Tag: Salvation Doubt

Today we’re talking about, “How do I know that I’m saved?” And I’ve really struggled to put this episode together because I didn’t want it to be just some kind of giant reassurance-seeking fest for people. However, I know that this is a big question that many Christians with OCD are wrestling with. Even if you don’t have OCD, lots of Christians have some everyday doubts about whether or not they’re saved.

The problem is that if you have a religious form of OCD called scrupulosity, it can take these everyday doubts and blow them up into a giant horror movie in your brain where you’re separated from God forever. And in inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, we talk a lot about the obsessional story and how these doubts don’t just exist in isolation. They draw you into a storyline, and the plot is based on a mixture of fact and fiction. So there’s real emotion that gets laden onto these things. And even though you’re being led into an imaginary worst-case-scenario outcome, you don’t necessarily realize that you’re going into the imagination. You’re crossing over this imaginary bridge into what we call the OCD bubble.

Once you’re in the bubble, it’s very hard to recognize that you’re in the bubble. Everything feels real and scary, and it doesn’t feel quite safe to stay in that place, but it also feels really irresponsible, or it doesn’t feel okay, to leave.

Let’s talk for a moment about why people have doubts about their salvation. So for some people, they doubt their salvation because maybe they were saved really young. Maybe they don’t have a full memory of the experience. Maybe they remember it, but they feel like, you know, there were a lot of pieces spiritually that I just didn’t understand. And to that, I would say, of course there are things that we’re going to understand at a different level when we’re an adult than when we were a child. But did your child self understand it on a child level?

Other people would say, well, I’ve been listening to other Christians, and they have these dramatic testimonies, these extreme conversion experiences. They were using drugs before, and they didn’t care anything about God. They were an atheist. And then God met them somehow, and they knew it was Him, and now they’re not using drugs, and they are fully devoted to Jesus and telling everyone else about Him. And sometimes when you hear drastic and dramatic testimonies like that, it can cause you, if you don’t have one of those, to think, well, did I have a real experience? Am I really a Christian? So I think that’s why some people doubt.

Each person’s experience with the Lord is different in our meeting with Jesus. You can even see that with Jesus’ disciples. There were some that were kind of like, “Hey, come and meet Jesus. Come and see what’s happening.” And then you have, of course, Paul on the road to Damascus, and he has a dramatic conversion experience.

Maybe you don’t have a specific day or time that you can point to in regard to when you decided to follow Jesus. Maybe it was a gradual process. Over time, you slowly started to engage in spiritual practices, and at some point along that line, you made that decision each and every day to get up and to follow Jesus, to be His disciple. And I think people who have that version of their story struggle because they hear other people say, “Well, I know I was saved on June the first in 1985, and that was the day that I gave my life to Christ.” And so someone who has a more gradual conversion story may really struggle, like, is my experience real?

You may doubt your salvation by saying, “You know what? I just don’t feel close to God.” We’ve talked about this on the podcast before, that I do believe feelings are important. I don’t believe that we should just dismiss everything that we feel. We have to find this balance of our feelings do provide some helpful information for us sometimes. And there were certainly emotions that led me to start this podcast, whether those were sadness, deep empathy, and a little bit of anger about maybe easy answers in the Christian community. And all of that was very helpful for me and propelled me to do something positive after having that emotional experience.

So when we talk about, “I don’t feel close to God,” this is somewhat nebulous. Because you think about the other relationships in your life, whether it’s a parent or a spouse or a best friend, there may be times that you feel really close and connected to that person, and then there may be other times where you don’t feel as close and connected, but you know that you love them. You know that you care for them. You know that you wouldn’t want anything negative to happen to them, that you would want to rush to their aid if they needed you. So we can have that sense of love for God even if we don’t feel close to Him right now.

Sometimes people will say as part of their obsessional story, “Well, I don’t feel the same way that I did when I got saved.” I think you could ask a lot of married people, “Do you still feel the same way that you did the day that you got married?” That is a mountaintop, exciting experience, full of love. You’re surrounded by lots of friends and family. It’s a beautiful thing, but we may not feel that same exact way two years later. That doesn’t mean that we don’t love our spouse. It just means we’re in a different season right now, and we have different seasons spiritually.

We have these mountaintop experiences with God. Think about when you are a teenager going to youth camp, if that was part of your experience. Everyone’s so excited about God, and they’re like, “Yes, I totally want to follow Him and live for Him the rest of my life, and I want to tell all my friends about Jesus.” And then slowly that starts to fade as you get back into the real world, and some of that is just normal. So don’t allow OCD to use these types of things as evidence that you’re not saved or that you don’t love God.

We just recently, in January, went through a period of prayer and fasting with our church. I would say that was a recent mountaintop experience for me. It was exciting. We just saw some answered prayer, very profoundly felt close to God, very connected in prayer. We had a lot of corporate gatherings of prayer early in the morning. It was cold, but we went there. It was just a beautiful time.

And then February hit, and even toward the end of January and into February, it was like my family was super sick. Just things were very different going on there, right? It’s a different experience, not feeling maybe as connected or as close to God. We still love God. We’re still participating in spiritual activities. We’re still reading our Bible. We’re still praying. It’s just a harder season because we went through a lot of sickness and didn’t feel good, had some rough weather. It was a rough winter this winter, but that’s okay. Spring is here or coming.

There are also times in your spiritual journey, or I’ve experienced this as well, where you’re going through immense suffering. You’re sad, you’re depressed, you don’t even know if you want to get out of bed. What is the point of all this? Why am I here? And those are the valley experiences that we have spiritually. Those are the desert seasons.

There’s a song that I really love called Desert Song, and it’s been around a while, but it’s really just kind of followed me through different hard seasons of my life. I’ll put that song back on, and the whole idea behind it is I’m going to praise God regardless of the season that’s going on in my life. When things feel really dry and empty and lonely and dark, God is still here. God is still worthy of praise.

You may doubt your salvation if you’re struggling with an ongoing sin. And this is something that we talked about in the confession and repentance episode, so I encourage you to flip back to that one and listen to it. It’s really good. And we talk about how the struggle that you’re going through shows that you are battling with sin and can confirm to yourself that you are a believer, that you are connected to God, because you are actively working toward eradicating that sin out of your life. That struggle means that you’re a work in progress, that God is still working on you and in you, and that you are still partnering with the Holy Spirit in that sanctification process.

The final reason for salvation doubts that I want to talk about is that people have bought into a works-based salvation. They’re depending on what they are doing and determining whether or not that’s good enough for God. And it’s interesting because I’ve talked with many people who have these doubts, and they will say, “Well, yeah, I know that’s not the gospel, but I feel like this.”

So I want to share that all of these things that we’ve talked about are all things that OCD uses as part of the obsessional story to draw you in and cause you to believe something that’s not true. And so it’s helpful for us to know that because if we know that, and we know these potential contributions to the obsessional story, other potential contributions may be people that you know who have walked away from the faith. That may be a huge contribution to some of this. “Well, I thought that they were really dedicated, and they walked away from the faith, and so what does that mean about me?”

Feelings of inadequacy, of feeling bad about yourself, can cause you to feel like, yeah, the Scripture promises and Word are for everyone else. Somehow I’m outside of that. That’s not really for me. This is very common in scrupulosity.

Oftentimes, I’m running into people that have read the Bible, they’ve studied the Scriptures, they’ve been under the teaching. They’ve done their fair share of Googling about their spiritual doubt process. And what we know is that OCD does use specific facts. It uses personal experience. It uses hearsay, the things that we’ve heard about other people. It uses news articles. All of these things are thrown into this obsessional story, and we can write a convincing story and make it sound really believable, and we can put fear in there or anticipation. And that can cause people to feel real emotions.

So that’s why they might say, “I know that this doesn’t make sense, but I also know that it feels real,” and it gets very, very confusing internally, right? That’s what OCD does. Because there’s this blend of fact and fictional elements, it seems like it’s true. It stirs up a lot of emotion, and you get stuck in that fear.

Really, the way out of that is by being able to examine that story differently, recognize the thinking errors that are happening, not to challenge the negative thoughts, but to recognize the reasoning process that got you there in the first place. If you can recognize the obsessional reasoning process that got you there in the first place, then you can work your way backward to untangle that obsessional reasoning process so that you can get out of the OCD bubble.

And this is what inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy, or ICBT, teaches you how to do. You learn all of these different pieces. You learn about the reasons for the obsessional doubt, the obsessional story, what going into the bubble is like, and then what are the doorways out of that bubble so that you can get back to what’s actually happening in the here and now.

When we look at salvation at a very basic level, God has a part, and we have a part. God is the main character, the major player in the story. We have a minor part in accepting the gift. Salvation is based on the finished work of the cross of Jesus Christ. It is not based on what we have done. It’s not based on what we did before we were saved. It’s not based on what we’ve done since we’ve been saved.

Ephesians 2:8 and 9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

If salvation is not based on earning God’s merit, then that means that we don’t need to strive for God’s love and approval. Our part of the equation, that’s very small, is to believe in what Jesus has done for us and to trust in the work of the cross of Christ.

Romans 10:9: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

This can be something that’s really hard for a lot of Christians with OCD to understand and accept. Salvation is not based on you and your behavior. Salvation is based on what God has done for us, and that’s a beautiful thing because if I can’t do anything to earn it, that also means that I’m not going to do something to mess it up.

If I am seeking God on a day-to-day basis, if I am involved and engaged with my faith, then you’re not just going to mysteriously, magically, somehow, maybe kind of walk away someday. That is a fear based in OCD and what OCD is telling you, all kinds of things that you’re going to lose your relationship with God, telling you that you’re going to walk away from the faith. It may tell you that you’re outside of the family of God, that you can’t really truly know if you’re saved. And understand that this OCD story, it comes with a lot of fear dumped on top of it. That fear makes the OCD story feel so real and so believable. But the problem is that it’s not. This is a lie, and you have to be able to identify, how in the world did I get into this reasoning process?

And I understand, as someone who grew up and felt like a lot of my sanctification, this process of becoming more like Christ, I thought this is all up to me and I’ve got to work really hard and I’ve got to check the boxes and I’ve got to do the right thing and I’ve got to be very conscientious. And I did all of that when I was younger and in my twenties. And you know what? It was exhausting.

Not only was it exhausting because there was so much effort that I felt like I was trying to put forth, there really wasn’t joy in my spiritual practices. And what I learned when life hit me on the backside and I went through suffering and came to a different understanding and realization of who God is and my relationship with Him, I recognized that if I can’t save myself, then I also don’t have that ability to do all this effort to make myself more like Christ. That has to be a partnership between me and the Holy Spirit as I am daily surrendering to God’s work in my life, as I am denying myself and taking up my cross every single day.

So I want to tell you that our salvation is not based on feelings, that you may or may not feel close to God right now. That doesn’t affect the truth of the situation, that you are saved based on what Jesus did in dying for you on the cross. You may feel like God isn’t there or God has abandoned you, but I want you to hear that He loves you very much and went all the way to give His Son for us in order to have a relationship with us. If that doesn’t speak volumes to you, I don’t know what will.

I think, unfortunately, we have become so desensitized to this salvation story, and we know all the quote-right answers as Christians. The joke is that the Sunday school answer is always Jesus. Whatever the question is, the Sunday school answer is, “It’s Jesus.” And so we can recite to ourselves, “Well, I know salvation is through grace, and I know Jesus died on the cross for me.” And then there’s this gigantic “but”—I’m emphasizing that word. It’s like, “But I feel…” is usually what comes next, or, “But I have this thought…” to that such-and-such. And you really have to do some work, and I encourage you to do some work, to unravel that thought process, unravel that feeling process, figure out where that story has come from.

And I’ve talked about this before, but oftentimes we’re putting things on God that we have received from other people in our life, or we are putting this perspective of who God is based on maybe some harsh church teachings that you might have experienced, judgmental believers in the church. There are all kinds of different ways that our view of God is formed. Most early and often, it’s our parents and how they respond to us, how they respond to us emotionally, how they respond to us in discipline situations, and then how they speak to us about God. And that certainly affects how we view God.

The last thing that I want to talk with you about is this concept that I’ve been rolling around in my mind that I refer to as spiritual sense data. Now, ICBT tells us that we have a variety of senses that we use in our environment on a normal everyday, day-to-day basis. So we have our five senses, we have our common sense, we have this sense of self, the real person who we really are. We also have internal senses. Those would be things like beliefs, desires, feelings, emotions. And if we are able to tune into all of these senses and trust those senses, that helps you get out of the trap of OCD, get out of that thought spiral.

I really believe that as believers, we have a sense of spiritual sense data if we have the Holy Spirit inside of us, in that Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. This is what Romans 8:15 through 17 says: “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” That’s awesome right there. “And if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him.”

And that means that we’ve all had some type of experience where our spirit has connected with God’s Spirit. And I would encourage you to really not distrust those experiences that you have. Maybe it’s been a while because OCD has been so loud since you’ve had one of those spiritual experiences. Maybe it’s been a long time ago, but you were out in nature somewhere, or by a beach, or in a worship service, and you really felt the presence of God, or you had some type of spiritual peace or reassurance that God was with you. Maybe it was in a time of deep suffering and you were sorrowfully crying out to God, but God gave you, not all the answers to your problems, but just a sense of presence or a sense of peace.

And understand, I’m saying not all things are about feelings, but if you have these points in your life that I would call anchor points, I would encourage you to tap in and really remember those. Sit with those experiences from a full sensory level. And when you’re able to do that, I think that’s going to help you know that you belong to Christ.

We also know that there is a fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And look, nobody has all of those things all the time. If we were perfect, if we had all the fruit of the Spirit all the time, we must be in heaven. That doesn’t exist on earth. But there are probably some of those things that you can identify. Look, I have become a more loving person since I became a Christian. Due to knowing Christ, I am a more patient person than I would be without Him. There is more kindness flowing out of me than there would be if I didn’t know Jesus. I think you may be able to see certain experiences in your life and say, okay, that’s something, that’s sense data that I can lean into, that shows that I love the Lord.

If you are having spiritual obsessions, the idea that this is something that you value, that OCD attacks, that it attacks your faith because it’s something that’s important to you, and if you’re just constantly wrestling with all of these doubts, I want you to know that there is hope, that there is healing, that I am going to continue to spread these messages that you can receive really great treatment that incorporates your faith, where you don’t feel like you have to either choose therapy or your faith.

If you’re struggling to find a strong Christian counselor in your area, I really encourage you to look into Empowered Mind. This is a course that I have for Christians that’ll teach you ICBT principles from a Christian faith lens. And if that’s something that would be helpful or beneficial to you, you can go to carriebock.com/training to find out more information.

Thank you so much for listening. Please stay tuned with us. Next week, I have an interview with a dear friend, and we’re going to be talking about when the suffering won’t end. He has been living with terminal cancer for seven years, and I think he’s just a wealth of godly wisdom for you. And we’re going to apply it to OCD, and I think you’re going to take a lot out of that episode.