Kasey Van Norman Quotes

Healthy doubt encourages us to bring our questions to God; toxic doubt drives us away from him. And healthy doubt makes an appearance for the short term, ultimately bringing us to a deeper place with God, while toxic doubt consumes us and lingers on, dragging us down day after day, year after year.

When we foolishly believe that our ways, our opinions, our plans somehow have jurisdiction over the sovereign will of the Creator of the universe, we will always end up in one place: the pigpen.

When we cave to discouragement, we are really saying that we think our circumstances are bigger than the Creator of the universe. The reason discouragement has such potential to overshadow our faith is because, simply put, it reflects an unwillingness to trust God.

Maybe you feel so consumed with the pull of your desire that you wonder if there is still hope for you. Perhaps you feel so beaten down by a certain trial in your life that you don't know if you will ever have the strength to get up again. Maybe you are so exhausted from your attempt to juggle all the different idols begging for your attention that you're on the verge of collapse. If you want to have genuine faith in a God who has the power to stand with you in the fire and bring you out unharmed, then I beg you to examine your faith, as Scripture tells us to do: Examine yourselves to see if your faith is genuine.

I grasped the who, and that was enough when I didn't understand the why. What I have learned along the way, and what Job learned too, is that it is better to know God than to know the answers!

The truth is, however, that God does not intend for us to forget our past because it has the potential to make us stronger, more purpose-filled people. God can redeem those experiences and use them to transform us into a more accurate image of his Son. The key is that we must let him into those places so that we can see him - and ourselves - more clearly.

The more time that passes without an answer and the longer we wander through the wilderness of silence and shadow, the more fearful we become that maybe God isn't all we have believed him to be. It's in those moments that Satan plants in us the temptation to 'throw away this confident trust in the Lord.' The enemy wants us to forget 'the great reward it brings you' (Hebrews 10:35).

God can't be squashed into any formula or confined to a narrow explanation, and he doesn't want our dreams to be small and manageable either. He is a God who blasts through all human boundaries.

I do not need the Lord to heal me. What I need is the faith to trust him no matter what happens. In this, I have begun to realize that great faith is borne in the great unknowns of life.