Crisis of Faith

I am currently reading “Kill the Spider” by Carlos Whittaker and this is a book I would recommend to anyone who has ever struggled with overcoming sin or faced a crisis of faith. Last night as I was reading I came across this quote; “What if it is actually God unraveling your beliefs in order to rebuild them”. I had to really think about this as I tried to understand what he was saying and I was taken back to a sermon I heard a few weeks ago when the Pastor said that sometimes God will take you from something good because He is preparing you for something great. Now on the surface these two quotes may not seem to have a lot in common but for some reason they stuck together for me.

Please note where I am NOT going with this. I am NOT questioning anyone’s beliefs or commitment to following Christ. I am simply posing that some of our beliefs may not be as strong as we thought they were or they may not even be correct and as Christians we have to examine that in our lives.

What if we believe something good about God but there is a greater truth meant for us? What if that good belief has to be stripped away before we can see the absolute power of God’s love? What if we stopped believing the moment that good thing was gone and never gave God a chance to show us what is GREAT.

In his book Whittaker details that a crisis of faith may stem from two backgrounds: Being raised with faith ingrained in us by our communities or we can grow up with misconceptions about faith as an outsider. “Neither of these is real or personal.”

Today I would like to focus on the first of those two and I will focus my next post on the other.

For those of us raised in church and surrounded by a community of believers have you ever asked yourself if you would still believe in Jesus if you were not born into a Christian home? Do you believe in Jesus because you are convicted by His truths or because you were raised to believe in Him?

Honestly as a Christian are there any “truths” about God that you have struggled with?

Do you remember the first time something bad happened to a really good person in your life? Do you remember when you really prayed for something and it didn’t happen? Did you have a loved one who was sick and you prayed for healing but it never came? Have you ever struggled with why a Loving God would allow someone to go to Hell?

These are some difficult questions and there is probably a list a mile long of questions just like this. These questions can alter the way we think about God. Believing that God is Good and that nothing bad should happen is a good belief but when life happens and that belief is shattered we are left with two choices. We can blame God and stop believing all together or we can lean closer to Him and allow Him to show us how great He really is. When we talk about Millennial's and even going back to Gen-Xers leaving the church as young adults; many times it is over these issues. They are longing for a deeper answer of God’s greatness and they are not getting it. They are losing their “good” God and not finding the “Great” God.

We can live our whole lives in church and never understand the greatness of God. We can live in a false reality of who God is but if we never examine our beliefs how can we ever share them with the world?

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, a friend told me his reason for leaving Religion was due to the fact that it relied too much on being born into the right family, right location, and right religion. After praying over this comment and continuing my studies I have come to the conclusion that those of us raised in church really have to examine our beliefs.

While on one hand being born into a Christian family may be a blessing it can also bring about some difficult challenges. Did you get saved at a young age because of family pressure? Was it the popular thing to do? Maybe the reason that we are seeing an exodus of young adults from the church is because they have never had a real conversion moment. What I write is tough and requires some self-examination and I don’t write it to make anyone second guess their faith but to highlight the struggle of being raised by believers and the pressure to believe ourselves.

So for the first time I am going to end my blog with a question and hope that I get a few answers in the comments because this is a discussion we need to have.

Can being raised in a Christian environment (home, church, community, etc.) actually lead us to have a false sense of security in our faith?

you can find a copy of Killing The Spider here: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Spider-Getting-Really-Holding/dp/031033800X