There are seasons in the Christian life when faith feels less like a settled conviction and more like something you are fighting to hold on to. The doubts come quietly at first, then louder. You pray and the words seem to bounce off the ceiling. You open your Bible and the words feel distant and flat. You look at other believers who seem to walk with effortless confidence and wonder what is wrong with you.
If you are in a season like that right now, this article is for you. Not with easy answers or cheerful platitudes, but with honest engagement with what Scripture actually says about hope and encouragement for those who are struggling in their faith.
What we will find is that the Christian hope is not built on the shifting sands of our feelings or our circumstances. It is anchored in the unchanging character of God, the finished work of Christ, and a cloud of witnesses who have walked this road before us and found that He is faithful. That anchor holds even when everything inside us feels like it is unravelling.
The Honest Reality of Struggle
One of the most damaging myths in contemporary Christianity is the idea that genuine faith is always accompanied by emotional warmth, spiritual clarity, and upward momentum. By this measure, doubt and spiritual dryness become evidence of failure. The struggling believer looks around at church, concludes they must be uniquely broken, and quietly withdraws.
But Scripture tells a very different story. Consider the psalmist in Psalm 42. He is not pretending to be fine. He writes with raw, almost startling vulnerability:
“Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him for the help of His presence.”
(Psalm 42:5, NASB)
Notice what the psalmist is doing here. He is talking to himself, calling his own soul to account. The despair is real; he does not minimise it or pretend it away. But he refuses to let it have the final word. He turns to face it and speaks truth over it: hope in God. He does not yet feel the hope. He is choosing it as a direction while his emotions lag behind.
This is one of the most important things Scripture teaches about faith in dark seasons: the way forward is not to manufacture feelings you do not have, but to preach truth to yourself until your feelings slowly catch up. The psalmist had learned that God is worthy of hope, and he holds that conviction against the tide of his own despair.
Jeremiah gives us a similar example in the book of Lamentations, written in the ruins of Jerusalem after the Babylonian destruction. He does not rush to comfort. He spends two full chapters in raw grief before he reaches the pivot point in chapter three:
“This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. The LORD’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.”
(Lamentations 3:21–23, NASB)
The phrase “this I recall to my mind” is deliberate. Jeremiah chose to remember something true about God when his circumstances gave him every reason to despair. And what he remembered was not a feeling or an experience; it was a fact: God’s lovingkindnesses never cease. His compassions never fail. They are new every morning.
This is the nature of biblical hope. It is not optimism, which looks at circumstances and expects the best. It is not wishful thinking, which imagines things might get better. It is a confident expectation rooted in who God is, a reality that stands independent of our circumstances, our feelings, or our present experience of His presence.
What Hope Actually Is
The original article quoted from Hebrews 11:1, and it is worth returning to that verse carefully, because the biblical definition of faith and hope is quite different from the way we ordinarily use those words:
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
(Hebrews 11:1, NASB)
Two words deserve careful attention here. The word translated “assurance” in the NASB is the Greek hypostasis, which literally means “standing under” or “underlying substance”. It is what gives something its solid, real quality. Faith, says the writer, is the underlying substance of the things we hope for. It makes them present and real to us even before they are fully realised.
The word translated “conviction” is elegchos, meaning proof or evidence. Remarkably, faith itself is described as the evidence of unseen realities. When we trust God’s promises in the dark, our very trust becomes a kind of proof that those realities exist and are trustworthy.
Notice what this means for the struggling believer. You do not need to feel confident to have faith. You do not need to feel God’s presence to trust that He is present. Faith is not the absence of doubt or the presence of warm feelings; it is a posture of the will, a choice to anchor your life to what God has revealed rather than to what your circumstances or emotions are currently telling you.
Paul unpacks this further in his letter to the Romans, in a passage that is worth reading slowly:
“And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
(Romans 5:3–5, NASB)
This chain of cause and effect is striking. Tribulation, the thing we most want to avoid, is the very thing that produces perseverance. Perseverance produces proven character, the kind of character that has been tested and found genuine. And proven character produces hope, a hope that does not disappoint because it is grounded not in circumstances but in the love of God poured out within us by the Holy Spirit.
Paul is not saying that suffering is enjoyable. The word translated “exult” does not mean pretending pain away. It means finding a reason to boast in something, to see value in what others might dismiss. The reason Paul can exult in tribulation is that he has seen its fruit. He knows where it leads. And so do you, if you have walked through any difficult season and emerged with a deeper knowledge of God than you had before.
The God Who Draws Near to the Brokenhearted
One of the most tender verses in all of Scripture appears, somewhat surprisingly, in a psalm of David written from a place of desperate danger. David was fleeing for his life, having narrowly escaped capture. And from that place of extremity he declares:
“The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
(Psalm 34:18, NASB)
This verse does not say the LORD is near to the spiritually strong, the theologically confident, or those who have their devotional lives sorted out. He is near to the brokenhearted. He saves those who are crushed in spirit. If anything, your current brokenness is not an obstacle to experiencing God’s nearness; it may be the very condition in which you are most likely to encounter Him.
The prophet Isaiah addresses the question of spiritual exhaustion directly in one of the most beloved passages in the Old Testament:
“Yet those who wait for the LORD will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.”
(Isaiah 40:31, NASB)
The context of this verse matters. Isaiah 40 is addressed to people who feel abandoned, who have been saying, “My way is hidden from the LORD, and the justice due me escapes the notice of my God” (Isaiah 40:27). The comfort God offers in response is not a quick fix or an immediate emotional uplift. It is an invitation to wait, and in that waiting, to discover that God’s strength is genuinely renewable.
The Hebrew word translated “wait” is qavah, which carries the sense of expectant, straining anticipation, like a cord pulled taut between two points. This is not passive resignation but active, directed hope. It is the posture of someone who has fixed their expectation firmly on God and refuses to let it drift elsewhere.
There is something important in the progression of Isaiah’s promise too. The three stages, mounting up with wings like eagles, running without getting tired, walking without becoming weary, move from the spectacular to the ordinary. Eagle-flight first, then running, then just walking. Sometimes the deepest expression of renewed strength is not that you feel spiritually exhilarated but simply that you kept going when everything in you wanted to stop.
The Fellowship of Those Who Have Struggled Before
One of the great gifts God has given us for the journey of faith is the testimony of those who walked it before us. The writer of Hebrews spends an entire chapter cataloguing men and women who trusted God in circumstances of tremendous difficulty, then pivots to this exhortation:
“Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”
(Hebrews 12:1–2, NASB)
The “cloud of witnesses” is not a passive audience. These are men and women whose lives are themselves a testimony, a witness to the fact that trusting God in difficulty is possible and worth it. Abraham left everything for a land he had never seen. Joseph trusted God through slavery and false imprisonment, years of circumstances that appeared to flatly contradict God’s promises. Moses chose the reproach of Christ over the treasures of Egypt. None of them received the full realisation of what they were promised in their lifetimes; all of them died in faith.
When you are struggling in your faith, you are not on new ground. You are part of a long line of believers who felt what you are feeling and kept going anyway. The race has been run before. The road is marked. And the One who is “the author and perfecter of faith” has not only mapped the course; He ran it Himself.
The instruction at the end of that passage is significant: fix your eyes on Jesus. Not on the cloud of witnesses, however inspiring. Not on other believers around you, whose lives may appear more put-together than your own. Not on your own spiritual progress or lack thereof. Fix your eyes on Jesus. He is both the origin of your faith and its completion. He will finish what He started in you (Philippians 1:6).
The Faithfulness That Holds When Ours Does Not
Perhaps the deepest fear beneath the struggle of faith is this: what if my doubts and failures have disqualified me? What if I have drifted too far? What if God is done with me?
Paul addresses this with remarkable directness in his second letter to Timothy:
“If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.”
(2 Timothy 2:13, NASB)
God’s faithfulness is not contingent on ours. He cannot be unfaithful to His own character or His own promises. Even when our grip on God loosens, His grip on us does not. This is not a licence for careless living; it is an anchor for the soul in seasons of weakness.
The same truth runs through the great promise of Lamentations 3: His compassions never fail. Not “only fail when we are sufficiently faithful”. Never fail. Every morning, regardless of what the previous day held, His mercies are new. You wake up not into a deficit of divine patience but into a fresh supply of divine compassion.
This is, at its heart, the good news of the gospel. The ground of our standing before God is not our faithfulness to Him but His faithfulness to us in Christ. Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame, not because we had proven ourselves worthy of His sacrifice, but because the love of God is not contingent on the lovableness of its object. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). That reality does not change when we are struggling or doubting. The cross stands.
The Community That Carries Us
There is something important about the way the writer of Hebrews frames the call to endurance: “let us run”, not “let you run”. The Christian life is not a solo event. It is run in community, and that community is part of how God sustains us in seasons when our own faith is thin.
The same writer made this explicit a few chapters earlier:
“And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.”
(Hebrews 10:24–25, NASB)
When you are struggling in your faith, the temptation is to withdraw. To stay home from church because it feels hypocritical to sing when you do not feel it. To avoid conversations about faith because you do not have answers to your own questions. To manage the struggle privately rather than bring it into the light of community.
But this is precisely the wrong response. The assembling together is not for people who have arrived spiritually; it is the gathering of people who need each other in order to keep going. When your faith is weak, you need others to carry some of the weight. Their prayers can sustain you when you cannot pray for yourself. Their hope can anchor you when yours has frayed. Their testimony of God’s faithfulness can speak to a part of you that has gone quiet.
If you are struggling, find one or two people you can be honest with. Not to perform your doubt or wallow in it, but to let yourself be known and prayed for. The Christian life was never designed to be lived in isolation, and the courage it takes to say “I am struggling” to a trusted brother or sister may be one of the most faith-filled things you do in a difficult season.
The Practice of Remembering
Both Jeremiah and the psalmist model something that is easy to miss in our approach to discouragement: deliberate remembering. Jeremiah says, “this I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope.” The psalmist repeatedly calls himself to “hope in God” by rehearsing what he knows to be true about Him.
Throughout the Old Testament, Israel was repeatedly commanded to remember. The feasts and memorials built into the Jewish calendar were not mere tradition; they were instruments of spiritual formation, regular, structured opportunities to rehearse what God had done so that the knowledge of His faithfulness could sustain faith in the present.
We need the same discipline. In seasons of discouragement, our attention narrows naturally to the immediate, to what is painful and confusing and unresolved. We need to deliberately broaden our view by remembering.
Remember the cross. Whatever your circumstances today, the cross is the definitive statement of God’s love toward you. He did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for all of us (Romans 8:32). If He did that, the apostle argues, will He not also graciously give us all things? Whatever feels absent in your life right now, the one thing you cannot lack is the love of God demonstrated at Calvary.
Remember His past faithfulness. Think back over your own life and trace the moments where God provided, protected, redirected, or met you in ways you did not expect. Those memories are not mere nostalgia; they are evidence. A God who has been faithful in the past is the same God you are dealing with today.
Remember the promises. The Bible is not merely a record of what God has done; it is a repository of what He has committed to do. He has promised never to leave you or forsake you (Hebrews 13:5). He has promised that nothing can separate you from His love (Romans 8:38–39). He has promised to complete the work He began in you (Philippians 1:6). These are not inspirational sentiments; they are the sworn commitments of a covenant-keeping God.
Standing Firm When You Feel Like Falling
If you are in a season of struggle right now, let me say this plainly: your struggle does not disqualify you from God’s grace. Your doubts do not frighten Him. Your distance from Him is not, as it might feel, a sign that He has moved.
You are part of a long and honourable line of those who have found the journey of faith hard. The psalmist who wanted to know why God had forgotten him. Jeremiah writing from the ruins of Jerusalem. Job arguing his case from the ash heap. The disciples hiding behind locked doors on the Saturday between crucifixion and resurrection, with every reason to believe the story had ended badly.
What sustained all of them was not the strength of their own faith but the faithfulness of the God they were struggling to trust. His lovingkindnesses never cease. His compassions never fail. Those who wait for Him will gain new strength.
So keep going. Not because you feel strong but because He is. Not because you can see the way ahead but because He can. Not because your faith is perfect but because His faithfulness is. Fix your eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith. He started this work in you and He will see it through.
This article focuses on spiritual dryness and the struggle to hold on in faith. If you are walking through acute suffering, the companion article “Faith in Times of Suffering” addresses that directly, covering God’s presence in the valley, the refining purpose of trials, and the practical resources of prayer and community in hard times. If the question you are sitting with is what the biblical hope itself actually rests on at its foundation, “Exploring the Depths of Hope in Times of Trial” goes deeper into that: the anchor of Hebrews 6, the resurrection as the ground of hope, and what to hold on to when circumstances do not change.
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All Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible (NASB) 1995 edition.