TODAY’S SCRIPTURE
Read: Psalms 22:1-2
Listen: Psalms 22
TODAY’S MESSAGE
We have all experienced the beauty and ugliness around us. As Pastor John Dickson explained this weekend, this can cause us to wonder why there is beauty and why there is ugliness. Throughout history, people have turned to one of the five major belief systems (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Atheism or Christianity). Of these belief systems, Christianity’s response to doubt is unique
Christians serve a God who invites us to run to him with our skeptical muscles fully flexed. About 1/5th of the Psalms are called Psalms of complaint. These are prayers given to us by God inviting us to complain to him. How fitting that our God, who has experienced pain himself, doesn’t ask us to fake it when we are around him. Watch this video clip below as Pastor John Dickson describes how God has invited us to run to him with our doubts.
For many of us, we struggle to imagine expressing doubt to God like in today’s verse. Instead, we feel more comfortable with the trust expressed in Psalm 23:1, “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.” However, the inclusion of both the doubts in Psalm 22 and the trust in Psalm 23 tells us that both can be appropriate. There is a time to express frustration and doubt to God. There is a time to express trust in God even when we are holding onto trust by a string. He invites us to run to him with both.
IN YOUR CHAIR TIME TODAY
Journal about what doubts and questions you have for God. These may be big philosophical questions, or maybe they are deeply personal questions. God invites you to bring them all to him. Finally, end by asking him some of these questions and thanking him for the invitation to wrestle with these questions.
Download a printable PDF of the BTW week here.
