Wrestling with Doubt: Is God Real? | September 14, 2025

This week’s sermon is the first in a six-week series exploring some of the big questions of faith, titled Wrestling with Doubt, Finding Faith, based on the book of the same name by Adam Hamilton. We may not like to admit our doubts, but the reality is we all have doubts and questions, aspects of faith we wonder about, and if there’s anywhere we ought to be open to wrestling with doubts and questions, it’s church. Here’s a quick video I recorded sharing a little more about this series, as well as my newsletter column introducing the series to the congregations.

This initial sermon in the series engages with a foundational question: “Is There a God?” Although we generally take the answer for granted, it’s a question worth exploring, and a question with which many in our world wrestle, including church people!

The Scriptures for this week are Genesis 1:1-2:4a (read in parts from The Message), Psalm 19:1-4, and John 1:1-5, 9-13. I’m grateful for the suggested outlines provided in Cokesbury’s worship & sermon resources for this series, as well as the book itself, from which I quoted a few times and from which several of the examples are drawn. I’ve previously used the example from Frederich Buechner in a 2015 sermon on Doubting Thomas while I was an intern.

Here’s the livestream from Living Hope and the sermon podcast audio from Christ the King.

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 A few weeks ago, Christin and I got some bad news from our mechanic. When I graduated from seminary nearly a decade ago, we bought a used 2012 blue Ford Fusion. It was making a nasty grinding noice, so we took it in, and the mechanic said it’d be a couple thousand dollars to fix it.

We’d already fixed a few other things on this car not too long ago, and it had lots of miles and basically no trade-in value. If we fix it, maybe it’d be good for a few years, or maybe something else was about to break. But there was no way to know.

And I hate making decisions without all the information. We’d always planned to drive this car into the ground, and it would have been an easy choice if the engine fell out or something. But we spent about a week and a half wrestling with whether or not the right decision was to repair it, or to buy something else.

We did some test driving and eventually bought a Tucson we liked in our price range. So far it’s been great, but it has a lemon title, so it still feels like a gamble.

Was it the right decision? There’s just no way to be certain, at least until we can look back in another decade or so and see if it’s been a good car.

Over the next six weeks, we’re going to be talking about questions we don’t have definitive answers to, questions that have to involve an element of faith.

I grew up in the church, I’ve been a Christian my whole life, I have a Master of Divinity degree to do this professionally, and I have plenty of doubts I wrestle with, including some of the topics we’re going to look at.

If you’re looking for definitive answers, this might be a frustrating series, because the answer to most of the questions we ask is going to end up being mystery. There’s no easy, definitive answer to why bad things happen to innocent people, and there’s only much we can comprehend about life after death. I’m going to end up saying the words faith and mystery a lot.

But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Sometimes we get this idea that everyone else must have things all figured out, like it’s a problem if we’re wondering about whether or not the Bible’s true, or whether God’s even real. The reality is, we all experience doubts. We all wonder. We all have questions—big questions.

And church is exactly where we ought to be exploring those big questions. If we can’t openly and faithfully discuss whether God’s real, how can we possibly expect anyone else to believe it?

People in the Bible wrestle with all sorts of doubts and questions. Abraham and Sarah laughed at the thought of God giving them a child. Moses wondered if God was calling the right person. David questioned if God had abandoned him.

Other Psalms wonder why the wicked prosper while the good people suffer. The disciples—the people literally walking and talking with Jesus—had all kinds of questions. Peter ran away. Thomas looked for proof of Jesus’ resurrection.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith. In fact, many have pointed out that the opposite of faith is certainty, when we think we know everything, when there’s no room for mystery or questioning.

One of my favorite lines in all of Scripture—we said it already; it’s sort of a theme for this series—comes from a desperate father who brings his child to Jesus for healing, and he says, “I believe, help my unbelief.” “I believe, help my unbelief.”

Our call as Christians is not to stop doubting, but to let our doubts lead us to explore faith, to follow the questions. If God is real, God can handle our questions. And if God’s not real, I’d rather know that and not spend my life trying to follow some delusion.

I’m not going to try to definitively prove God’s existence to you this morning. I think there are philosophers who’ve tried that, but college intro to philosophy is one of the two classes in my life I’ve dropped out of. The professor was great, but after a week, I had no idea what I was reading in the homework assignments. (I also dropped high school AP Calculus, which is ironic given my computer science degree.)

You can read the philosophical arguments for or against God if you want; I don’t personally find them that helpful.

But I do think there’s evidence in the world around us for the existence of a divine creator. David says in Psalm 19, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims its maker’s handiwork.”

Just like David, people throughout history have looked at the beauty of butterflies and sunsets, the magnificence of oceans and deserts, and the complexity of an insect, and realized there must be a creator, an intention, someone shaping the world.

Sometimes people try to set up a conflict between science and faith. In 2010, Stephen Hawking said, “Science makes God unnecessary.” Stephen Hawking is much smarter than I am (and he definitely did not drop calculus class) but I obviously disagree with him here.

The friction between science and faith usually comes when their purposes get mixed up, especially when people try to use the Bible as a science textbook.

We’ll talk more about interpreting the Bible next week, but the point of that first story from Genesis is not to explain the scientific origins of the universe, but to make the fundamental point that God is creator, the source behind the existence of life, the universe, and everything.

The Bible—and therefore theology in general—isn’t interested so much in the how as in the why.

Science tells us there are laws of physics that govern how planets and light move, and we know life is made up of atomic building blocks and molecules that none of the Biblical writers could have imagined. But none of that explains the why, or where it all came from.

Christians believe those laws of nature come from God. We believe God is the first cause, the creator, as Scripture testifies. So where’d God come from?

Georges Lemaître, the theoretical physicist who first proposed the Big Bang around 1930 talked about a “primeval atom” containing all matter and energy. Where’d that primeval atom come from? By the way, Georges Lemaître was also a Roman Catholic priest.

There are certainly scientists who argue against God’s existence, but there are also plenty of scientists who see their faith strengthened by scientific discoveries. Copernicus was another Catholic priest. Isaac Newton was a Christian who wrote more theology than science.

Frances Collins, leader of the Humane Genome Project and National Institutes of Health director, talks about science as the exploration of “God’s creative abilities.”

Adam Hamilton, author of the book this sermon series is based on, writes, “Scientists will continue to uncover the laws and mathematical formulas of the cosmos. But does that work render God unnecessary as Hawking said, or do their amazing discoveries make an even greater case for One who is the First Cause? Your answer is a choice you make, a decision to believe that the magnificence, vastness, and beauty of creation is a lovely accident, or is the result of One who said, ‘Let there be light.’”

Is there a God? We can’t know for sure, we can’t be 100% certain, but there’s good reason to say yes. It takes faith to believe in a self-created universe, and it takes faith to believe in God. And on some level, we’re not going to find out in this life if we’re right or not. But here we are.

And we don’t have to have absolute proof of God to live in faith—we’re not going to get absolute proof! Philosophy can’t prove or disprove God; neither can science; or even theology.

But we can choose to live as if it’s true. We can choose to believe. Christians choose to spend our lives following Jesus, using our time to love our neighbors as Jesus told us to. We’re hearing today about Outreach for Hope, one way we care for our neighbors because we believe.

We confess as a church that there is a God who created the heavens and the earth, a God who is our heavenly parent, a God who chose to enter this world and become known to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

I wrestle a little with saying “I choose Jesus” or even “I choose to believe there is a God” gets a little sticky because we also believe faith itself is a gift from God, but the net result is the same. We choose to believe, we choose to follow Jesus, we choose to love the way Jesus loves. Faith is a gift, and it’s also a choice we make.

I can’t prove God is real or that Jesus is the Son of God, but I’m going to keep going on the premise that the connection I’ve felt to God in prayer wasn’t just endorphins, that the witness of the martyrs who have laid down their lives for Jesus knew what they were doing. I’m going to keep believing there are things happening in the world that can only be explained by God acting in the world.

As Adam Hamilton says, “In summary, I believe in God because I believe God is the best explanation for the universe we live in…I believe in God because I am drawn to Jesus, and Jesus believed in God. But I also believe in God because I see the impact faith in God has had on the lives of so many people, and through them, on the world.”

I wonder, if God is real, how would we expect to know? What proof would be enough?

Would it be through so many people’s experiences of the Holy Spirit working? Is the existence of a beautiful and impossibly complex world evidence? Would it be through miracles, even a man rising from the dead?

Preacher Frederich Buechner once asked his congregation to imagine one morning you woke up and saw God had written “I exist” or “Jesus is alive” in blazing letters in the sky for everyone to see.

How would people respond? Some would fall to their knees in wonder, someone would be terrified, some filled with hope. Churches would overflow!

But after a while, he said, the blazing letters in the sky would fade into the background of life and people would start to ask what difference the existence of God makes in the world. Churches would split up over different interpretations of what happened. People would try to explain away the miracle. No level of proof will ever be sufficient to remove the element of mystery from faith.

John begins his Gospel with the words we read today, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” He talks about the light shining in the darkness, and the darkness not overcoming it, and of course by the Word and the light he means Jesus.

But 20 chapters later, listen to what John says in the conclusion to his Gospel: “Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. (I love that verse – Jesus did a lot of stuff. I’m not writing it all down.) But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31)

There are an awful lot of questions we don’t get to know the answers to. Faith involves doubt more than certainty. But you are invited to faith, to join in saying, “I believe, help my unbelief.” God invites you to trust, to believe, to live in faith. In Jesus’ name.
Amen

Read part two of this sermon series: The Good Book? Wrestling with the Bible