The Impasse Series (3/4): The Cost of Belief: The Surrender

Most people who don't believe in God aren't missing information. They're stuck in the middle of confusion or anger. That makes it hard to follow where the information leads.

That's not an insult. It's one of the most honest things I can say and I say it because I've been there. Belief has a cost. It requires you to stop being the final authority on your own life, and that is not a small thing. We don't give that up easily, and we don't give it up cheaply.

This is the third post in The Impasse Series. Four posts on the questions that stop people cold at the edge of faith. This category is about the mechanics of belief itself: how faith works, why it requires uncertainty, what prayer actually is, and why the gap between knowing and trusting is the hardest ground anyone has to cross.

The lens, as always: God is sovereign, and He is our Father. And any good father knows that a child who is handed everything, every answer, every proof, every guarantee never grows up. The space between question and certainty is exactly where faith is built. Not despite the uncertainty, but because of it.

1. Why does faith require belief without certainty?

Every significant thing in life, marriage, career, friendship, having children requires commitment before certainty. Faith isn't an irrational belief against evidence; its trust extended beyond what proof alone can guarantee. That's also just how knowing a person works, as opposed to knowing facts. You can't prove your spouse loves you the way you prove a math theorem. The question is whether the evidence is sufficient to reasonably trust.

2. If God knows everything, do I really have free will?

Knowledge of a choice and causation of a choice are different things. If I watch a recording of you choosing coffee over tea, knowing the outcome doesn't mean I caused it. Divine foreknowledge the idea that God exists outside of time and sees all moments simultaneously doesn't logically collapse freedom any more than watching a replay does. This has been a serious philosophical debate for centuries; the short answer is that omniscience and free will are not obviously incompatible.

3. Why pray if God already knows the outcome?

Prayer isn't primarily about informing God, it's about orienting yourself. Prayer changes the one praying, not just the situation. There's also a relational dimension: a father who knows his child needs something still wants the child to come ask...not that he needs to be told, but because the asking is part of the relationship. Prayer is how you stay in conversation with God, not how you file a formal request.

4. What if faith is simply wishful thinking?

Wishful thinking usually produces comforting beliefs and Christianity is not, in many places, a comfortable belief. It makes moral demands, requires confronting your own failures, and promises not the absence of suffering but the presence of God within it. People generally don't wish for that. The fact that the content of faith often runs against what we'd prefer suggests it isn't simply a projection of desire.

5. Why does God allow people to lose their faith?

Faith that can't be lost isn't really faith. It's programming. If you're not free to walk away, staying means nothing. God values the authenticity of the relationship enough to risk it. There's also a question of whether "losing faith" is ever really final. Many people who describe losing their faith describe a process that ended in something deeper, not just something gone.

6. Why doesn't God perform obvious miracles today?

Many people claim He does and some of those claims are credible, including documented medical recoveries that have no naturalistic explanation. But even granting that miracles are rarer than we'd like: what would constant, obvious miracles actually produce? History suggests that people who see miracles often still don't believe. The Israelites in the Exodus saw extraordinary things and still built a golden calf. Evidence alone cannot be the bottleneck for belief.

7. Why does truth seem so difficult to find?

The truth about important things meaning, morality, purpose, existence isn't the same kind of thing as a fact you look up. It requires engagement, humility, and the willingness to be wrong and start over. The difficulty of finding truth isn't evidence there isn't any; it's evidence that finding it costs something. Most worthwhile things do.

8. Why would a good God allow eternity to hinge on earthly choices?

We are the choices we make. Character is not imposed from outside; it's formed by the accumulation of what you've chosen across a lifetime. If who you are is genuinely yours, then what you've become by the end of your life is a real thing not something God can or should override. Eternity isn't a reward for checking boxes; it's the continuation of the direction you were already moving.

9. Why do some people experience God while others never seem to?

Some of it is circumstance, some is disposition, some is effort, and some honestly remains unexplained. The tradition suggests that the gap between seeking and finding is usually not as wide as it seems from the outside and that some of what looks like "never experiencing God" is actually not having recognized what they experienced.

10. If Christianity is true, why doesn't everyone believe?

Believing is not just an intellectual act; it requires surrendering something. Most people who don't believe aren't unconvinced by the arguments; they're unwilling to follow where the arguments lead. That's not an insult, it's just honest. Faith has a cost: it demands you're not the final authority on your own life. That's why I say, "God is sovereign and we are not." The resurrection either happened or it didn't, and the evidence for it is better than most people have been told. The question of why everyone doesn't believe has the same answer as why everyone doesn't do the hard thing they know they should do.

Every question in this post has the same root: what does it actually take to believe?

The answer is not more information. It's more honesty. Specifically, honesty about what you're protecting by staying on the other side of belief. Pride. Autonomy. The comfort of being the one who decides what's true about your own life.

Faith isn't a leap into the dark. It's a step toward a Father who has been reaching toward you the whole time. The evidence is there. The question is what you're going to do with it and what it's going to cost you to follow it.

That cost is real. And it is worth it.

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→ If you're ready to do the work, my book Escape Artist: The Fight for Freedom From Trauma will guide you through the process of breaking patterns and stepping into freedom. On Sale now everywhere books are sold.

→ If you need to go even deeper, I have written Escape Artist: The Workbook that will guide you through deeper reflections and healing. Available now on Amazon.

You don't have to figure this out alone.

More in this series:

• The Impasse Series: The Father's Heart

• The Impasse Series: The School of Love

• The Impasse Series: Christianity on Trial