The Shadow of Doubt
Finding a ready answer when Satan pushes my buttons
If you’re reading this hoping to find expert words of advice from someone who has “figured it all out,” then I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Someone, somewhere may be able to claim that title, but it isn’t me.
True, it’s been a momentous week for me, launching Dispatches from the Spiritual Front. That’s the culmination of weeks of dreaming and work. I’ve done my best to strive for excellence, because you deserve professionalism in exchange for your attention and participation.
But just because these pages are kind of shiny, doesn’t mean they’re evidence that I’m anything other than exactly like you — a child of God trying to keep my fears and failings from swamping my faith, all day, every day. I have no secret knowledge to transmit, only a longing to seek the truth and to live by it like I mean it. To be honest, what I seek from you is company for the journey and the benefit of your experience as we piece together what it means to live as a true follower of Jesus in these end times.
With that in mind, this blog may, more often than not, reveal my struggles alongside my God-given insights. Starting today! Putting Dispatches into the world for all to see has opened the gates on an all-too-familiar torrent of taunting doubt. I expect these kinds of thoughts are familiar to you as well:
“Who do you think you are?”
“As if you have any right to speak to God’s people, considering your past mistakes!”
“What can a nobody like you say that those real writers with millions of subscribers aren’t already saying, and much better?”
I could definitely go on, but you get the idea. I’m vulnerable on all these points — and many more. One minute I believe that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13), and the very next I’m sure I deserve all those accusations
But I can’t simultaneously be both “more than a conqueror through him who loves me” (Romans 8) and a worm with no right to exist, much less speak.
Right?
Fortunately, that question answers itself if you listen closely to the voice behind each message. One is filled with grace and peace, the other drips with guilt and shame. Redemption and restoration versus condemnation and death. The voice of the Most High God against the prince of evil and all lies.
Seems so easy to keep it all straight when I put it like that. So why is it sometimes so hard to remember put it like that? Why does the vision of myself as an unworthy worm so often take hold and cast a shadow of doubt over my life?
I don’t know for sure, but perhaps there is benefit in the struggle. Just this morning I read in Romans 5:3-4:
“We also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
Satan is a button-pusher par excellence. He knows where my weakness is. But so what? Let him push away, so long as I can meet him with the truth — that his poison has been turned into blessing by my Father, who uses it to train me. The joke’s on the evil one, always. What he means as a weapon against me is transformed into hope by the Holy Spirit.
So, here’s a one-size-fits-all answer we can give to any accusation flung at us by the enemy:
“The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear?” (Psalm 27:1).
In other words, “My hope is in God. If you have a problem with me, take it up with Him.”