P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

WORRIED ATHEISTS

Our Voice of Prophecy development officer, Phil Draper, who has a wonderful — and sometimes wicked — sense of humor, recently sent the following list around via e-mail for some of us to mull over. The title of this electronic note is as follows: "You Know You're a Real Pastor If . . ."

And I must confess that I blushed a few times. "You know you're a real pastor if . . . you've ever waded in a creek wearing a necktie." "If you'd rather negotiate with terrorists than the church organist." "If a church picnic is NO picnic." "If you've ever wanted to fire the church and form a CONGREGATION search committee."

And these last two really ring a bell. "You know you're a real pastor if you've ever wanted to give the sound man some feedback of your own." And finally: "If you've ever wanted to lay hands on a deacon . . . and you weren't thinking of praying for him!"

Well, those are actually kind of fun . . . and I want to go on the record here and say that I've worked with some wonderful PA operators, great organists, and terrific congregations. But you know, just about every pastor in the world has had moments — maybe on Monday morning, when the whole church is post-morteming your sermon — when you are hit with a wave of doubt about what you're doing in that position. Are you really a man of GOD? Did you pick up a wrong signal somewhere, and turned left to go to seminary when you probably should have turned right and gone into real estate?

The topic of bad organists isn't our focus this week, and neither are the hazards of pastoral ministry. Our title, instead, is this: THE PENDULUM OF DOUBT. And I'm thinking here of the kinds of spiritual doubt that hit all of us — preachers and lay people alike. The kind that, sometimes for no reason, just suddenly is upon you . . . and you shudder with the horrible conviction that everything you've put your faith in is a fabrication.

Have you ever had that happen? Maybe you're watching the evening news, and all of the horrors on the screen suddenly make you think to yourself: "There is absolutely NO DESIGN to this craziness! How can there be a God? This is nothing but random, sick chaos! We're all alone in this rotten universe!"
And you really get the feeling that everything around you is secular and man-made: the madness AND the motorhomes and the museums. The crime and the condos and the cars. For good and for bad, we're surrounded by reality.

Real things made out of plastic and concrete and computer chips. And real people and really good things and really bad things. And you begin to think: "Man, have I been fooled with 45 years of Christianity? Was it a lot of talk designed to get me to put money in an offering plate or send it to Lonnie Melashenko on the radio?" You stand at a cemetery and the preacher talks about eternal life and somebody named Jesus coming in the clouds . . . but hey, who's ever seen that happen? The graveyard's getting pretty full, and there haven't been any resurrections up till now that we know of. Death is real and the Bible's promises are pretty invisible by comparison.

Let me mention that title again: THE PENDULUM OF DOUBT. Because it swings back and forth, doesn't it? There are OTHER times when it's just as plain as two-plus-two that we live in a designed universe. The fingerprints of the Creator are everywhere! You feel His Spirit moving upon your heart; the work of the Church around the globe proves His influence and His power. You watch your children grow and learn, and you marvel at the miracle of life itself. Of course there's a God! You'd have to be blind not to see it.

And friend, that pendulum swings back and forth between conviction and doubt, hope and fear, assurance and bewilderment. I've ridden those waves, and maybe you have as well. It's interesting that even the great Old Testament prophet Elijah took a few roller coaster rides. In First Kings chapter 18 he's the hero of Mt. Carmel, calling down God's fire from heaven and reviving the entire nation. Fantastic! Incredibly, it's just one chapter later — that's right, First Kings 19 now — where he goes running into the desert in terror, afraid of Queen Jezebel. Where is God now? Oh dear oh dear. Is he about to get killed? In fact, in verse four he offers up a feeble little prayer to the last vestige of whatever "God" still remains in his belief system. "I've had enough, Lord," he whimpers. "Just let me die."

Well, friend, it may not be that dramatic or traumatic for you and me as our convictions sway in the breezes of 1999. But I want to share some interesting news with you. Did you know that even atheists, who don't believe in God, suffer from these same pendulum swings of doubt? Their lifetime of DISbelief is just as subject to attack as your spiritual faith.

In an essay entitled "Religion: Reality or Substitute?", from the book Christian Reflections, C. S. Lewis writes about this. Notice:

"Whichever view we embrace," he writes, "mere feeling will continue to assault our conviction. Just as the Christian has his moments when the clamor of this visible and audible world is so persistent and the whisper of the spiritual world so faint that faith and reason can hardly stick to their guns, so, as I well remember, the atheist too has his moments of shuddering misgiving, of an all but irresistible suspicion that old tales may after all be true, that something or someone from outside may at any moment break into his neat, explicable, mechanical universe."

This was his own experience, which I'll comment on in a moment. But here's a bit more:

"Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seems obvious that this material world is the only reality: disbelieve in Him and you must face hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all."

And of course, Lewis himself — Jack — went through this in a wrenching way. As a young man he was an atheist: a brilliant, scholarly, well-reasoned man who had worked out with logic and mental processes a firm, personal conviction that God didn't exist. He was sure of it, and he buttressed his convictions with his reading and his discussions at the local pub, the Lamb and Flag. But once in a while, a doubt would creep in. A book he would glance at from the other side — after all, he wanted to be balanced in his scholarship — that book would make a certain bit of sense. And he would push those thoughts away, but sooner or later they'd come back, strengthened with new arguments, fresh reasoning. What's more, and he admits it later, God Himself was beginning to work on him. "The great Angler played His fish," he writes, "and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue."

Well, he tells in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, how he was finally overcome by DOUBTS! Doubts about being an atheist. He reluctantly surrendered to God, and became a Christian. Then, years later, now as a spiritual giant in the faith, an established author of religious books, he went through the experience of losing his wife, Joy, to cancer. And suddenly he was assailed by fierce winds of doubt again. Where was God now? Why were his prayers ignored? He would cry out to heaven and feel absolutely NOTHING, not a whisper of response. The door was locked and double-locked against him, it seemed. And it took some time before his faith slowly returned.

Well, in our final moment here, we ask the question: What should we who are believers DO? When the winds blow, what should we do?

Two things. First of all, let's recognize that the things of God ARE beyond us. That's fact. There HAS to be an element of faith, of trusting what we don't understand, because we CAN'T understand it all. The Bible itself, in Romans 11, says so, with the brilliant Apostle Paul conceding this:

"Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments, and His paths BEYOND TRACING OUT! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor?"

But here's the second point, and I'll return to that long C. S. Lewis anecdote about how our feelings go back and forth. He adds this:

"No conviction, religious or irreligious, will, of itself, end once and for all this fifth-columnist in the soul."

And you know, none of us here at the office knew what that ancient expression meant: "This fifth-columnist in the soul." Until our great radio friend, Bob Edwards, who's about 110 years old — actually 74 — shed some light. Back when triumphant armies would march through a city, they would do so in four columns. And sometimes the local citizens, if they supported the army's efforts, if they were sympathizers, would jump into line as a FIFTH column. And so Lewis borrows the wartime metaphor of this "fifth-columnist" of FEELINGS inside us, that lend sympathy to one side or the other, pushing us from one doubt to the next one.
And how do we get rid of that "fifth columnist," the inner fears and doubts? We'll spend all week thinking about this final line of advice:

"Only the PRACTICE of Faith resulting in the HABIT of Faith will gradually do that."

A great piano player doesn't wake up each morning gripped with fear: "Now I can't play! Oh dear! I've lost it!" No, because the years of practice have given him the HABIT of faith that the skill is still there.
It's the same for the people of God. And piano lessons are about to begin.