I’m not a big fan of church message signs, but I can at least ignore them when their messages are cute, trite, sappy or irrelevant. This one makes me mad. Of course the problem isn’t with “Share your faith with others” but with “Keep your doubts to yourself”. This advice makes us look like anti-thinking, anti-rational simpletons to the world because it suggests that doubt is a powerful enemy to faith, and as such it should be ignored, denied, stuffed down deep until it disappears.

“Keep your doubts to yourself” also makes it impossible to authentically “share your faith with others”. After all, if I sometimes have doubts (and I do), and yet I still stake my life on my faith (and I do), I think that makes for a more compelling testimony about faith, which by definition isn’t a 100% certainty. On the other hand, if I feign certainty, I tend to come across as a blinded fanatic.

I recently read Daniel Taylor’s The Myth of Certainty, a great book that gave me more freedom to strongly affirm my faith even in times of doubt, or at least uncertainty. Taylor writes:

“…Job’s friends spoke many so-called truths to him which taken abstractly are theologically unimpeachable. Scripture recognizes, however, that the cool self-righteousness with which these truths were offered renders them useless to Job or anyone else. Christ, on the other hand, repeatedly modeled truth as relationship” (p. 129)

How do I know my wife loves me? I could pull out our marriage certificate and study it, and then keep my doubts to myself. But it is in the relationship that I find meaningful certainty.

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