Founding member offer. $270 a year, locked in while you stay a member. After October 31, $407 a year, or $37 a month. You save $137 a year. Includes Navigator, every Learning Path, the Contender and Berean series, cohorts, Unspoken, and every digital file in the store. Renews at $270 a year while you stay a member; cancel anytime online.

Offer ends October 31 at 11:59 PM Eastern.
Founding member offerLock in $270
Jude 3 Project
Back to Read
Study guide · Apologetics & Culture

What Do You Do With Your Own Doubts and Fears as a Believer?

Reviewed by Jude 3 Project·2 min read

Tap a Bible reference to read it.Hover over a Bible reference to read it.

A standalone study on facing your own doubts and the church’s failures without losing your faith.

The big question

It is easy to assume that people who defend the faith have no doubts of their own. Yolanda Solomon says the opposite. She carries doubts and fears like anyone, and she argues that pretending otherwise is what makes our witness brittle. This study is about facing the fear of man, owning honest doubt, and telling the truth about the church’s failures, all without walking away from Christ.

Key takeaways

  • What and who you fear will shape how you live out the gospel.
  • Owning your doubts is part of having mercy on doubters, starting with yourself.
  • Doubt can drive you deeper into Scripture instead of away from God.
  • Honest faith names the church’s real failures: hypocrisy, racism, sexism, nationalism.
  • The misuse of the faith does not prove it false, and the gospel is the remedy for fear.

Scripture to sit with

1 Peter 3:15. Set apart Christ as Lord in your heart, then be ready to give a reason. Security in Christ comes before the answer.

John 20:24-29. Jesus invites doubting Thomas to come close and see. Doubt met with invitation, not rejection.

Jude 22. Have mercy on those who doubt. Solomon extends that mercy to herself.

2 Corinthians 5:11. Knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others. The right fear frees us from the wrong one.

Quotes worth discussing

Solomon says, “What and who we fear will determine how we live out the gospel.”

On doubt, Solomon says, “Sometimes that person that I need to have mercy on is me.”

On where to take it, Solomon says, “Instead of letting our doubts push us further from God, let that doubt take you deeper into God’s word.”

On honesty, Solomon says, “The misuse of one thing does not make every use illegitimate.”

Discussion questions

  • Whose approval do you fear most, and how does it shape what you will and will not say about your faith?
  • What is a doubt you have been afraid to say out loud? What would it look like to bring it to Scripture?
  • Where have you seen the church’s failures push someone away from Christ?
  • How do you hold honesty about those failures together with confidence in the gospel?
  • What would change if you feared God more than you feared people this week?

Go deeper

This study comes from the Jude 3 Project’s Life of an Apologist course with Yolanda Solomon. For a related conversation, see the Jude 3 episode on whether it is okay to doubt your faith.

A closing reflection

Name one doubt and one fear this week, out loud or on paper. Take the doubt to a passage of Scripture and sit with it instead of running. Then ask God to make his approval matter more to you than anyone else’s. The remedy for fear is not certainty. It is the gospel.

Ask Navigator a follow-up