Todd Mullins on Turning Doubt into Faith – “Don’t Let Doubt Take You Out”

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

This is Liz Renzel with Crawford Media Group, and today our guest is Todd Mullins, Senior Pastor at Christ Fellowship Church. Today we’ll be talking about his new book titled, Don’t Let Doubt Take You Out. Welcome to our program, Todd.

SPEAKER 03 : 0:13

Hey, it’s good to be with you.

SPEAKER 01 : 0:15

You know, Todd, I love the title, but reading a little bit of your book, I’d like you to tell us about the event that caused you to question everything about your life that ultimately led you to write this book.

SPEAKER 03 : 0:26

Yeah, well, I think that doubt is something that we all have to deal with in one way or another. I think we look at people that are confident and successful in life, or maybe they’re just strong Christians in their faith, and we think they must not deal with the same battles that we deal with. And the truth is, for my years of pastoring people and praying with people and counseling, our congregation, I’ve seen all types of very successful people, faithful people, all struggle with doubt. And I grew up in a great Christian home. I was raised in the Christian faith and loved the Lord and never planned to be a pastor, but I ended up being a pastor. Don’t you love that?

SPEAKER 01 : 1:09

How God does that.

SPEAKER 03 : 1:10

Yeah, unique way of just saying, no, you’re not going to be a doctor. I’ve got something else for you here. And so it was later in my life when we went through a crisis with our son. We had been through seven years of infertility and just a couple times where we thought we were pregnant and just disappointment hit us with that. But we finally had our boy and we’re so grateful. But about 18 months to two years old, he was not reaching some of his milestones that he should have in development. And We went to the doctor and got kind of the worst case diagnosis that we could have gotten and kind of what we had feared. And he was diagnosed being on the autism spectrum. And I remember when Julie and I, my wife, we were sitting in the doctor’s office and these words were spoken over us. And we’re like. you know, that isn’t what we see in our son. That’s not what we know to believe. And that may be a prescription for a journey we’re going to have to take and therapy he’s going to have to get, but it is not going to be a description. It’s a prescription, but not a description. Only God can describe him. And I remember Liz being so full of faith at that time and going, okay, God, you’re going to get us through that. And we had many years where Jefferson grew and and became, you know, got language and was functioning great, but then he hit his teenage years, and everything in our world stopped, and he stopped progressing, he stopped talking, he stopped eating, he stopped wanting to live, and as a, you know, dad, you want to fix the problem, and I remember praying like I’d never prayed before, and asking God for a miracle, and I’m up on Sundays, you know, I’m preaching that God is a miracle-working God, and and full of faith for the congregation. And yet in my own life, I was questioning everything I believed and everything I had been preaching and everything I had known because God wasn’t answering my prayers the way I wanted him to. He wasn’t coming through the way I thought he should. And I realized that for a lot of us, that’s when we really start to doubt God and doubt our faith. We’re like, God, why is this happening to me? Why is this happening to my family? Why, you know, I read about these stories in the Bible and yet it doesn’t seem like you’re there for me. And if we don’t know how to deal with doubt when those questions come up, because those are real questions. I think probably everybody listening today has one way or another asked the question, you know, God, if you’re so good, why do you let bad things happen? And if there’s any place that you can take that question, it is to God in prayer. And he’s not afraid of those questions and those hard questions that can’t always be answered very quickly. But, man, when you lean into God and lean into truth and seek his word, it forced me to seek him like I never sought him before and understand him. And I found that my place of desperation brought me to a place of revelation. It was in that desperate place that God spoke to me about myself and about my kind of control and trying to fix things. It kept me in a place of dependency on God. and god revealed his power and his strength in the midst of our pain and i don’t think there would have been any other way i could have learned some of the lessons i’ve learned since then you know thank god our son has done great and god’s healed him and he’s graduated from college and top of his class and got married and there’s a lot of things along the way but sometimes you got to understand When you’re praying for a miracle, we like the miracle minutes. The microwave miracles. But sometimes he takes us on a journey of little miracles. And I was looking for the big miracle, like the instant healing. And I was missing the little miracles along the way that he was taking us on and showing his faithfulness to us in the middle of the little things.

SPEAKER 01 : 5:05

That’s such a good story, and thank you for sharing about your son, and amen, that he is thriving. You know, doubt is huge. I think every one of us, as you said, every one of us deals with it. I went through a period of major fear. You know, that’s what you said, that doubt produces fear. And I love what you said earlier, that God’s not afraid of our questions. So does doubt mean that you don’t believe God?

SPEAKER 03 : 5:35

Well, I used to think that I used to think that if you doubted that you, that was the opposite of faith, but I’ve grown to learn that it’s not that the doubt you, you don’t have doubt without faith. And there are things in our faith journey with God that we will not fully ever understand until we get to heaven. So doubt’s just going to be along for the ride at times when our mind can’t get around something. And yet when you think about it, um, doubts almost the natural response to the supernatural. So if something is supernatural, it’s above the natural. It’s beyond what our natural minds can conceive and comprehend. But I came to just realize, man, I don’t want my God to be something I can get my little mind around. My mind is too small to understand the greatness and the power and the faithfulness of God and really grasp what his plan is. And so I have to trust him. And so no doubt is not the opposite of faith. I think doubt can actually, if it’s handled right, it can actually strengthen your faith, grow your faith because it causes you to lean into God and, uh, and, and reach out for him. And anytime you are searching for truth, you’re going to find Jesus.

SPEAKER 01 : 6:46

I love that you said that because not only personally, but I’m sure a lot of our listeners are going through the same thing. I thought, you know, because I was doubting and my fear came through false teachings and false belief that everything was up to me. If I didn’t believe hard enough, if I didn’t declare hard enough, if I didn’t have enough faith, then God’s not going to answer me. any of his promises or any of my prayers. And, you know, it actually caused, and it causes, like you said in your book, isolation from God. And that’s exactly where the enemy wants us, right?

SPEAKER 03 : 7:20

Exactly. He wants to be, doubt can be a disruptor between our connection with God. And that’s what doubt tries to do. But instead of seeing it as like the opposite of faith, we actually go, and doubt is like a warning signal. It’s like a light on the dashboard that, of your car alerting you that something’s wrong. The oil’s low, the engine’s overheating. Doubt’s just that indicator that something’s got to be addressed. And if you leave it unattended, you may end up on the side of the road of life in your relationships with people or your relationships with God going, how did I end up here? So it is something you’ve got to press into. And I always encourage people that if you’re dealing with doubt, Don’t hang out with other doubters. You want to hang out with people that have some faith. They have faith for you. They’ve seen God move in ways you haven’t seen Him move. They’ve walked with God further than you’ve walked with God. So if you’re dealing with doubt, hang out with some people of faith and let their faith grow your faith.

SPEAKER 01 : 8:17

That’s such good advice. So good, because even the Bible says to surround ourselves with believers. In my little season, I kept saying, I need to hear the truth. I need the truth. I didn’t know what the truth was, but I knew I needed truth. So what would you tell our listeners? What are some tools and what should we do to deal with doubt?

SPEAKER 03 : 8:38

Well, again, doubt I saw has hit me in three different ways. Long before I ever doubted God, I doubted myself. And so part of my book, I talk about, you know, when we doubt ourselves, that we end up counting ourselves out. We think we’re not good enough. We don’t think we have enough. We look around and see what everybody else is doing. And so it causes us to hold back and shrink back and not step into the life God has for us. And so really, that is where we have to take the lies that we’ve either been told about ourselves because of what somebody said to us or said about us. the lies that we’ve been believing ourselves and repeating, and we have to replace those lies with the truth of God. We have to understand who we are in God. And the truest thing about you is what God says about you, that you are called, you’re chosen, you are loved, you are anointed. If you are filled with his spirit, then you have the power of God inside of you. And for me, I had to go about almost making daily declarations in my life, And in my book, I write down, here are the daily declarations I had to make every day to change my thinking. So many of us don’t think about what we think about. We allow our thoughts to go just on their own, in our head, or what somebody said, and those kind of things change. will keep us back from stepping out. And so in the area of self-doubt, we’ve got to replace the lies that maybe we’ve grown up with, maybe things spoken over us while we were young, and we have to replace it with the truth of God. And when we do that, it gives us what I like to call a God-fidence. It’s not a confidence in me, it’s a confidence in God and His Spirit living inside of me. And the more I know what the Bible says about me, the more confident I am to step out and be who God created me to be. Then in the area of doubting God, that’s the second area that I approach in the book, is that again, it’s about understanding who God is. And if we just go by our limited understanding, maybe like you said, you had some false teaching when you were growing up that made you believe. You just got to believe harder or pray harder. Well, if you go back to the Word of God, you see that great men and women of God in the Bible struggled with doubt, but that didn’t mean that they had lost faith. That didn’t mean that they had disappointed God. That just meant that they were human. And you look at Moses, he doubted God. Abraham had his doubts. David had his doubts. But they didn’t let their doubts, they didn’t stop there. They actually pressed into God and kept leaning into the Lord. And as they did, it gave them the strength to become who they were supposed to be and walk Regardless of the detours or delays that they went through, they stayed consistent. And I really feel like when we understand this, our doubt can lead to a deeper faith. And it can drive us to our knees. It can keep us looking up to God and keep us in prayer. And so for me, I had to surround myself with people who had greater faith than I had. I had to lean into the guys in my men’s group. And share with them what I was going through when I was questioning God. And their faith actually carried me. There’s a verse description in Romans chapter 1 where the apostles, Paul says, I want us to help us out with the faith we have. Your faith will help me and my faith will help you. And so really it’s all about holding on to God, holding on to the promises, and then holding on to God’s people in that season. And the third section of my book is Doubting Others. And I talk about how doubt finds its way into our relationships. When somebody hurts us or someone we trust lets us down, we become suspicious and we doubt their motives and their intentions. And doubt tries to push us back from the relationship. And it did that to me. I had a dear friend that I was doing ministry and life with, and everything fell apart. And I looked back and I saw how little things said and little misunderstandings led to doubt seeping into the relationship. And we both started to question each other and doubt each other’s intentions and motives. And before long, we weren’t talking anymore. And I’m like, we’ve got to come together. We’ve got to call this what this is. And we’ve got to be able to show grace and forgiveness and then talk about our expectations of each other. And when we did that, man, God began to heal the relationship. And I think about Thomas, doubting Thomas. He was He wasn’t there when the doubt started right after the resurrection. He wasn’t with his brothers. All the rest of them saw Jesus. We don’t know where Thomas was. But eight days later, Thomas was still with the disciples. He was doubting, but he was hanging out with some people that had seen something he hadn’t seen, the resurrected Jesus. And because of that, that got him into a place of proximity to where faith could grow and Jesus could have this encounter with him. And so I would just encourage anybody right now that’s doubting their faith. And just lean into your church, lean into your Bible study, share this with somebody, be open and vulnerable. And when you do, you’re real and it’s a real place for the Holy Spirit to work in your life.

SPEAKER 01 : 13:47

Todd, where can our listeners go to get your book titled Don’t Let Doubt Take You Out? What a great title.

SPEAKER 03 : 13:54

Thank you. The book’s on Amazon, so that’s probably the easiest way to get it. And then my website, which is toddmullins.org. has that and a lot of other discipleship tools and devotionals that I’ve written.

SPEAKER 01 : 14:09

Todd, thank you so much for joining us today. It was such a pleasure.

SPEAKER 03 : 14:12

Thank you. My joy.