Hairballs from the Heart

by

All who are led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons and daughters. You didn’t receive a spirit of slavery to lead you back again into fear, but you received a Spirit that shows you are adopted as his children. With this Spirit, we cry, “Abba, Father.” The same Spirit agrees with our spirit, that we are God’s children. But if we are children, we are also heirs. We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him so that we can also be glorified with him.   -Romans 8:14-17

Assurance is a key doctrine in the Wesleyan tradition.  It is the belief that a person can know they are saved in Jesus Christ.  The Apostle Paul taught that the same Spirit that adopts us as God’s children, that empowers us to call God our Loving Parent, this Holy Spirit agrees, or witnesses with our spirit.  Something changes in you when you accept that God has called you “My Child.”  Fear gives way to peace when the  foundation of our being  is the solid rock of Christ, not the shifting sand of everything else that seeks to claim us.

Enter Doubt

Many of us who came to faith in evangelical traditions know the concept of assurance well.  We have claimed Christ as our own, even as we have been claimed by Christ.  We’ve felt the strangely warmed heart every time we realized and trusted that Christ really died “for me.”  We have experienced the power and witness of the Spirit through powerful demonstrations of faith, through life-giving missions, through transformative worship, through holy coincidences, through the gift of speaking in tongues, through the gentle witness of nature.

And yet, we are riddled with doubt.

Doubt feels like the opposite of assurance.  We voice our doubts, and we are often met with people who don’t know how to respond.  Often, people in the church give unhelpful platitudes to cheer us up when we doubt.  “Keep on praying!” “God’s still working!” (Or if they’re just plain honest, they look at you weird and start talking about something else). Or worse, they make doubt to be a sin, and you feel judged for expressing your doubt.

What if Disillusionment is Still the Witness of the Spirit?

But what if disillusionment is still the witness of the Spirit?  What if your disappointment that things aren’t what they seemed is the Holy Spirit witnessing within you that there is yet a better way?  Maybe you are disappointed and filled with doubt because something legitimately needs to be re-examined and taught differently?  What if, as Paul says, “We are God’s heirs and fellow heirs with Christ, if we really suffer with him…”  Did Christ’s suffering not include doubt?  More than once Jesus himself seemed to wonder if his own disciples would ever get it.  And he certainly had at least one canonized moment of extreme doubt that his death was necessary for atonement.

Sure, we are masters at deceiving ourselves, of overlooking the plank in our own eyes to remove the splinter from someone else’s.  Doubt can also come from places of fear that would remove our hearts and attention from what God would want for our happiness and wholeness.  I have experienced some doubts that have shaken me to the core and led to severe anxiety and depression.  I don’t want to elevate doubting as if it’s only ever good, or only ever leads to a deeper enlightenment.  Most of us experiencing doubt are not thrilled about it.  It can feel like real suffering.

So if that’s the case, how can you tell if the Holy Spirit’s at work in you when you experience earth-shattering doubts?

Hairballs From the Heart

In Wesley’s sermon, “The Witness of the Spirit,” we are given real clues to look for when we wonder whether God’s Holy Spirit is witnessing within our own.  I love this paraphrase from Rev. Thomas James, which beautifully sums up the climax of Wesley’s sermon:

Because you asked, I’ll tell you: here’s how you know you’ve heard the voice of God in the testimony of the Spirit: you will know that you have not been deceived by your own soul, and you’ll know that you are not delusional, because the voice of God will follow the fruits of the Spirit. The fruits of the Spirit ruling in the heart are ‘love, joy, and peace’; ‘bowels of mercies, humbleness of mind, meekness, gentleness, and long-suffering.’ The outward fruits are the doing good to all [humanity], the doing no evil to any [person], and the walking in the light.

By these fruits you will be able to distinguish the voice of God from the delusional voice of all others. The voice of God will never call for anything but for the witness of your life to fall in line with the witness of the life of Christ, which offers new life through eternal love to all. The will of God is for humanity, for each of us, to acknowledge that we are one in the Spirit of God, which seeks to make manifest through our lives the great love of God to all people.

How often have I witnessed people with strong doubts yet demonstrate these gifts of the Spirit?  Perhaps doubting everything you once believed is not a sign that you’ve lost your way.  Within your doubt, are you experiencing love, joy and peace?  Within your doubt, are you filled with mercy, humility, patience and gentleness towards others?  Within your doubt, are you actively seeking to do good and no harm to others?  Within your doubt, are you yet still seeking for all people to experience full life and peace with each other?

You may never find satisfying answers in this life.  Doubt may not be a life-stage for you…it could be a permanent way of being in the world. But if Wesley’s ideas of the witness of the Spirit are true, then doubt does not have to compete with assurance.

For me, and for many who suffer from anxiety and depression, that is Good News.

When not drawing the Wesley Bros cartoon, the Rev. Charlie Baber, a United Methodist deacon, serves as youth minister at University United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill, N.C. His cartoon appears on United Methodist Insight by special arrangement.