Christians who publicly express their doubts are often looked upon as if they uttered a four-letter word. Doubt is often viewed as the unforgivable sin. But this is one of the many myths about doubt flying around out there. Another—one of the biggest—is that spiritual people don’t doubt; they just need to conjure up more faith. But this is just false. The Bible contains many examples of Christians who doubted. Do you remember Abraham—the man of faith? Do you recall his doubts getting the better of him when God said that he and Sarah would have a child in their old age? Abraham laughed—even in spite of how far God had led them and the promises He’d made to them (Genesis 17:17). Another common myth asserts that doubt is always bad; it’s not. People can grow in their faith and mature as they deal with doubt. So if you find yourself doubting, there’s nothing to be ashamed of; you just need to find out how to deal with it.

Flavors of Doubt
Not all religious doubts are created equal; they come in various shapes, flavors, and sizes. I want to primarily focus on one kind of doubt, one that is common, frustrating and painful. The first kind that usually comes to mind is intellectual doubt. People do struggle with factual or content-related doubts about Christianity (these kinds of doubts can usually be remedied by further study and reading), but many more struggle with emotional doubt—and this is where I want to focus our discussion.

The doubts that I confessed at the beginning are emotional doubts. Now I don’t have everything figured out, but intellectually I’m solidly convinced of the truthfulness of the core aspects of Christianity. My problem is that I let my emotions get the best of me. Listen to what Os Guiness has to say about the power of emotional doubt:

The problem is not that reason attacks faith, but that emotions overwhelm reason as well as faith, and it’s impossible for reasons to dissuade them. . . . [This kind of] doubt comes just at the point where the believer’s emotions (vivid imagination, changing moods, erratic feelings, intense reactions) rise up and overpower the understanding of faith. Out-voted, out-gunned, faith is pressed back and hemmed in by the unruly mob of raging emotions that only a while earlier were quiet, orderly citizens of the personality. Reason is cut down, obedience is thrown out, and for a while the rule of emotions is as sovereign as it is violent. The coup d’etat is complete.

Who among us hasn’t experienced a time when what we believe to be true was swamped by emotions, the nagging “what if’s” of life? Many times, what we interpret as spiritual doubt is, in reality, unruly emotions.

Dealing With Emotional Doubt
In Philippians 4:6-9 Paul imparts some excellent advice concerning how Christians can overcome anxiety and emotional doubt:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your heart and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

Gary Habermas derives a four-step process of dealing with emotional doubt from this passage:

1. Pray. When we experience anxiety and doubt, we should first cast our anxieties and fears on God in prayer, because He cares for us and will help us. And the peace He offers will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

2. Express thanksgiving and praise. After praying, we should then intentionally praise God for the blessings in our life and express thanksgiving to Him for hearing our prayers.

3. Change your thinking. The most essential step in this process is to change our thinking from anxious thoughts to what is true. We need to remind ourselves what’s true in this situation regardless of how we feel.

4. Practice. In verse nine Paul tells us to put this method into practice—in other words, do it. The natural inference is that whenever we encounter anxiety or emotional duress, we should repeat this process. We should practice this when life’s going well and especially when we’re being inundated by unruly emotions.

In addition to this biblical method of dealing with emotional doubt, we also need to make sure that we’re exercising regularly, sleeping enough and eating well, as these contribute to our emotional and mental health. The remedy to your emotional doubt may just be a good night’s sleep!

Changing Your Thinking
Let’s unpack the third step a bit more, since it’s so crucial to dealing with emotional doubt. Our thought life is central to living a vibrant Christian life. In Romans 12:2, Paul says that the way we resist the pattern of this world is by renewing our minds. Now he could have said a lot of different things instead of mind—heart, emotions, worship—but he didn’t. The reason is that what we think about and what we believe are critical to how we live. Dallas Willard, a Christian philosopher who has done a lot of work in the area of spiritual formation, offers penetrating insight into the interplay of thoughts and emotions:

Our thoughts are one of the most basic sources of our life. They determine the orientation of everything we do and evoke the feelings that frame our world and motivate our actions. Interestingly, you can’t evoke thoughts by feeling a certain way, but you can evoke and to some degree control feelings by directing your thoughts. Our power over our thoughts is of great and indispensable assistance in directing and controlling our feelings, which themselves are not directly under the guidance of our will. We cannot just choose our feelings.

We don’t have direct control over how we feel. But we can indirectly affect our emotions by thinking in certain ways. If we want to get at the root of the emotional doubt, then we have to change our thinking and stop allowing ourselves to believe lies. We must tell ourselves the Truth—God’s Truth—until we accept it. Again, this is not a one-time remedy; it’s a habit we need to build into our lives.

In light of this, I hope that you’ll no longer feel ashamed when you experience doubt or idly sit by and allow emotional doubt to paralyze you with fear. I’ll let the poignant words of Oswald Chambers conclude our discussion: “Unless we train our emotions, they will lead us around by the nose, and we will be captives to every passing impulse or reaction. But once faith is trained to control the emotions and knows how to lean resolutely again weakness of character, another entry way of doubt is sealed shut forever. . . . Much of our distress as Christians comes not because of sin, but because we are ignorant of the laws of our own nature.”