There are some questions Christians don’t like admitting they have.
We are pretty comfortable asking God what He wants us to do. We ask Him where we should go, how we should handle something, or what decision we should make. Those feel like acceptable questions. There are other questions that feel a little more dangerous.
God, are You really there? Did I misunderstand You? Why would You let this happen? Can I still trust You?
And maybe the hardest question is the one you never expected yourself to ask.
What if I’m wrong about all of this?
I remember working at a little church in a town not far from where I grew up. I was serving as the Worship Director, and honestly, it was a refreshing season for me. The Lord used that church to help me heal in some ways and to understand what was truly important about the local church.
One night, I was driving home after having a conversation I never expected to have.
For years, I had believed God was leading me toward pastoral ministry. That part had never really been the question. The question was why the road there seemed to keep getting longer.
I don’t remember everything that was said in that meeting, but I remember the message clearly. Without a degree, I wasn’t qualified to be their pastor.
The church was willing to let me preach and provide pastoral care as much as I wanted for free, but if I wanted to actually serve as their pastor, I needed a degree.
What made that especially hard was that I was already preaching, leading worship, and doing a lot of the ministry after their pastor had moved on. I was already doing much of the work. I just wasn’t considered qualified to have the role.
I hit every stop light on the way home, and each one seemed to take longer than normal. Maybe I was just noticing them more that night. I was already tired of feeling like my life was stuck at a red light.
Earlier that week, I had encouraged someone else to trust God. I had told them that God was still working even when they couldn’t see it. I believed what I told them. I still believe it now.
But sitting at one of those red lights, I realized I was having a much harder time believing it for myself.
I remember thinking, God, I know what I’m supposed to say here. I know the verses. I know the answers I would give someone sitting across from me. But I don’t understand what You’re doing.
That was the part that bothered me.
It wasn’t that I suddenly stopped believing in God. I wasn’t questioning whether Jesus was real or whether Scripture was true. It was more personal than that.
I was wondering whether I had misunderstood Him.
Had I prayed for the wrong thing? Had I mistaken my own hopes for God’s direction? Had I been telling myself that God was working when really I just didn’t want to admit that things weren’t going the way I thought they would?
I didn’t have some dramatic crisis of faith that night. I just drove home with questions I didn’t really know what to do with.
I knew how to help other people carry their doubts.
I wasn’t nearly as sure what to do with my own.
Maybe that’s one reason a little moment in Matthew’s Gospel has always caught my attention. John the Baptist knew something about questions that didn’t seem to fit the person asking them.
John Wasn’t Supposed to Be the One Asking This Question
John the Baptist is in prison when Matthew tells us something surprising.
Earlier in his ministry, John had been very clear about Jesus. In John 1:29-34, John identifies Jesus and tells the people around him what he had witnessed. He had seen the Spirit descend upon Jesus. He had testified about who Jesus was.
John wasn’t standing on the outside trying to decide whether any of this was true. He knew Jesus. He had seen things and preached things that left very little doubt about what he believed.
Then, from prison, John sent some of his disciples to Jesus with a question.
“Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?”
Matthew 11:3 ESV
That is an incredible question when you remember who is asking it.
Matthew doesn’t tell us exactly what was happening inside John’s mind, and I think we need to be careful not to pretend that he does. John’s imprisonment may have contributed to his struggle. He also may have expected the Messiah’s ministry to look different than what he was hearing about Jesus. Enduring Word points to both of those as possibilities, but Scripture never tells us exactly what was going through John’s mind.
What we do know is where he was when he asked the question.
He was in prison.
And sometimes where you are sitting changes the way everything looks.
I learned something similar years ago when a pastor I had looked up to for much of my childhood and young adult life fell into sin. I wasn’t especially close to him, but I knew him well enough to respect him. He was one of those people I had always associated with faithfulness and ministry.
When I learned what had happened, it challenged something I had believed for a long time.
Somewhere along the way, I had developed the idea that if someone truly loved Jesus, was called by God, and had served faithfully for years, somehow God would keep them from falling that far.
But calling doesn’t remove our ability to make terrible choices. Being used by God doesn’t make someone incapable of sin. Years of faithfulness don’t mean we stop needing accountability, humility, and grace.
That realization changed the way I looked at ministry, but it also changed the way I looked at myself.
If someone I respected that much could fall, then experience, gifting, and calling were never going to make me immune.
For a while, that realization didn’t make my faith stronger. It made some things feel less certain.
I had believed something clearly, and disappointment forced me to look at it again.
I’ve watched that happen many times over the years. Most people don’t wake up one morning and suddenly decide they don’t believe in God anymore. Usually something happens first.
A prayer isn’t answered. A marriage doesn’t get better. Someone they love dies. A church hurts them. A leader disappoints them. Their child walks away from God. They believe they have obeyed, and life still falls apart.
The question starts as, “God, what are You doing?”
After enough time, it can become, “God, do I really know You at all?”
Sometimes doubt is disappointment that has been sitting alone for too long.
Sometimes We Don’t Doubt God. We Doubt the God We Expected.
I wonder how much of our struggle with God comes from expectations we didn’t even realize we had.
We know God doesn’t promise an easy life. We know that because we’ve heard it preached, and we’ve probably said it ourselves. But knowing that and living it are two very different things.
Somewhere inside us there can still be this quiet assumption that obedience should make the road a little straighter.
If I follow Jesus, surely this will work out. If I pray faithfully, surely God will answer the way I’m asking. If I’m doing what He told me to do, surely He won’t let this fall apart. If this person matters this much to me, surely God will heal them.
Then “surely” doesn’t happen.
That’s when we have to begin separating God from the outcome we expected from Him.
I don’t say that lightly. Some of the things people are carrying are deeply painful. I don’t think the answer is to shrug and say, “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” and move on.
That may be true, but true things can still be used in unhelpful ways.
There are moments when a person doesn’t need a theological sentence handed to them. They need someone willing to sit with the question for a little while.
For many years, I thought my own calling was tied to a particular church. I couldn’t really picture myself serving anywhere else. In my mind, I knew what God had called me to do, and I also had a pretty good idea of what I thought it was supposed to look like.
The problem was that the doors weren’t opening.
I prayed about it. I asked God for opportunities. I asked Him to make a way. I tried to trust His timing.
What I didn’t realize was that underneath many of those prayers was an assumption.
I wanted God to open a door, but I had already decided which door I wanted Him to open.
Eventually, I remember praying something much simpler.
“Lord, I’ll go wherever You send me.”
Something in me changed when I prayed that.
I wasn’t asking Him to make my plan work anymore. I was finally willing to let Him change the plan.
There was a lot wrapped up in that church for me. There were people I loved, history I valued, and a future I could imagine because it was familiar.
Going wherever God sent me meant giving up my ability to picture what came next.
It also made me realize that I had been asking God for direction while still trying to control the destination.
Nothing about that prayer was profound. It wasn’t eloquent. But it was honest.
I finally stopped asking God to prove that my version of the story was right.
I was willing to let Him write a different one.
John Took His Question to Jesus
John did something with his question.
He sent it to Jesus.
I love that because John didn’t clean the question up first. He didn’t try to make it sound more spiritual than it was. He wanted to know if Jesus really was the One.
And Jesus could handle the question.
Sometimes we act as if God is going to be surprised by what we really think. We pray around the thing we are actually upset about. We use good Christian language. We tell God we trust Him while quietly wondering whether we do.
But if you’re angry, He already knows. If you’re confused, He already knows. If you’re disappointed, He already knows.
You aren’t protecting God by refusing to say what is actually happening inside you.
There is a difference between walking away from God because you have questions and bringing your questions with you while you keep walking toward Him.
Maybe faith isn’t never having questions.
Maybe sometimes faith is choosing where you take them.
Jesus Didn’t Explain the Prison
This may be the part of the story that gets me the most.
Jesus answers John, but He doesn’t answer him the way I probably would have wanted Him to.
He doesn’t explain why John is still in prison. He doesn’t give him a timeline. He doesn’t tell him what will happen next.
Instead, Jesus tells John’s messengers:
“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.”
Matthew 11:4-5 ESV
Jesus points John toward what is already happening.
John asks who Jesus is, and Jesus tells him to look again.
I think I would have wanted more.
I would have wanted Jesus to explain the prison. Maybe you would too.
That’s usually what we want when we doubt God. We want to know why something happened, when it is going to change, and how He plans to fix it. We want the missing pages from the story.
Jesus doesn’t give John those pages.
He gives him enough to remember who Jesus is.
There have been times when I wanted God to explain something and instead I had to go back and remember what I already knew. Not because the question stopped mattering, and not because the pain disappeared, but because the thing I couldn’t understand had started becoming bigger in my mind than everything I had already seen.
That happens easily.
One unanswered prayer can become louder than years of answered ones. One painful season can make a lifetime of God’s faithfulness seem far away. One closed door can make us forget every door He has opened.
Doubt has a way of shrinking our field of vision.
Jesus widened John’s again.
Then Jesus Does Something I Didn’t Expect
After John’s messengers leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and starts talking about John.
This is where I might expect a warning about doubt. Instead, Jesus reminds the crowd who John is. He calls him a prophet and more than a prophet. Then He says that among those born of women, no one greater than John the Baptist had arisen.
John brought Jesus a serious question, and Jesus didn’t throw away everything He knew about John because of it.
That matters to me because I know how quickly Christians can become ashamed of doubt.
We think the question means something is wrong with us. We worry it cancels the faith we had yesterday. We start looking back at an earlier version of ourselves and wondering where that person went.
You used to feel sure. Now you don’t.
But your questions may change how you see yourself without changing what Jesus already knows about you.
There have been many times when I had a question and, instead of asking someone, I quietly went and looked it up myself. I didn’t want to seem uneducated or inexperienced. I thought a pastor should probably already know.
Looking back, I wish I had been more comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”
Having a question doesn’t make you unqualified. It means you are still learning.
John asked his question.
Maybe we can too.
What Do You Do When You Doubt God?
I don’t think there is a trick that makes doubt disappear, and I’m suspicious of anyone who makes it sound that easy.
But John’s story gives us somewhere to start.
Ask God the real question. Pray the prayer you are actually thinking instead of the one you believe you are supposed to pray.
Look at Jesus again. Before you decide everything you believed was wrong because of one painful chapter, return to the Gospels. Look at what Jesus said and what He did.
Remember what you have already seen. Don’t use yesterday’s faithfulness to pretend today doesn’t hurt. Let it remind you that today isn’t the only evidence you have.
There are times when faith feels like standing on a hill where you can see for miles.
There are other times when you can barely see what comes next.
The second kind is still faith.
John Was Still in Prison
We have to leave John’s story where Scripture leaves it.
Jesus sent John’s disciples back with an answer, but Matthew never tells us that John’s prison door suddenly opened. In fact, Matthew 14 records that John was later executed by Herod.
That isn’t the ending I would choose.
Maybe that is part of why his story matters so much.
Sometimes Jesus answers our questions by changing the situation.
Sometimes He doesn’t.
Sometimes He gives us enough truth to keep trusting Him while we are still sitting in a place we don’t understand.
I think back sometimes to that drive home from the little church, hitting what felt like every red light between there and home.
At the time, I thought the problem was that God wasn’t opening the door I had been waiting for. I knew I was called to pastoral ministry. I had believed that for years. So when I was told I could preach, lead worship, provide pastoral care, and do much of the work of ministry, but still wasn’t qualified to actually be their pastor, I didn’t know what to do with it.
Sitting at those red lights, it felt like one more place where I was being told to wait.
What I know now is that the conversation wasn’t the end of my calling.
It was one moment on a much longer road.
I couldn’t see that then. I couldn’t see the other churches, the people I would meet, the things God still needed to teach me, or the ways my understanding of ministry would change.
All I could see was the door in front of me, and it wasn’t opening.
I think that is one of the hardest things about doubt.
We usually have to make sense of the story while we are still somewhere in the middle of it.
We don’t know what the next chapter holds. We don’t know whether the door will eventually open or whether God is going to lead us somewhere we never considered. We just know that what is happening right now doesn’t look anything like what we expected.
Maybe that’s where you are right now.
Something happened that you didn’t expect, and you are having a harder time understanding the God you once felt so sure about. You aren’t trying to rebel against Him. You aren’t looking for a reason to walk away.
You just don’t understand what He is doing.
If that’s you, I don’t think you need to be afraid of the question.
John wasn’t.
Bring the question with you and take it to Jesus. Look again at what He has done. Remember what you already know about Him, even if you don’t know what He is doing right now.
Then keep going.
I eventually learned that a red light doesn’t mean the road ends there.
Sometimes you really are being asked to wait. Sometimes the road ahead is going to take a turn you couldn’t see coming. Sometimes you will understand later, and sometimes you may carry questions for a very long time.
But not being able to see where the road is going is not the same thing as having no road at all.
And it doesn’t mean Jesus has left you to travel it alone.
You Don’t Have to Sit at the Red Light Alone
Faith Unplugged exists for people carrying honest questions and heavy things. If these articles have helped you feel less alone, reminded you that Jesus is still near, or given you language for what you’ve been carrying, I’d be honored to have you support this work.
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I went through a challenging time after I think I did what God wanted (accept a promotion). I am still not sure what I was supposed to learn, that I found out it was not for me at that time? I really thought I could help coworkers as a supervisor.
I had to take a position downgrade several months later, for health reasons. It could be that this was necessary so that the right person could become supervisor. It was tough to realize the natural, expected progression did not apply here. I am grateful to have caring coworkers who supported me then and now.
Thank You for sharing this Chris. I know these moments of nagging questions are hard to navigate but looking back it is often where God did great things in disrupting my plans for His.