A Pastoral Letter to the Doubting Christian

Dear Friend,

You might be surprised to hear this, but doubts don’t disqualify you from the Christian life.

I don’t mean unbelief (the settled refusal to trust Christ) but doubt: the unsettling questions, the lingering unease, the feeling that your faith is sometimes held together with trembling hands and even the unshakable feeling that you’re not ‘Christian enough’. If that describes you, you are not strange, broken, or alone. You are standing in a long biblical line.

For example, the Psalms are full of faithful people asking uncomfortable questions. Job cries out in confusion. Habakkuk demands answers. John the Baptist—after boldly proclaiming Jesus as the Lamb of God—later sends messengers to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matt. 11:3). Scripture does not sanitise the inner lives, or struggles, of God’s people. It tells the truth.

Doubt Is Not the Opposite of Faith

It is very easy for Christians to assume that faith = certainty and doubt = failure. But biblically, faith is not the absence of questions—it is trusting God with your questions.

The distraught father in Mark 9 who cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief!” was not rebuked by Jesus, he was helped. That prayer is one of the most honest in the Bible, and it shows us something crucial: faith and doubt can coexist in the same heart.

Here’s a helpful thing to remember – faith is not a psychological state of confidence; it is a relational posture of dependence. To doubt is not necessarily to turn away from God—it may be to lean toward him, asking him to make sense of a world that often feels confusing, painful, and unjust.

You Are Allowed to Ask Hard Questions

Some Christians carry the quiet fear that certain questions are off-limits: about suffering, hell, election, prayer, science, the reliability of Scripture, or the church’s failures (past and present). But the God who inspired Scripture is not threatened by honest inquiry.

Authentic faith, at its best, should never be anti-intellectual or afraid of complexity. We worship a God whose judgments are “unsearchable” and whose ways are “inscrutable” (Rom. 11:33). That does not mean irrational—it means inexhaustible.

There is a difference between asking questions in humility and sitting in judgment over God. But many Christians confuse the two and end up silencing themselves out of fear. If your questions arise from a desire to understand, to trust, and to obey, they are not acts of rebellion. They are acts of engagement.

The Bible Meets Us Before It Explains Everything

One of the hardest lessons of the Christian life is that God rarely answers all of our why questions. He does, however, answer our who question.

When Job finally hears from God, he does not receive a tidy explanation for his suffering. He receives a revelation of God Himself. And that is enough to move him from protest to trust: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5).

Christian faith ultimately rests not on our ability to resolve every tension, but on the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ. The cross does not explain all suffering—but it tells us what kind of God is sovereign over it. A God who enters our pain. A God who bears our sin. A God who keeps his promises, even when the path runs through darkness.

Don’t Walk Alone

One of the great dangers of doubt is isolation. When questions are hidden, they tend to grow sharper and heavier. God never intended his people to wrestle alone.

Bring your questions into the light—into prayer, into Scripture, into conversation with wise and patient believers. Not everyone will be a safe guide, but the church at its best is a place where truth and tenderness meet.

Pastors, in particular, should hear this: doubting Christians do not need quick fixes or defensive answers. They need shepherds who listen, who open the Word carefully, and who trust the Spirit to work over time.

A Word of Hope

If you are a Christian with many questions, take heart: Jesus does not cast off weak faith. He strengthens it. He does not break the bruised reed or quench the smoldering wick (Isa. 42:3).

Your faith is not sustained by the clarity of your thoughts, but by the faithfulness of your Savior. You are held more securely than you feel.

So keep asking. Keep reading. Keep praying—even when prayer feels weak. Keep returning to Jesus, again and again. Doubt may shake you, but it does not have the final word.

Grace is stronger than uncertainty. Truth is deeper than your questions. And the God who began a good work in you will bring it to completion (Phil. 1:6).

With pastoral affection,
A fellow pilgrim limping through life