by Craig Groeschel | Mar 27, 2025 | Featured, Life Advice, LO Library |
Let me tell you about one Sunday morning in 2017. I was standing on the front row of our church service, singing a worship song, minutes away from going up to preach. I realized in that moment that I felt nothing. By nothing, I mean …
· I didn’t feel God’s presence.
· I didn’t feel like preaching.
· I didn’t feel like I had any faith.
Panic erupted in me, as I thought, What if all this isn’t real? What if it’s all just been emotions? Some say religion is just a crutch; what if they’re right?
I felt as if someone had knocked the breath out of me.
I wondered if the people near me could hear my heart pounding, because I was sure it was louder than the music.
I started shaking.
I began to cry.
That’s when I noticed the exit sign.
I thought, Maybe I could just leave? Just walk right out of church.
The reality is that, for quite a while now, a lot of people have had those same feelings, those same questions, and been heading for the exit, walking out of church. And they’ve not returned.
Why are people leaving?
I think most don’t have a problem with Jesus. He’s hard not to like.
Instead, they have questions but feel like they can’t ask them, so they’ve found no answers.
Yet, there are answers. But many people don’t feel safe asking. They want to, but they’re embarrassed or ashamed or insecure, thinking, What if I’m the only one? What will people think of me? They’re afraid, and church may not seem like the safest place to express their doubts.
Some of those who have mustered up their courage and finally asked their questions have, too often, been met with bumper-sticker theology that dogmatically states, “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.”
Thanks.
Thanks a lot.
Many are left wondering whether there are any answers at all. And then, just as I did, they noticed the exit.
Perhaps doubts have left you wondering.
What do you doubt?
It’s an important question because, until you get clarity about what you’re doubting, you’ll feel confused instead of getting answers that can satisfy you.
While you’re pondering what you doubt, you may also want to assess why. What’s lurking behind your doubt? Consider the why behind the what.
Let’s look at some common dynamics that can be the source:
· Doubts may be driven by circumstances.
We may hate what’s happening and feel like there’s no way a good God would allow something so bad, which leads us to wonder if maybe there is no God or he’s just not as good as we were told.
· Doubts may be driven by intellect.
I’ve found people are especially vulnerable to intellectual doubts if they don’t know why they believe what they believe. Then when one day a friend poses a question or a teacher belittles what they believe, suddenly there’s a fissure in their faith and the foundation starts to falter.
· Doubts may be driven by emotion.
We may realize our faith is built almost entirely on feelings. Perhaps there is a euphoric experience when a person comes to Jesus. After being emotionally pumped for a bit, eventually, that spiritual high began to wear off. Now panic sets in and the questions come: Is my faith disappearing? What if I was never really a Christian in the first place?
· Doubts may be driven by other people.
Maybe someone has been around some hypocritical Christians. Maybe a pastor who was loved and respected fell morally, or a dad who supposedly loved Jesus until an affair came out. So the person decides, “If that is what Christians are like, then I think the whole thing must be a joke.”
· Doubts may be driven by a relationship with an absent or abusive father.
If you look at the most famous atheists of all time, many of them had absent or abusive fathers, including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frederick Nietzsche, and Albert Camus. I get it. I bet it’s easy to conclude, If this is what earthly fathers are like, I sure don’t want a heavenly father!
· Doubts may be driven by personality.
Some people are just naturally more cynical or contrarian. That can make it more challenging to have faith or easier to rebel against a family or a culture founded on faith.
· Doubts may be driven by decisions.
When Christians make deliberate decisions to sin and keep sinning, they’ll feel further and further from God. Why? Because sin separates us from God. Then this person is upset because God seems distant and may start to wonder, Where is God? Why don’t I feel his presence? Is he even real? But the issue is not with God. It’s with the choice to stubbornly cling to sin.
Did any of these resonate with you? The “why” behind the “what”?
Our doubts cannot be diffused until they are defined.
If you don’t know what’s behind your doubt, you may never experience the benefit of your doubt.
So, what is your doubt all about?
What do you doubt, and why?
Take a moment to objectively and honestly face your doubts and your hurts.
Don’t be afraid to press into your emotions.
Don’t be scared to ask your questions.
Don’t hold back.
Whatever your doubt, and whyever you doubt, I want you to know that, despite the impression you got from a parent, a pastor, or a Mr. The Bible Says It So That Settles It, doubt is normal. Everyone doubts. Doubt is part of the human experience. And, yes, doubt is even a part of faith.
We’re going to talk about how doubts don’t have to take you away from God. Your doubts can actually draw you closer to him.
Some think of faith as a destination, as in, Someday I will arrive. I’ll have graduated. Like those perfect people who don’t struggle with doubts the way I do. Someday I’ll have perfect faith too.
No.
Faith is a journey. You don’t arrive. You’ll never understand it all or move beyond having questions. The strongest faith isn’t a faith that never doubts. Rather …
The strongest faith is a faith that grows through doubts.
Digging Deeper Into Doubt
As you consider how your doubts can invite you to a richer relationship with God, it might be helpful to examine the basis for your doubts. With this goal in mind, use the following categories and questions from The Benefit of Doubt Workbook to help you assess what’s attached to the doubts you hold.
Doubts Based On Circumstances, Past Experiences, And Emotions
· How have your most painful losses and disappointments contributed to the doubts you have? What questions do these experiences raise?
· What recent personal circumstances tilt you toward doubting? What feelings and assumptions emerge when these doubts arise?
Doubts Based On Intellect And Ideas You Hold
· Generally, are you persuaded more by rational evidence or by your feelings and intuition? How does this tendency affect your spiritual doubts?
· What are some of the questions and concerns you have about the Bible? How do these influence your willingness to rely on it as your source of God’s truth?
Doubts Based On (And Inherited From) Other People
· Which family members have most influenced your views on God, faith, and Christianity? What role have your friends played in your beliefs or doubts?
· Which pastors, teachers, and leaders have had the greatest impact on your faith? What did you learn about the role of doubt from them?
Doubts Based On Misperceptions And False Assumptions About God And The Bible
· What image of God did you form while you were growing up? What was the basis for this image and perception of him?
· How has your relationship with your parents or early caregivers influenced the way you see God now? What false assumptions and biases might have arisen because of this?
The Benefit of Doubt book and workbook release from Zondervan and HarperChristian Resources on February 18, 2025.
New York Times bestselling author Craig Groeschel is the founding and senior pastor of Life.Church, which created the free YouVersion Bible App and is one of the largest churches in the world. He has written more than 15 books and hosts the top-ranking Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast. He speaks regularly for the Global Leadership Network, which reaches hundreds of thousands of leaders around the world annually. Craig and his wife, Amy, live in Oklahoma. Connect with Craig at www.craiggroeschel.com.
by Craig Groeschel | May 18, 2023 | Doubt, Hope, Identity, LO Library, Mental health, Shame
Have you ever heard someone say you should wait thirty minutes after a meal to go swimming? Or that shaving your hair makes it grow back thicker? That you need to drink at least eight glasses of water per day to be healthy?
How about that it takes seven years for your body to digest gum? Or that if you drop a penny from the top of the Empire State Building, you could kill someone? That your hair and fingernails will continue to grow after you die?
Guess what! None of these things are true, but a lot of people still believe them. Whole generations of kids had to wait a half hour after lunchtime just to swim, but they didn’t need to! When a lie is believed to be true, it will affect your life as if it were true.
Missing some swimming time isn’t a big deal, but what if you believe significant lies that have serious implications? What if you buy into the lie that you’ll never be good enough? Or that you made too many mistakes? Or that God doesn’t really care about you? Or that you’ll never be able to stop doing what you don’t want to do?
A lie believed as truth will affect your life as if it were true.
There is a specific lie I have believed for as long as I can remember. Living as if that were true has been one of the biggest limiting forces in my life. For years, my strongest thoughts have always been about my shortcomings. I have always felt inadequate. No matter what anyone else said, my inner voice always screamed, No matter how hard you try, you’ll never measure up.
Why do I feel that way? Frankly, I’m not sure; I have never not felt that way. It seems self-doubt comes naturally to me, or it would if I was a natural at anything.
Essentially, this voice causes me to live a faithless life.
As I type these words about how we can control our thought life, my mind is racing. As David often wrote in Psalms (Psalm 42:5, for example), I am wrestling with my thoughts. I am battling feelings of overwhelming anxiety because I have said yes to too many things and overcommitted myself again.
Yes, my mind is out of control. I wish I could tell you I’m full of faith as I write, but my thoughts are full of fear.
But then I come back to what I know is true.
I swat at the swarm of thoughts flitting around my head and remember that I am not a victim of my own mind. I have power over my thoughts. I am not captive to them. With God’s help, I can make them captive to me.
While I know those truths, at the same time the reality is that I am a struggling thought warrior who has battled insecurity, negativity, fear, and anxiety most of my life. The battles don’t stop. Reading this won’t instantly solve the situations you face. The goal, especially for where you are in life, is to develop some tools, some weapons for the battles ahead.
***
Midway through college, something dramatic happened to me. Jesus changed my life. By God’s grace, he found me and saved me.
Soon I was being so transformed by my relationship with Christ that, while still very new in my faith, I sensed God calling me to be a pastor.
As God was building my faith, I felt him telling me I could make a difference in the world through his church. All my childhood insecurities and teenage self-doubts were being eclipsed by glimpses of hope. What do I mean? Well, here’s a little backstory for context:
When I was growing up, my family couldn’t afford name-brand clothes, so my mother bought used name-brand things at garage sales, cut the logos off, and sewed them onto my generic shirts.
I felt fake.
In second grade, I discovered I was color-blind. Not only could I not match my fake name-brand shirts to my no-name pants, I would never see the beauty of this world as others could.
I felt defective.
In a spelling bee with my classmates, I misspelled Mississippi. We had learned a song teaching us how to spell the word. And every time an i appears after the M, there’s only one of them and two of everything else. How could I possibly misspell Mississippi?
I felt stupid.
In fifth grade, a girl named Tiffany dumped me for a guy named Brian. Her reason? Brian had a motorcycle. I only had a moped. (Yes, twelve-year-olds in my small town drove motorcycles and mopeds. These were different times.)
I felt lame.
My father played minor league baseball. He was a professional athlete, and I wasn’t sure if I could even play in college.
I felt inadequate.
These isolated events, along with many others, formed my perception of myself into the reality I would carry into my newfound faith as a young adult.
I felt I wasn’t good enough.
So I learned to play it safe and avoid risks at all costs. I felt that, given any opportunity, I would fail. I quietly came to define success as just not failing.
Chances are good you have your own set of lies to deal with. Any of these sound familiar?
■ I am invincible.
■ No one cares about me.
■ I am the center of the universe.
■ I am missing out on all the fun.
■ I am destined to be famous.
■ Everyone is watching me all the time.
■ This is the best time of my life. Everything will be downhill from here.
■ Everyone else has it figured out.
■ Everyone else has it better than me.
■ What others think about me is more important than anything else.
■ No one could possibly like me because I’m too fat, too thin, too ugly, too whatever.
■ No one, especially my parents, can understand what I’m going through.
■ I will always be alone.
■ Things can never get better.
■ I’m not capable of changing.
■ Others wouldn’t love me if they knew what I’ve done.
The lies I believed nearly derailed my future.
How are the lies you believe holding you back?
***
But how do you recognize the devil’s lies? How can you overcome the negative messages you adopted in your earliest days? Start by asking yourself this question: What unhealthy and destructive conclusions do I believe about myself and my place in the world?
Satan’s strategy to win the battle for your mind is getting you to believe lies. If you believe a lie, it will hold you back from doing what God’s calling you to do.
The lie will keep you living in shame from the past, when God wants to set you free for a better future.
The lie will keep you from living with joy and freedom and confine you to a less-than existence.
Living your life by a lie is a lot like believing a door is locked when it isn’t. Freedom is waiting for you, but you first have to commit to some personal lie detection to experience the abundant life Jesus came and died to give you.
Excerpted with permission from the newly released book Winning the War in Your Mind for Teens: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life by Craig Groeschel with Josh Mosey. Published by Zondervan, 2023.
Craig Groeschel is the founding and senior pastor of Life.Church, one of the largest churches in the world and the creator of the free YouVersion Bible App. The New York Times bestselling author hosts the top-ranking Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast and speaks to hundreds of thousands of leaders around the world annually through the Global Leadership Network. Craig and his wife, Amy, live in Oklahoma. Connect with Craig at www.craiggroeschel.com.
by Craig Groeschel | Mar 8, 2023 | Life Advice
“I will not yell at my kids anymore.”
“I am breaking up with my boyfriend—for real this time!”
“I’m going to stop hitting snooze so I can start getting to work five minutes early instead of five minutes late.”
Why do we make these declarations—and then fail to follow through? Could it be we’ve tried to change what we do and haven’t changed what we think of ourselves?
If so, that is a formula for failure. We cannot put do before who, but we do. We do it all the time. We decide to change what we do.
The problem is trying to change our “do” is behavior modification. And behavior modification never works.
Why?
Because behaviors never exist in a vacuum. There’s a reason you do what you do. Attacking behavior makes sense because that’s what you see and find so frustrating. But if you target the behavior, you are going after the wrong thing.
If you try to change your behavior without changing your identity, you’re pulling up a weed without getting to the root.
We’ve all done that, right? Seen some huge, annoying weed towering over our grass, gone over, and ripped it out with the fury of a Marvel villain. It feels great to get rid of the handful of nasty vegetation. Except we didn’t get rid of it. Not unless we dug down and got all of the root out of the ground.
To ensure a weed doesn’t come back, you have to reach down and pull out what is not visible on the surface.
It’s like treating an illness—you can’t deal with the symptom and ignore the real problem causing the symptom.
In a similar way, someone who promises to never watch pornography again may avoid looking at it for a few days. But will they get caught up in pornography again? Yes.
Why? They dealt with the symptom and ignored the real problem causing them to look at pornography.
Motivation and willpower are both limited resources that you will deplete quickly. Behavior modification does not equip you with the power to change.
The reason you haven’t experienced lasting change is because you’ve tried to alter what you do and haven’t changed what you think of you.
James Clear, a guru on change and the author of Atomic Habits, says, “It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying belief that led you to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.”
Scientists who use cybernetics theory say there are two ways we can try to change. First, there’s what they call first-order change, which is behavior modification. We commit to starting or stopping a specific action. First-order change can have some instant results, but the change will never last.
The second approach, according to cybernetics theory, is second-order change, which is conceptual. The focus is not on acting different but on thinking different, especially about yourself. A cybernetics researcher will tell you that second-order change is the only kind that lasts.
Romans 12:1–2 is one of the most popular passages from Paul’s letters because the “living sacrifice” reference gets a lot of attention. But in verse 2, the apostle shares the key to transformation—real, lasting, eternal change. “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think” (NLT). Paul says you’ll experience transformation not by changing what you do but “by changing the way you think.” Boom!
Why would cybernetics theory researchers agree with the apostle Paul? Because you do what you do because of what you think of you.
So to change what you do, you need to first change what you think of you.
Think about a new habit you’d like to start.
What needs to change about your self-perception so you see yourself as someone who follows through on that habit consistently?
Write down a personal “I am…” and an “I do…” statement that focuses on who you want to become and what habit you are trying to achieve. For example, “I am a healthy person. I commit to exercising five days a week.”
Every time you see your statement, declare it over yourself and your actions will begin to shift as you change your self-perception.
Craig Groeschel is the founding and senior pastor of Life.Church, an innovative multi-site church that created the free YouVersion Bible App. He is a New York Times bestselling author and has written fifteen books, including Winning the War in Your Mind and Lead Like it Matters. Known as a leadership expert, he hosts the top-ranking Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast and regularly speaks for the Global Leadership Network, which reaches hundreds of thousands of leaders around the world annually. Craig and his wife, Amy, live in Oklahoma. To learn more about Craig, visit www.craiggroeschel.com.
