jesus’s worthiness (how it’s actually worth saying no to our sexual romantic desires to say yes to Jesus), or there are people like me who have grown up in the church always experiencing same-sex attraction and always wanting to follow Jesus.

Those kinds of stories can be helpful for those who are really wrestling with questions like, How can I say that Jesus really has the right to tell me what to do with my body or what I’m going to find in my heart?

Jesus diagnoses our hearts as factories of sin. He says that out of a man’s heart come all sorts of sinful desires, including sexually sinful desires. So even the fact that same-sex desire might seem to be sort of naturally springing up in our hearts, our culture will say that testifies to the fact that it’s a good, beautiful, and natural thing. Actually, when we open the pages of Scripture, we find that what springs out of my heart, in so many ways, isn’t necessarily good, true, or beautiful. But in the context of the local church, I can see people who are embodiments of the goodness of the gospel in that particular area.

One of the things that we need for every element of the Christian life is the fellowship of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

I think of the area of struggling with the reality of suffering. Currently, in my life right now, praise God, I’m living a very happy life. And that means that I’m actually not particularly well-positioned to help somebody who’s really struggling with the question of suffering right now. But there will be many in my community who’ve been through or are currently going through meaningful experiences of suffering who can point their brothers and sisters to the goodness of Jesus in the midst of their suffering.

I don’t think that means that if we are not currently experiencing something or if we don’t have a particular expertise or a kind of life experience to share that we can’t say anything meaningful to help a brother or sister, because all of us have God’s word in the Scriptures. We’ll find what we need in there. But it can land especially helpfully with us, if we are deeply struggling with a question of doubt, to connect with somebody in our local church community who might be able to see that with fresh eyes for us and to help point us back to the goodness of the gospel and the goodness of the Lord in relation to that area of struggle.

Rebecca McLaughlin is the author of How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life.

---

---

Related Articles

---

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.