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You Can Trust a God With Scars: Faith (And Doubt) for the Searching Soul
How do you balance the tension between doubt and faith?
Can you really trust God, considering the suffering, injustice, and hypocrisy you see in the news (and in your own life)? Can the Christian faith resolve your deepest longings? You are not alone if you feel spiritually adrift and directionless. Questions about God, faith, life, and the disillusionment toward church and religious leaders are widespread.
You Can Trust a God with Scars invites you to experience the broader Christian story. In these pages, the yearning and questions of your own story become grounded with a God who does not avoid pain but enters into it, bearing wounds of His own. In this timely book, Rev. Dr. Jared Ayers offers a guided tour of the Christian Story for you who may be unfamiliar, skeptical, hurting, and disillusioned, lingering in the borderlands between faith and doubt. With a fascinating mix of theology, art, Scripture, music, and literature, he invites you into a conversation about a Christianity that embraces doubt, mystery, and a God who understands suffering intimately.
Whether you are a Christian seeking to draw closer to Jesus amidst pain, have been hurt by the church, or are an agnostic or atheist, in You Can Trust a God With Scars, you will series of conversations about Christian faith that are honest, hospitable, and intellectually compellingA meaningful framework to help you work through your beliefsQuestions at the end of each chapter to guide reflection or discussionHere is a safe, compassionate space to reawaken hope and find meaning in the Christian story, despite living in a fractured world.
Can you really trust God, considering the suffering, injustice, and hypocrisy you see in the news (and in your own life)? Can the Christian faith resolve your deepest longings? You are not alone if you feel spiritually adrift and directionless. Questions about God, faith, life, and the disillusionment toward church and religious leaders are widespread.
You Can Trust a God with Scars invites you to experience the broader Christian story. In these pages, the yearning and questions of your own story become grounded with a God who does not avoid pain but enters into it, bearing wounds of His own. In this timely book, Rev. Dr. Jared Ayers offers a guided tour of the Christian Story for you who may be unfamiliar, skeptical, hurting, and disillusioned, lingering in the borderlands between faith and doubt. With a fascinating mix of theology, art, Scripture, music, and literature, he invites you into a conversation about a Christianity that embraces doubt, mystery, and a God who understands suffering intimately.
Whether you are a Christian seeking to draw closer to Jesus amidst pain, have been hurt by the church, or are an agnostic or atheist, in You Can Trust a God With Scars, you will series of conversations about Christian faith that are honest, hospitable, and intellectually compellingA meaningful framework to help you work through your beliefsQuestions at the end of each chapter to guide reflection or discussionHere is a safe, compassionate space to reawaken hope and find meaning in the Christian story, despite living in a fractured world.
184 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 9, 2025
6 people are currently reading
600 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 9, 2026
“You Can Trust a God with Scars” is a book to read if you want to honestly wrestle with the doubts and questions. Likewise, it is an excellent book to gift a struggling, hurt, or doubting fellow believer.
Pastor Jared Ayers brings readers into a coffee shop style conversation where pain, questions, mystery, and doubt are allowed to come to the forefront. He writes:
“…this book is an extended conversation about why, even given our own whispering doubts and the wreckage of church-inflicted pain we live with, I still think it’s a good, true, and beautiful thing to be a follower of Jesus.”
I enjoyed how this book delightfully weaves together the Gospels and Ayers’ conversations and experiences with others alongside literature, music, and movies. All I can add is that I wanted even more of this in the book. 😃
Highlights:
“As we learn to trust the testimony of our core longings, we discover that they invite us to the Voice that quietly, persistently beckons.”
“In Jesus, God knows what human pain, weakness, exhaustion, sorrow, and suffering are. In fact, when you comprehend the immensity of the humiliation the Creator underwent in experiencing a solitary human life, you realize that all of Jesus' life was suffering, not just the end of it.”
“For some, the yearning for a homeland to which we haven't arrived materializes as a restlessness, a wandering dissatisfaction.”
“Scrubbing our discourse of sin language doesn't make the ugly realities we know all too well go away. It just cripples our capacity to deal with them.”
“Humans aren't brought into being as slave labor but to commune with God, know one another, and steward the beaury and possibility of the good creation.”
Total: ★★★★☆ (4.25)
Readability: 5
Impact: 4
Content: 4
Enjoyment: 4
Thank you to the publisher for gifting me a copy of this book. I am leaving this review voluntarily and was not required to leave a positive review. All opinions are my own.
Pastor Jared Ayers brings readers into a coffee shop style conversation where pain, questions, mystery, and doubt are allowed to come to the forefront. He writes:
“…this book is an extended conversation about why, even given our own whispering doubts and the wreckage of church-inflicted pain we live with, I still think it’s a good, true, and beautiful thing to be a follower of Jesus.”
I enjoyed how this book delightfully weaves together the Gospels and Ayers’ conversations and experiences with others alongside literature, music, and movies. All I can add is that I wanted even more of this in the book. 😃
Highlights:
“As we learn to trust the testimony of our core longings, we discover that they invite us to the Voice that quietly, persistently beckons.”
“In Jesus, God knows what human pain, weakness, exhaustion, sorrow, and suffering are. In fact, when you comprehend the immensity of the humiliation the Creator underwent in experiencing a solitary human life, you realize that all of Jesus' life was suffering, not just the end of it.”
“For some, the yearning for a homeland to which we haven't arrived materializes as a restlessness, a wandering dissatisfaction.”
“Scrubbing our discourse of sin language doesn't make the ugly realities we know all too well go away. It just cripples our capacity to deal with them.”
“Humans aren't brought into being as slave labor but to commune with God, know one another, and steward the beaury and possibility of the good creation.”
Total: ★★★★☆ (4.25)
Readability: 5
Impact: 4
Content: 4
Enjoyment: 4
Thank you to the publisher for gifting me a copy of this book. I am leaving this review voluntarily and was not required to leave a positive review. All opinions are my own.
March 27, 2025
interesting; didn’t really manage to do what it said on the tin; Ayers is far too Christian to really get stuck into the Doubt part of it and the chapter about the Church was laughably shallow. HOWEVER, he’s an engaging and entertaining writer - he successfully kept me locked into scripture and its interpretations for 200 pages lol, and parts of it were genuinely uplifting!
April 14, 2025
"You Can Trust a God with Scars: Faith (and Doubt) for the Searching Soul", by Jared Ayers, intrigued me as soon as I read the title. Ayers wrote this book after coming to the point where he wandered if his whole belief system was a mistake, and if his 20 plus years as a pastor was all spent in vain. He compares the Christian life to "yearning for our true home" and the thirst we all have to know that what we believe is really true. I agreed with his assertion that "the living God is not an object to be studied, a force to be wielded, an idea to be argued. God will not be managed, pinned down, coerced, cornered. God is Life. God is Being. God is Mystery. God is wholly and entirely Other from us."
I appreciated Ayers' transparency and honesty, and think this would be a good book for someone who is struggling with what they believe. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions are my own.
I appreciated Ayers' transparency and honesty, and think this would be a good book for someone who is struggling with what they believe. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. All opinions are my own.
January 2, 2026
This book isn’t for me.
What I mean by that is that this book is meant for those who don’t know much about the Christian faith. For those who have questions about the validity of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection. For those who don’t know if they can continue their faith or doubt the importance of the church—especially when the church has caused a lot of harm.
I read through this quickly because there was nothing really new for me here to read, however, I did enjoy Jared Ayers’s way of sharing the Gospel throughout his book. It was true yet also cognizant of the readers who may have doubts and/or past hurts in their lives as it concerns to faith in Jesus.
Would I recommend it to other believers? That would depend on where they are at with their walk. But would I give this book to a friend of mine who might want to know more about Jesus and how, ultimately, we CAN trust a God with scars? Absolutely.
*Thank you to NavPress for this book ARC. This is my honest review.*
What I mean by that is that this book is meant for those who don’t know much about the Christian faith. For those who have questions about the validity of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection. For those who don’t know if they can continue their faith or doubt the importance of the church—especially when the church has caused a lot of harm.
I read through this quickly because there was nothing really new for me here to read, however, I did enjoy Jared Ayers’s way of sharing the Gospel throughout his book. It was true yet also cognizant of the readers who may have doubts and/or past hurts in their lives as it concerns to faith in Jesus.
Would I recommend it to other believers? That would depend on where they are at with their walk. But would I give this book to a friend of mine who might want to know more about Jesus and how, ultimately, we CAN trust a God with scars? Absolutely.
*Thank you to NavPress for this book ARC. This is my honest review.*
October 7, 2025
I got this through the goodreads giveaway and I'll be honest, it's not my cup of tea.
I'm obviously not going to critique it harshly, because I am definitely not the demographic for it as someone who's agnostic. But I will say it it a bit of a rough read due to how it is written.
I'm obviously not going to critique it harshly, because I am definitely not the demographic for it as someone who's agnostic. But I will say it it a bit of a rough read due to how it is written.
September 25, 2025
I liked it but it was a bit confusing and hard to follow at times.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews