The thing about James is that he pulls no punches. In the first chapter of his letter he gives this ominous warning that feels impossible to overcome: don’t doubt or you’ll suffer. And he pares it with this wonderful promise: ask for wisdom and you’ll get it!
5 If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. 6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. 7 For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; 8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
As someone who suffers from a doubting disorder, these verses have come to my mind often. And whether or not you have a doubting disorder, they should haunt you, because the combination of the great promise of wisdom and the great warning of suffering and distitution from God’s blessings are overwhelming in their implication. How can we live without doubt? How can we avoid being a double-minded man? Where is the hope here?
As I have written about before, life is filled with uncertainty. What will happen, what should I do, how shall I act? The Word gives us the Law, but knowing rightly how to apply that Law in the infinite applications that life throws at us requires wisdom. So we feel uncertain. And in response to this uncertainty, we desire to know how to live rightly. We desire wisdom. And it can only come from one source: God. He uses various means to transmit that wisdom to us (people, the church, books, experience, nature), but all wisdom comes from God. James’ promise about wisdom has always been a great balm to me, a great promise that I can rest on, that if I ask for wisdom God will grant it to me, “generously.”
But then there is this caveat. You must ask without doubting. And when you have OCD, or for that matter, when you are a fallen human, doubting is endemic to your condition. Can you trust that God will give you wisdom? Maybe that part is easy, but what about the specific wisdom that you receive. Can you have faith that that wisdom is God’s wisdom? What if you misinterpreted things? What if you just imagined this is the wisdom God is giving you? What if you’re just using God as an excuse to get your own way? What if you’re reading Scripture wrong? What if your friends are giving you bad advice? And uncertainty creeps back in.
James is right. Once you doubt, you are a wave driven and tossed about by the wind. It’s a violent image. An image of being out of control. Lacking agency. The doubting wind is in control of your emotions and your thoughts and your actions, and you feel helpless to resist it. You move from one conviction to the next conviction, unable to commit to anything.
Why is it that such a person should not expect to receive anything from God? This always felt harsh to me, especially as someone who compulsively doubts. But there it is, in the Word!
How do we square this with the story of Jesus healing the boy with the unclean spirit in Mark 9:
23 And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” 24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”
Jesus’ emphasis was on belief as James’ was on faith, yet the man still acknowledged doubts and Jesus healed his boy. Isn’t this an example of someone doubting and yet still receiving something from the Lord? This hardly seems like a case of “no doubts”!
I think so long as we restrict our understanding of “doubts” to internal thoughts rather than actions and decisions of our will we will find ourselves damned by James 1:7-8.
The man who brought his boy to be healed demonstrated faith by bringing his son to Christ, even if he had internal unbelief. And by crying out for more belief, he demonstrated his trust in the source of all faith.
Similarly, in our lives, there will be many times of uncertainty where we have internal doubts but we can choose to act in faith in the wisdom God has given us. That is demonstrating the “no doubt” James is speaking of, I believe. Our mind and the Accuser may throw intrusive thoughts at us, causing us to “Wonder If” we’re making the right choice or we are safe or are pure or whatever. But when we have asked in faith for wisdom, and received that wisdom, we can choose to turn our wills toward acting on that wisdom regardless of the noise in our head.
This does not mean that those internal doubts are meaningless or insignificant. Having lived with extremely loud doubts for 17 years now, I can attest that they matter. They matter in the sense that they affect your daily life and can disturb you. And some internal doubts need to be wrestled with, when they are based on truth, reason, here-and-now evidence, and the Word properly applied in context. Sometimes such doubts are exactly how God leads to wisdom!
But for some of us, the uncertainty that internal doubts raise are not usually based on these firm foundations but in the imagination. And when given attention, they lead us to direct our will away from the wisdom God has given us. They lead us to overturn our convictions in search of a feeling of peace and certainty that we are not promised in Scripture or in life. When James says “For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord,” I almost wonder if he is say that such a person will never practically be convinced he has received anything from the Lord! Because whether the Lord grants such a person wisdom or not, they will not recognize it if they do not commit and follow through with it despite the whisperings of doubt.
I am not convinced that we can silence the voices of doubt that interrupt our thoughts and echo through our minds. But I know we don’t have to entertain those voices and we certainly don’t have to act on them. We have the freedom in Christ to believe the wisdom he has given us and courageously follow through with the decisions we must make in this complex world. Many times we will have to echo that desperate father’s words, “I believe; help my unbelief!” But we know God honors such prayers of faith.
So as daunting as James 1 might seem, the promise for wisdom should give us hope. And the call to turn from doubt should not trouble us. With the help of the Holy Spirit we can turn from doubt and act in faith. Our emotions and thoughts may still be tossed about, at times, but our behaviors and our convictions do not need to be. And what I have found is that when you demonstrate to your heart that you will act on your convictions, the wisdom God has promised to give you, then your heart soon follows.
In other news, I recently published an article at Christianity Today on entering or returning to college titled “Come to Office Hours, Be Humble, and Go to Church.” Read it!
Right before reading this post I read another Substack post. The author wondered how a good boy raised in a nice Republican family could turn from all that to an ideology that led him to kill an innocent person. As I read I had the thought: Could a factor be that he switched from one form of certainty to another, never allowing self-doubt to rear its discomforting head?
Thank you. I honestly can relate to so much of what you have written in this article.