As a scientist, and more generally as an academic, I have been trained to be a skeptic. There is value in skepticism, but there is also a great deal of danger in too much skepticism.

Back when I was in my teens and twenties, it seemed that people were trying to help me figure out my spiritual gifts every time I turned around. It wasn’t that often, of course, but I did take quite a few spiritual gift inventories in my younger days. Some were better than others, but one thing that was pretty consistent was that teaching always came up as one of my top spiritual gifts. I was skeptical. Yes, I love teaching and there is evidence to support the hypothesis that I’m good at it. However, I’ve wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember. I’m pretty sure I owe my sister an apology for my attempts to teach her to read when she was three. That puts the gift of teaching a few years before my profession of faith. It bothered me that none of the inventories seemed to be able to distinguish between a natural gift that came at birth and a spiritual gift that came at rebirth when I accepted Christ. And it seemed that leaders were constantly emphasizing that spiritual gifts might have nothing to do with natural talents.

What I finally came to accept was that it didn’t actually matter whether my teaching was a natural talent or a natural talent enhanced by a spiritual gift. The reality was that God gave me the gift whenever I got it, and he expects me to use my natural talents for his purposes just as much as he expects me to use the spiritual gifts he’s given me. All of my skepticism, all of my fretting, was just a waste of time and energy that could have been spent on things of value.

Unfortunately, skepticism is often more debilitating. I’ve been reading Hearing God by Dallas Willard, which I highly recommend. Willard makes the point that we often don’t hear God and don’t see him working in the world answering our prayers simply because we refuse to see. We work hard to explain away God’s activity on our behalf and convince ourselves that he’s not responding.

I saw an example of that in college. Several years before, I had been aware of an incident that I consider miraculous. A bomb hadn’t gone off. This bomb was in a hospital called Rumah Sakit Immanuel. The bomb was found ten days after it “should” have gone off, and authorities described it as large enough to level the hospital complex and damage the buildings on either side. No one could explain why the bomb hadn’t detonated. I had surgery at that hospital a few week later.

I was telling the story of the bomb that hadn’t gone off to one of my professors, someone who professed Christ. He immediately rejected the notion that the incident was miraculous, and started offering explanations. You may have some of the same thoughts he did. After all, this occurred in a third world. Maybe the investigators weren’t up to the task. Certainly, he believed that the incident had to have a natural explanation.

I’ll admit, I can’t prove that the incident did not have a natural cause. However, I am certain that God kept that bomb from going off, whether he did it through natural or supernatural means.

Why am I so sure? Well, that hospital was functioning as a powerful witness to a community that was very closed to the gospel, and God had shown up many times in small ways and bigger ones over the time of its existence, starting with the name of the place. The secular authorities suggested the name Rumah Sakit Immanuel instead of Rumah Sakit Baptis (Baptist), and the missionaries quickly agreed to having the “God with Us” hospital.

My professor did not convince me that God was not behind the bomb failure, though I did give up on trying to convince him pretty quickly. I have come to recognize that faith has to be a willing choice.

God doesn’t hit people over the head. He calls gently. Even when Jesus was actively working miracles before people, they didn’t always believe:  “Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him” John 12:37 (ESV). Our skepticism hurts us first when we refuse to believe despite what we see. We also run the risk that our lack of faith will limit what God does on our behalf. ” And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.  And he marveled because of their unbelief” Mark 6:5-6a (ESV).

Does some of your skepticism need to be replaced by a willingness to see and believe?

 

Photo by João Silas on Unsplash