Sermon quotes on doubt
Hosea Ballou
Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.
Frederick Buechner
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Rene Descartes
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Henry Drummond
Christ never failed to distinguish between doubt and unbelief. Doubt is can’t believe. Unbelief is won’t believe. Doubt is honesty. Unbelief is obstinacy. Doubt is looking for light. Unbelief is content with darkness.
V. Raymond Edman
Never doubt in the dark what God told you in the light
Jonathan Edwards
Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts: the sight of the deep-blue sky and the clustering stars above seem to impart a quiet to the mind.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are to subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
Timothy Keller
A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.
Madeline L’Engle
Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.
C.S. Lewis
We’re not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
Blaise Pascal
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.
Eugene Peterson
All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.
Bertrand Russell
Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.
Charles Spurgeon
Some of us who have preached the Word for years, and have been the means of working faith in others and of establishing them in the knowledge of the fundamental doctrines of the Bible, have nevertheless been the subjects of the most fearful and violent doubts as to the truth of the very gospel we have preached.
Jeremy Taylor
Friendship is the allay of our sorrows, the ease of our passions, the discharge of our oppression, the sanctuary of our calamities, the counselor of our doubts, the clarity of our minds, the emission of our thoughts, the exercise and improvement of what we dedicate.
Dallas Willard
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.
Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God
Frederick II
O God, if there is a God, have mercy on my soul, if there is a soul.
Lauren F. Winner
Maybe God has given some people belief like a pier, to stand on (and God has given those people’s steadiness to the church, to me, as a reminder, as an aid), and maybe God has given others something else: maybe God has given to some this humming sense that we know nothing, this belief and disbelief a hundred times an hour, this training in nimbleness.
Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (HarperOne, 2013)
Timothy Keller
Honest doubts, then, are open to belief. If you are really asking for information and good arguments, you might get some.
The Mother of God (Encounters with Jesus Series Book 10) Penguin Publishing Group.
Charles Taylor
Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in [the twenty-first century] many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?
Miguel de Unamuno
Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the idea of God, not in God Himself.
Clyde Reid
We structure our churches and maintain them so as to shield us from God and to protect us from genuine religious experience…The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.
Austin Fischer
Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is the presence of love.
Taken from Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt by Austin Fischer. Copyright (c) 2018 by Austin Fischer. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Austin Fischer
Christianity has suffered more casualties from faux faith than from honest doubt.
Taken from Faith in the Shadows: Finding Christ in the Midst of Doubt by Austin Fischer. Copyright (c) 2018 by Austin Fischer. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Jennie Allen
Doubt steals hope. And with no hope, everything that matters doesn’t feel as important anymore.
Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts, WaterBrook, 2020.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through an enormous furnace of doubt.
Quoted in Kenneth Lantz, The Dostoevsky Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 204), 21.
Brian Zahnd
Most Christians can deal with inevitable doubts as long as there is room for doubt. But when a system is enforced that leaves no room for doubt, benign uncertainties can mutate into faith-destroying monsters. When doubts are locked away in a closet of secrecy, they can grow into formidable ogres.
Taken from When Everything’s on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes by Brian Zahnd Copyright (c) 2021 by Brian Zahnd. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
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