Friday, December 10, 2010

THE FAVOR OF DOUBT

Larry Wishard sent me a quote of Seth Godin.  Take a look.

Living with doubt
... is almost always more profitable than living with certainty.

People don't like doubt, so they pay money and give up opportunities to avoid it. Entrepreneurship is largely about living with doubt, as is creating just about any sort of art.

If you need reassurance, you're giving up quite a bit to get it.


On the other hand, if you can get in the habit of seeking out uncertainty, you'll have developed a great instinct.

There is healthy room for us to doubt ourselves.....and believe in God.  Independence (self-dependence) leaves one frozen in fear that we will mistakenly step.  Dependence (God-dependence) thrusts us into the true arena of belief where we can relax (Ps. 46:10) knowing He is God and we are not.

The church economy is in dire straights when living without the room to be wrong.  Doubt gives the church lungs room to breathe as true newborns.  Without knowing it, we have smothered much of our own potential by being fed perpetual "right" phraseology; We do church right, we have the right doctrine, and we are the church that is....right.  When these lines pelt the heart in repeated fashion one will begin to withdraw from risk.

We must learn to discern when to doubt ourselves in order to learn to not doubt God.  When this happens our verbiage takes a faith shift to, He does church right, He has the right doctrine, and He builds the church that is right.  By our leaps of faith, struggle, and doubt, it is our goal to partake of His wonderful Life!

Our Father is full of untapped Life.  There is gold in them thar hills!  Pharisaical rigidity has arrested the church and these rarely come out of their cells (shells); but only to be fed.  On the other hand, when a disciple can learn to doubt him or herself a new world of faith will open. 

We will forever learn.  Do you think heaven will be a place of only what we know?  How un-Life.  It will be eternity just to get over the first day of AWE!  So be it while we walk on earth.  Do yourself a favor.  Doubt your whole faith system and give God room to feed you what He may have been wanting to say for a long time.

The Truth will always be there.  Openness to it will always be our challenge.

1 comment:

John P. Brown said...

For the first time I find myself disagreeing with you. Perhaps I missed your thought, but what stood out was "doubt your whole faith system." Jesus said, "if you have faith and do not doubt" Mt. 21:21. I think we get stuck on traditions and our church formats and rituals and confuse that for "our faith." If you meant those things are what we should doubt, then I agree. But I basically think Seth Godin's statement is incorrect. Having been an entrepreneur, I acted in great confidence--not in doubt, or I wouldn't have taken the first step, nor do I believe others would.

Respectfully,
John P. Brown