My husband and I recently moved to a new state. Since the dust is finally starting to settle, we have been visiting churches in hopes of finding a place to put down roots. We have been to one church several times and feel like it’s a strong contender.
A few weeks ago, while visiting there, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. It wasn’t the church or the people. Something in my spirit was uneasy.
Outwardly, I was doing all the things I had always done during worship. Inwardly, it was a different story. Here I was in church singing praise songs at the top of my lungs, listening to the words and wanting desperately to feel the certainty that seemed to come so easily to everyone around me. I was singing. I might have even been swaying. But I was definitely doubting. I kind of felt like a fraud.
As the service continued, the pastor began preaching from Matthew 28. It wasn’t a new passage to me. In fact, I had heard it most of my life. Yet one verse hit me differently than it ever had before.
What caught my attention was not the miracle, the resurrection, or even the worship. It was a small detail tucked into Matthew 28:17.
This verse describes what happened after the resurrection. The disciples have traveled to Galilee where Jesus told them He would meet them. It is important to note, they are not hearing rumors or secondhand accounts. They are standing in His presence. Yet Matthew tells us, “When they saw Him, they worshipped Him; but some doubted.”
Some doubted.
I couldn’t seem to get past those two words.
These were the disciples. Not strangers, but the men who followed Him throughout His ministry. Watching all the unbelievable things Jesus did. They were His closest earthly friends.
The more I considered that, the stranger it seemed.
The Disciples Knew Jesus And Still Experienced Doubt
For years, I believed faith and doubt existed on opposite ends of a spectrum. More faith meant less doubt. Less doubt meant stronger faith. At least that was how I understood it. Yet the more I sat with Matthew 28:17, the more I realized that explanation didn’t quite fit.
Maybe what bothered me most wasn’t the doubt itself, but the fact that the disciples had witnessed it all. They had evidence most of us can only imagine. They weren’t hearing stories about Jesus. They had lived them. They had walked beside Him, witnessed His miracles, and now stood in His presence after the resurrection. If doubt simply disappeared as evidence increased, then Matthew 28:17 makes very little sense.
Once I noticed that, I started seeing similar examples throughout Scripture. Peter stepped out of the boat and walked on water, yet doubt still crept in. John the Baptist recognized Jesus, baptized Him, and witnessed extraordinary confirmation of who He was. Yet later, sitting in prison, he sent messengers to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” Even the Israelites, who witnessed miracle after miracle, struggled to trust God.
The circumstances were different in those stories, but the pattern is hard to ignore.
Perhaps the reason those stories grabbed my attention was because I was carrying questions of my own. I wasn’t doubting the existence of God or the truth of the resurrection. What I was wrestling with was far more personal.
I doubted whether He cared.
That is hard to admit. For most of my life, I tried to believe all the things Christians are supposed to believe. I believed God heard prayer. I believed He cared about His people. I believed He could move mountains. The Bible says all of those things.
Yet I spent years asking Him to fix something I believed was wrong with me. I prayed, I confessed. I brought it to Him over and over again.
And nothing changed. At least, nothing I could see.
So while the people around me were raising their hands in worship that morning, my thoughts were heading in a very different direction. If God cared, why had He left me carrying this for so long?
The verse didn’t answer my questions. It certainly didn’t explain why I had spent years praying about the same things or why some answers seemed to take so long.
What it did challenge was the conclusion I had drawn about doubt itself.
Does Doubt Mean Your Faith Is Weak?
For years, I assumed doubt meant something was wrong with my faith. I treated it as evidence of weakness, a sign that I needed to believe harder, trust more, or somehow fix whatever was lacking in me. Yet here were the disciples standing in the presence of the risen Christ, worshipping and doubting at the same time.
That possibility had never occurred to me.
It forced me to reconsider an assumption I had carried for years. The more I looked at Scripture, the harder it became to maintain the idea that doubt automatically means weak faith. The evidence simply didn’t support it.
What strikes me now is that Matthew doesn’t stop the story at the doubt. He doesn’t tell us the doubters were sent away until they got their faith sorted out. The very next verses contain the Great Commission. The disciples who worshipped heard it. So did the disciples who doubted. In other words, the doubters were still invited to participate.
Even with the doubts, the story keeps moving. Doubt is acknowledged, but it is not the end of the story. For someone who spent years believing doubt meant something was wrong with my faith, that realization changed the way I read the passage.
Matthew 28:17 no longer fits neatly into the categories I once had for faith and doubt. The longer I sit with it, the more I wonder if faith and doubt have always existed side by side. Perhaps that is simply part of being human.
The disciples were still learning, still growing, and still trying to make sense of what God was doing. They had not arrived. They had not figured everything out. Yet Jesus continued to call them forward.
Perhaps faith is found in the wrestling. In the questions we continue to bring to God. In the prayers we keep praying. In the willingness to keep seeking, even when the answers are not yet clear.
The disciples worshipped. Some doubted. And the story continued. Maybe we are not as different from them as we imagine.
