Today I was in a restaurant having breakfast with some dear friends before I took off to the airport. I spoke about doubt and unbelief. As I was thinking on this later, I decided it would make a really good post.
The bible tells us to not have doubt and unbelief. But what is doubt and what is unbelief? For some they assume they are one in the same. But they are two different areas that have two different outcomes in our life. If we are not to have doubt and unbelief, then we must have the opposites which are understanding and believing.
We all have times of doubt and unbelief in our lives. One of scriptures that always has stood out to me is in Romans 4 were it talks of Abraham. It says when he became fully persuaded, he believed the promise of God not doubting. Which means there was a time he wasn’t fully persuaded and had to go through a process to shift out of doubt. Being persuaded occurs in both the areas of doubt and unbelief. One deals with how we think of applying promise and the other of activation of the promise and the outcome if it. ,
Many people can have great faith but still have doubts if things will come to pass as promised. Others have deep assurance of promise, but their faith is lacking and hope the promise will come. If we are honest with ourselves, we all have been on both sides of this having doubt and great faith, and also times having no doubt but lacking in faith.
When we think of doubt we are dealing with assumed facts in the mind and how we perceive those facts working out. Facts are only conclusions based on inputs. We may or may not have all the inputs because facts are the best educated guess. When we think of unbelief, we are thinking of truths not fully developed. Truths of God that are sovereign and even can be spiritual law’s and promises. I see these truths as non-negotiables. This means doubt cannot and should not negotiate the outcome truth is trying to bring.
We see Abraham became fully persuaded, meaning the facts he was faced with, which are stated as the deadness of both his and Sarahs bodies, had to give way to the truth promised by God. God wasn’t moved by the facts and could even create new facts to dismiss doubt, hence their bodies were regenerated into the ability to bring forth a child of promise. But this was created by faith. It came down to what was going to rule and how Abraham would submit. He had to bring the final doubts under his spirit believing what God said was true. When this occurred, he was fully persuaded. It’s amazing of the power both the mind and the spirit have to create or deny.
Doubt occurs in your mind while unbelief occurs in your spirit. Doubt comes by your thoughts and the imaginations of your mind. It is how you perceive things and what you do with random thoughts. It is what you assume and what you fear. Doubt has a foothold in what we think on consider and ponder.
Doubt comes to diminish hope and even to dismantle hope. It comes to put hope aside. If hope is removed, then faith has nothing to create the evidence of things hoped for. You see doubt is as powerful as faith but has the opposite result. While doubt occurs in the mind, unbelief occurs in your spirit. Unbelief is not believing or engaging in spiritual truths that governor all things. Unbelief stops your faith working as well. It does this by not fully embracing truth by faith. Unbelief working hand in hand with doubt diminishes the possibilities of God and causes us to contemplate instead of engaging.
This is why Apostle Paul tells us to be careful what we hear. He also said to take every though captive to the obedience of Christ. Casting down imaginations and everything that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. The knowledge of God is found in the truth of God. The imaginations are found in our mind. The real stronghold we are fighting is in our thought life. Whatever we allow to dominate will also create our reality. We can have facts, or we can have truths. We can have information, or we can experience life. We can have intellectual ascent or spirit ascent.
I hope this short teaching will provoke you to take a look at the possibility of your own areas of doubt and unbelief and turn them around to be assurance and full faith believing. Like Abraham its time we become fully persuaded of some things in our own lives.