How can I restart my faith during dark days?

Hey, thanks again for sending in your sermon questions. As always, we have a lot of fun with these, so we really appreciate you interacting with our sermons the way that you do and sending in these questions. Well, last week when we began our Isaiah series, we said the Book of Isaiah was kind of divided into three major different audiences. One where dark days were on the horizon, and group two is when dark days were amongst them. They were living in dark days.

And then the third group is when dark days had passed. So we had someone send in a question asking, when dark days are here and you’re really struggling with your faith and you want to believe in God, you want to believe that someday the dark days will pass, or even just that God is still with you, it’d be enough. How do you kind of rejuvenate your faith in the midst of dark days when you’re full of doubt and life is full of trouble? It’s a fantastic question, and I think there’s many answers to that, but just to spend just a couple of minutes on one slice, that is probably the most important, in my view. You look at what Jesus says in John 15 is, remain in me and I’ll remain in you.

Like, stay connected to the vine. Don’t detach. Don’t detach from church. Don’t detach from talking about your faith with other believers. Don’t detach from reading scripture.

Don’t detach from prayer. Right. You have to stay immersed in your spiritual practices if you’re going to want to try to find Jesus again or have him show up again. What I see so often, people come to the dark days and they’re full of doubt and they just pull the eject handle, right? And they’re like, all right, I’m done with church.

I’m done with prayer, done with reading scripture. I’m out of here. I’m going to live my life the way I want to, and if God wants to find me, he can come find me. If you do that, you’re not staying connected to the vine and you’re probably not going to find Him again. I’ve talked about this a little bit in some of our settings, but I went through this intense longer than a year period of super doubt where it felt like God was a coin flip, whether he was there.

And I’ll say eventually God brought me back. But I think just reflecting on that, I think the most important thing that I did in that season was I stayed in a small group in our life group at church, Beth and I’s life group, and I talked to them about what was going on. I talked to mentors about what was going on. I asked them to pray for me. I kept reading Scripture every day, even though when I was reading scripture, I was like, I don’t even know if this is true, but I would just keep doing it, I would keep praying, I would stay reaching out to be connected.

And eventually, there was kind of a huge moment where God burst back into my life and kind of rebooted everything. But I don’t believe that would have happened if I hadn’t been staying connected to the vine. So while there’s probably a lot of other things that would be helpful in the midst of those dark days, I would say the most important thing is to stay connected to the vine. Well, hey, thanks again for sending in your questions. We hope that was helpful, and we will see you next time.

Bye.