A Flood of Doubters | Northstar Church

“But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. These are the records of the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time; Noah walked with God.” – Genesis 6:8-9.

If history has taught us anything, there will always be doubters. Whether you are seeking a financial goal, a business goal, a personal goal, or really anything – there will always be a person waiting to tell you that you aren’t good enough. Your idea isn’t good enough. It’s not going to work. It’s going to be too hard. It’s unrealistic. You get the point. But unlike today, when we seem to divide into several camps, Noah was in a camp by himself. You can only imagine what people were saying or at least thinking:

“This is madness. How long will this boat be?”

“This guy has lost his mind. No one can build a boat that big and why would anybody even want to.”

“He is building a three hundred cubit foot boat in the middle of nowhere.”

Imagine being Noah and hearing God’s command to build an ark. Noah was nearly 600 years old at that time. He had “walked faithfully with God,” and he wasn’t about to stop. But what a strange demand. The ark would be massive. The task was huge. But Noah obeyed God and got to work. He didn’t sit around and stew all day on the fact that people thought he couldn’t make all of this work. It didn’t consume him. He focused on God and in God, he found the motivation to keep going. And Noah stuck to the task to the end, despite the assignment taking over 100 years.

Walking with God may mean doing things that look foolish, but a true walk with God means having fellowship with God and praying seriously, “…Speak, Lord, your servant is listening…” (1 Samuel 3:9). It means acting on divine wisdom that will seem like foolishness in the mind of the world.

We are all like Noah in the sense we want to do big things in our lives. And along the way, we go through hard times. We doubt ourselves. We worry about the future and if we are doing the right things. Like Noah, we need to be confident that God who sees from beginning to end, has the perfect timing. And through us, like Noah, God can achieve His purposes in spite of the doubters.

Discussion Questions:

Faith is about a relationship with God built on trust. In other words, faith is about having enough confidence to believe and act on that belief, despite the doubts you may experience. Do you find this view of faith more helpful and encouraging?